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David Murdock

The project my group chose to do was the racial survey. The basic question that
we had was the question of whether or not race would affect peoples decision on
whether or not to support or vote for a U.S. senator candidate for Utah. Our group as a
whole needed to survey a lot of people so we all decided to spread out the surveys
across the whole group. We would each survey a certain amount of people and later
send our data to each other. I ended up having to do around twelve surveys so we
would have enough people surveyed.
My hypothesis was that there might be a few biases based on race, but for the
most part, the outcome would be based on the candidate's policies. In order for this to
be proven correct, the results would have to show about the same approval rating for
the white, or caucasian, candidate as the black, or African American, candidate. The
results also would not be able to deviate too far from being similar in order for my
hypothesis to be the truth. I was sure that there would be some outliers to the data, but
if my hypothesis was to correct then they would have to be the exception. If my
hypothesis was not correct, however, then the data would show that most people clearly
voted for one of the contenders because of their race. This could happen for either the
black or the white candidate.
One of the reasons that people will not be racist is because we now have an
African American president already. If we have an African American president, then that
means that people will be more prone to voting another African American into a political
office as well as the president. Having a black president shows that the population of
the United States of America has mainly moved past any racism that they might have

had and voted for a minority race. Although, there are now a lot of people from many
different races in the United States now than before, I would still consider them a
minority race, because most of the people in America are not black. Based on one
chart I saw, only about twelve percent of America is African American, and sixty-six or
sixty-seven percent of America is white.
One possible reason that people might have biases towards another race when
voting for people would be that African Americans are sometimes associated with crime,
and gangs and other bad things. Most people want a good, responsible person, who
will choose to make the decisions that will benefit the United States in office, instead of
an irresponsible person, who will not make the best decisions for our state and country..
If they make a connection that the candidate might be a bad person based on the
stereotypes that they have heard about that race, then they would not want to vote for
that person as much because they wouldnt want a criminal or gang member in office.
Another reason why people would be racist is because they associate blacks
with slavery. The southern states were very bitter when they lost the civil war, because
they lost their slaves and had to set them free. This ruined their incomes and their lives,
so they would teach their children that blacks are worse than us, because they remind
them of how they lost the war and their slaves. If their descendants saw a black person
running for office, and they were still racist and bitter because of what happened to their
ancestors, then they would probably not vote for that person. Although this type of bias
would be much rarer than any other, it may still be present in some people. Most likely
the older voters who would still have been affected by the issue in some way. Currently,

slavery is not a big issue in the United States at all, so the younger generations who are
not affected by this issue will probably not have this form of bias at all.
There most times we associate the word bias with a bad connotation, it can
actually be a good thing for candidates sometimes. A lot of the time, African Americans
or other races may appeal more to the younger generations than a white person ever
could. This may be because they want to be seen as a person who is not bias, or
maybe because they have friends who are black who they really like being around. It
may also be because there is a greater push in the younger generation to accept other
races and more people are interacting with people of other races than ever before.
Some people may even vote for an African contestant because they look better or are
more down to earth and appealing than a white person might be. Blacks and whites are
also now essentially equal along with all of the other races in the United States.
The results I got from the surveys I took showed that most people were not racist
towards the black candidate, in fact, more people agreed with the black candidates
policies than the white candidate even when the policies were the same. Although that
could be due to the fact that some of the people I surveyed might have not had
sufficient education on the political issues that were discussed in the data.
One of the questions on the survey was about if the surveyee supported more of
the candidates policies than they disagreed with. Of the people who took the survey for
the black candidate, two disagreed, while three agreed, and one stayed neutral. Of the
people who took the survey for the white candidate, four people disagreed, while one
agreed and one stayed neutral. I also assigned a point value to the answers to the
survey questions with strongly agree being two points, agree being one, neutral being

zero, disagree being negative one, and strongly disagree being negative two points.
The African American candidate ended up with twenty-four total points, and the
caucasian candidate finished with only five total points. In the other categories, the
black candidate won as well. The difference between the points of the black and white
candidate varied with each of the different categories.
I also got the rest of the results from the other people in my group. They showed
that the white candidate received four points on his policies while the black candidate
received eight points on his policies, which is the only category from the rest of my
group in which the African won. In the rest of the categories: education, work
experience, leadership, and life experience, the white candidate won by about two
points in each category. When I put my results together with the group results, the
black candidate pulled ahead again because of the great amount of points for the black
candidate coming from my surveys.
These results are almost the opposite of what some people might think the
outcome would be, as they would expect that the African American candidate would
have less support than the white candidate. Most people would think that the biases
would hurt the black candidate and help the white one, when in reality, the white person
running for senator got less points than the black person. Of course, the two
candidates scores were only about twenty points away from each other in the end, so
some of those outliers could have affected the data and they may have just happened
to favor the black candidate.
One possible explanation as to why the black candidate would get more support
is because, as mentioned earlier, people may want to show that they are not racist, so

they may over correct themselves a little too much, which would tilt the balance in favor
of the African American. My survey also showed that younger people in general would
often agree that the background of the black contender was sufficient in order to make
good decisions for us as a U.S. Senator for Utah. So, it could also be because the
younger generations tend to accept African Americans more than the other generations.
Another trend in the graph that I found was that people who are middle aged to retired
would disagree with the policies of either candidate regardless of race.
As the results show, it seems that there may be some biases that helped the
black candidate win, but overall, there was not a huge difference between the races of
the candidates and how much support that they got if you ignore the outliers. I think
that some of the outliers could have been caused by people not knowing enough about
politics and what the policies of the candidates meant in order to make an educated
choice on whether they agree or not. Most of the time they would vote that they agreed
with the African American candidate if they did not know what the policy meant. I think
that the data could be interpreted to show that people voted to support the candidate or
not based on their policies and nothing else because most of the time, the surveyee
would state that they agreed with some or most of the background of the candidate,
they may still disagree with the policies so they would not vote for them or support them.

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