In presidential election years, a small percentage of voters cast ballots for president but not for state and local offices. A substantial increase in Illinois that year - a larger-than-usual number who picked John Kerry or George W. Bush but declined to choose between Obama and Keyes - would have shown an unwillingness of some to vote for any black candidate. I tested this and found no such increase: White voters were willing to choose from two black candidates.
In 2008, the long primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Obama added hundreds of thousands of Democrats to the rolls. By October, it was clear that Obama could lose the general election only if many of these Democrats failed to turn out or crossed party lines - which, after eight years of Bush, could be interpreted only as electoral racism.
But Obama was elected with a higher percentage of white votes than either Kerry or Al Gore - more solid, empirical evidence of a profound shift in America's electoral politics.
Still, electoral racism can't be reduced to its most egregious form. The 2012 election may be a test of another form: the tendency of white liberals to hold African American leaders to a higher standard than their white counterparts. If old-fashioned electoral racism is the unwillingness to vote for a black candidate, liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate who is as competent as his white predecessors.
