SATURDAY POLITICS: Nate Silver Proves White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats

Nate Silver relaunched his FiveThirtyEight.com website awhile back and continues his mission to bring his analytic skills to non-quantitative fields. For example, in a recent article, Silver analyzes poling data from the General Social Survey to confirm what most people already know, (white) Republicans and more racist than (white) Democrats.

As of 2012, this index stood at 27 percent for white Republicans and 19 percent for white Democrats. So there’s a partisan gap, although not as large of one as some political commentators might assert. There are white racists in both parties. By most questions, they represent a minority of white voters in both parties. They probably represent a slightly larger minority of white Republicans than white Democrats. 

Fortunately, the expression of racism by whites toward blacks has decreased over time, and for Americans in both parties — at least, according to this survey. In 1990, the index of negative racial attitudes stood at 40 percent for white Democrats and 41 percent for white Republicans. 

There hasn’t been much of an overall increase or decrease in the index since Obama took office. On average, between the 2004 and 2006 editions of the surveys — the last two before Obama was either a president or a candidate — the index of negative racial attitudes stood at 22 percent for white Democrats and 26 percent for white Republicans. Those values are within the margin of error for those in the 2010 and 2012 surveys. 

If there’s a discouraging trend, it’s not so much that negative racial attitudes toward blacks have increased in these polls, but that they’ve failed to decrease under Obama, as they did so clearly for most of the past three decades.

So if people thought that "racism was over" because Barack Obama was elected President (I'm looking at your John Roberts!) they should look at this data and think again.