Thread: NYT: Winfrey backing equals a million votes for Obama

NYT: Winfrey backing equals a million votes
Celebrity's endorsement is thought to have given Obama a decisive boost

MEDIA TALK
By Brian Stelter
The New York Times
updated 5:31 a.m. ET, Mon., Aug. 11, 2008



Presidential candidates make the most of celebrity supporters, showing them off in television ads and propping them on podiums to stand and wave. No doubt Mike Huckabee’s aborted campaign for the Republican nomination got some sort of bump from those commercials of him with Chuck Norris, right?

Or maybe not. Politicians and pundits routinely claim that celebrity endorsements have little sway on voters, and two economists set out recently to test the premise. What they found was that at least one celebrity does hold influence in the voting booth: Oprah Winfrey.

The economists, Craig Garthwaite and Timothy Moore of the University of Maryland, College Park, contend that Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama last year gave him a boost of about one million votes in the primaries and caucuses. Their conclusions were based partly on a county-by-county analysis of subscriptions to O: The Oprah Magazine and sales figures for books that were included in her book club.

Those data points were cross-referenced with the votes cast for Mr. Obama in various polling precincts. The results showed a correlation between magazine sales and the vote share obtained by Mr. Obama, and extrapolated an effect of 1,015,559 votes.

“We think people take political information from all sorts of sources in their daily life,â€

WHO CARES WHAT THE o. DOES

SHE NEEDS TO HELP BLACK WOMEN, MORE; VISIT A SCHOOL IN EVERY STATE WOULD BE A GOOD START, o.

She is so transparent.....

I can't stand Oprah! She is a racist and the only reason she is putting her money into Obama's candidacy is because of his skin tone....not his abilities! And too, so she can show off that she is “best budsâ€