I should have gotten around to nakedly self-promoting this earlier in the week when it first posted, but I did one of those I should have gotten around to nakedly self-promoting this earlier in the week when it first posted, but I did one of those Salon “conversations” on the subject of race and the Democratic primary, along with Princeton’s Sean Wilentz and The Century Foundation’s Ruy Teixeira, hosted by Salon's Mark Schone. You can read the transcript and/or listen to the audio here. It’s also available for download through iTunes at the Salon “Conversations” page.
Basic summary: It's obviously impossible to disentangle and therefore measure exactly how much race factored into voting for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, but surely it mattered some to some voters and perhaps a lot to a subset of those voters. And this was within the Democratic primary, mind you; Obama, I suspect, will have another Philadelphia speech-like moment in the general election he’ll have to manage.
--Tom Schaller
