Blogging the Bookshelf

One night Binder asked, “Do you think your neighbors would be willing to vote for an African-American for president?” Some of the voters answered no, and Strasma watched them closely. Something in that response—perhaps a feeling of being liberated to publicly share an unpopular opinion—convinced him that the people who acknowledged their neighbors’ racism might really be confessing a view of their own. Strasma added the neighbors question to his survey and saw quickly that it worked. Those who had high Obama-support scores but ended up backing McCain said yes to it, so Strasma made it the core of a new “openness” model: another score, out of 100, that assessed how open a voter would be to casting a ballot for a black candidate.