Nate Silver, an esteemed baseball statistician turned esteemed political statistician has done a ton of work on the 2008 election results. He recently did a presentation at TED where he talked about racism in the election. While he himself actually predicted that racism would be a non-factor in the election (whether he simply discounted the magnitude of its effect or had some other reasoning is unclear) he has also done retrospective analysis on exit polling data. His analysis took into account voters who actually told pollsters that race did factor into their decision not to vote for Barack Obama, and his conclusion was that racism is predictable and treatable-in his words "solvable" just like any other problem.
In addition, in his conclusion he talks about Obama becoming even more electable in 2012 because the simple presence of an African-American president whose election did not destroy the country should make people less racist. Naturally he won't have the numbers to back it up for a few years.
www.fivethirtyeight.com
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