(Opinion crossposted from Brainstorm)

What impact will race/racism have on the Presidential election — and its outcome?

That seems to be the $64,000 question these days. And the answer is, simply put, we don’t know. Pollsters aren’t confident they can poll for it, and nobody is sure if the hundreds of thousands of new voters make that issue more or less “academic.”

There are clearly Americans who will use race as part of the justification (at least to themselves and in non-mixed social company) for voting the way they do this November, but nobody knows how to confidently quantify the tiny segment of the electorate that will allow race to be THE deciding factor for them — or even just one of several key variables they privilege.

There is a new poll out today that seems to add more fuel to this fire about the potential political significance of race/racism — and of racially divergent perceptions of race/racism in contemporary America.

Thankfully, racism in America isn’t what it used to be — brash, bold, and conspicuously displayed in the public sphere. It no longer announces itself unabashedly with “whites only” placards or through painted lines separating the backs from the fronts of public buses. Explicit racism has been demonized and marginalized. And most Americans consider that a profoundly good thing. However, with the election numbers being as close as they are this year, the new study seems to imply that America’s racist margins (no matter how relatively small) might still have a palpable impact on its political center. (And that’s exactly why I wrote my new book, Racial Paranoia, a book that helps to explain why the Stanford poll found what it did.)

What’s race got to do with the election? In some ways, not much. But it might not take a lot to tip such a tight scale one way or the other.

(The discussion in the video I embedded above downplays the ultimate significance of race’s impact on the election and of the potential significance of that so-called “Bradley Factor.”)