Rick Santorum’s meteoric rise in the national polls following his surprise February 7th wins in Minnesota, Missouri and Missouri naturally begs the question, “Where did the Santorum surge come from?”         My analysis of a nationally representative re-interview survey conducted by YouGov last week (respondents were first interviewed in January 2012) indicates that Santorum has his morally conservative brethren to thank for this front-runner status.  Santorum support, not surprisingly, increased rather dramatically among these panelists who were interviewed in both January and February (from 16 to 30 percent).   More importantly for our present purposes, the figure below shows that this ... read more

Some liberal political commentators pointed to the racially charged debate exchange between Juan Williams and Newt Gingrich, in which the former Speaker of the House reiterated that African-Americans “should demand jobs, not food-stamps,” as the impetus behind his stunning come from behind victory in the South Carolina Primary.  Or as Jesse Jackson put it in an op-ed last week, “Gingrich's campaign limped into South Carolina on life support. His revival came from his cunning peddling of a poisonous potion of race-bait politics to a virtually all-white electorate.”  Of course, those matter of fact claims had little basis in empirical evidence.  ... read more

Several recent studies by political scientists show racial and ethnocentric attitudes were not only strongly related to 2008 voting behavior, but that these attitudes had a much larger influence on that year’s presidential race than they had on the all-white presidential contests of the past (see: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).  The studies referenced measure anti-black predispositions in a variety of ways, with “racial resentment” perhaps the most potent predictor of opposition to Obama’s candidacy.  Interestingly enough, this measure of racial conservatism closely mirrors the content of last week’s heated debate exchange between Juan Williams and Newt Gingrich, presenting ... read more