Political Science Professor Charles Stewart on Race and the 2008 Election

Some political observers have declared that the election of the first black president signals a new era of post-racial politics in the United States—but the data show otherwise, two MIT researchers say. "Ironically, the candidate whom commentators lionized for ending America's debilitating racial divisions won the election on the basis of increasingly distinct white and nonwhite voting patterns," wrote the two researchers—Charles H. Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Political Science at MIT; and Stephen Ansolabehere, professor of political science at MIT—in the current issue of Boston Review. "Racial polarization in American voting patterns was the highest it has been since the 1984 election.