Determinants of Turnout and Candidate Choice in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

The presence of an African-American candidate on the ballot running for President in 2008 raises the possibility that the election outcome might have been influenced by anti-African-American racism among voters. This paper uses data from the Associated Press-Yahoo! News-Stanford University survey to explore this possibility, using measures of both explicit racism (symbolic racism) and implicit racism (the Affect Misattribution Procedure). The parameters of multinomial logistic regression equations were estimated to test the hypotheses that racism might have behaved differently on election day than they would have had racism been eliminated. The findings suggest that racism's impact on the election outcome could have been substantial, by causing (1) people