joining me now is michael tessler who has some amazing data who plays this out. about the relationship between people's racial attitudes and their opinion about the president or things the president proposed? >> so what we started out looking at is the correlation between racial attitudes, we measure them in a variety of ways and get similar results across the variety of measures we use. and what happened was we started to see that barack obama moves racial attitudes much stronger than previous presidential candidates. so that's a starting point. racial attitudes were just much more accessible when it comes to barack obama. >> so they were driving the way people felt about the president? >> yes, more so than other. and especially so in the primaries. so in the general election, it's a little hard because there's a lot of other things that are influencing votes simultaneously. once you strip away the primary logo, i can say a hundred percent is the most important factor in the primary. >> that's an incredibly controversial proposition. you're saying that racial at