As the battle for the presidency heats up, many political scientists are conducting research to get at the heart of the factors which may be influencing how the candidates are faring in the general election.
Just one of these factors is the candidates’ racial background, and professors and students from the department of political science at UCLA held a two-day public lecture series last week to discuss findings that indicate race has an impact on the election.
The conference featured nine speakers and primarily focused on a nationwide presidential poll currently being conducted by political scientists across the country.
Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA professor in the political science department, is one of the founders of the poll and is working in conjunction with Simon Jackman, another founder and professor from Stanford University, and 70 other political scientists from 30 universities.
The project is called the UCLA-Stanford 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project and is an online survey.
An ongoing project since December 2007, it is expected to be completed by November 2008 and is representative of 20,000 voters nationwide, Vavreck said.
“It is meant to assess the difference between structural conditions, such as the state of the economy and party identification, and campaign dynamics, such as advertisements, news coverage and the candidates themselves,” Vavreck said.
Vavreck said one of the findings of the poll is that in both the general and primary elections, as peoples’ antipathy towards blacks as a group increases, the less likely they are to vote for Barack Obama.
The study also found that as much as race can hurt the candidates, it can also help them.
The third result of the research was that voters who supported Hillary Clinton in the primary election are now supporting Obama more than they said they initially reported they would after the primary election.
“About 65 percent of Hillary voters now support Obama and 19 percent support McCain,” she said.
She added while race was the distinguishing factor in the primaries, factors such as voters’ party identification and positions on issues have more of an impact in the general election.
“The role of race is actually muted in the general election relative to the primary election,” Vavreck said.
David O’Sears, professor of psychology and political science at UCLA, said research shows that having a black candidate elicits racial prejudice.
O’Sears was one of the speakers at the conference and talked about the background of research done in the area of race and its impact on elections.
He said current and past research is done to measure racial resentment, which gauges how resentful people are to blacks.
Racial conservatives are people who score high on racial resentment and racial liberals score low, he said.
“There was evidence that Obama is drawing quite a bit of support from whites who are racial liberals more than Hillary Clinton would have as a candidate in the general election,” he said.
“It could be hurting him because the racially conservative republicans would be voting for McCain anyway,” O’Sears said.
The conference also featured a report by graduate students in the political science department at UCLA, who spoke about their own research which showed how the candidates’ race impacts the election.
Ryan Enos, a fifth-year graduate student in the department of political science, said his research sought to explain how diversity and peoples’ spatial relations to each other affect participation in the election.
“Generally it comes down to this one finding: The more segregated the city is, the more competition there is among different racial groups and the more voter participation there is,” he said.
He conducted research on Chicago housing projects which mainly housed blacks and were torn down in 2001.
His research study focused on the number of white and black voters before and after the segregated housing projects were demolished.
“What we generally see is that after housing projects are torn down, participation drops in whites and this is because the racial threat goes down,” he said.
Enos also conducted a field experiment on voters in the Los Angeles county, in which he sent letters to a sample of voters from predominantly Hispanic or mostly black neighborhoods which told them what the racial makeup of their neighborhoods.
The information also told voters about the voting frequencies of their neighborhood as well as the voting frequencies of the neighborhoods surrounding them, he said.
The research showed there was a higher effect among blacks, and Enos said he believed this is because blacks felt more threatened by the increasing Hispanic population in their neighborhood.
He related this with the sentiment by many whites in the 1960s who felt more racially threatened by increasing black populations in their neighborhoods.
Enos said this could be one of the reasons for battleground states.
“The more segregated the place, the less well Obama is doing,” he said. “I propose that a portion of variation we’re observing in how well Obama is doing has to do with geography. It’s not who lives there, but how you’re structured spatially in relation with your neighbors.”
Michael Tesler, a graduate student in the UCLA department of political science, spoke about symbolic racism.
Tesler said Obama has been doing much better than black candidates who ran for the presidency in the past.
“My take is if you were going to vote for Jesse Jackson, he was running on issues that were different from his party and he wasn’t electable,” he said.
“Barack Obama is taking the same issues as his party and is more electable,” he said.
Tesler also said he believes research shows racial resentment is strongly related to gender.
“In previous years, the racially resentful were less supportive of Hillary Clinton than they are now,” he said. “In Obama versus Clinton, race was implicated from day one.”
Tesler said though he believed Obama is increasing symbolic racism, there are certain factors, such as the state of the economy, which will deactivate racial resentment.
“If you’re voting on your economic issues, who cares about the race of the candidate?” he said.
At the conference, speakers and audience members also had a discussion on possible future research on the other factors which may have an impact on the presidential election.
O’Sears said he believes there is a gender gap among voters that is also important in the election.
“Women are 8 to 10 percent more favorable to Obama than they are to McCain, and it’s very close among men,” he said. “There’s always that gender gap and there has been since 1980 anyway.”
He said though class also has an impact on the election, it is less clear what that impact is because income level is also correlated with education.
O’Sears said further studies on the impact of race on the election are also being conducted on the Hispanic and Asian communities.
Vavreck said the results of the poll will not be publicly available until January 2010.