« Why I'm skeptical of Nate Silver's pollster ratings | Main | Questioning the popularity of fact-checking »
The comments to this entry are closed.
I am the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Duke University and have served as a RWJ Scholar in Health Policy Research and a faculty member in the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I am a co-director of Bright Line Watch. Previously, I contributed to The Upshot at The New York Times, served as a media critic for Columbia Journalism Review, co-edited Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin, and co-authored All the President's Spin. For more, see my Dartmouth website.
Content feeds:
-Blog RSS
-Bluesky
-Threads
Email:
[email protected]
The fact that Obama's results were close to the leading models may mean race was not a significant factor. Or, it may mean that several of the factors not in the models were significant, but canceled each other out.
ISTM that there were 3 potentially large factors that (I assume) were not reflected in the leading models:
1. Race
2. Obama's lack of experience
3. Biased media coverage
IMHO #3 cannot be separated from #1. Obama's media coverage was extraordinarily favorable because he was black.* Race hurt him because of racism, but it also helped him get more favorable coverage.
I would conclude that (Race + Media Bias) helped Obama by about the same amount that his lack of experience hurt him. I know of no way to estimate how small or large this amount might be. Nor can I estimate what the effect of race would have been had the media coverage been balanced.
*More precisely, Obama got extraordinarily favorable coverage because he's a black Democrat. Clarence Thomas has not gotten favorable media coverage.
Posted by: David in Cal | June 23, 2010 at 06:13 PM
For a recent example of media bias in favor of Obama, see Tom Maguire's evisceration of Reuters' curious perception of the reaction to Obama's "whose ass to kick" comment.
Posted by: Rob | June 23, 2010 at 06:44 PM