Experiments Rivers ran with Shanto Iyengar (lightening/darkening Obama's skin, and swapping black vs white candidate photos in a hypothetical congressional race) found essentially no candidate-race effect on voting, though about 15% of Democratic primary voters—even outside the South—held racial views considered conservative or racist.

factualpending

Speaker

Doug Rivers

Evidence Quote

we lightened and darkened Obama skin to see if there was any skin color effect word voting... and we didn't really find any effects

Source

Doug Rivers on polling 7/21/2008EconTalk
Created: 6/15/2026, 9:28:54 AM

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