Reid was right

First, skin color. White people (and perhaps African Americans and other minorities as well) are more likely to vote for lighter-skinned blacks. In 2007, when Harvard’s Jennifer Hochschild and the University of Virginia’s Vesla Weaver surveyed every African-American governor, senator and member of Congress since 1865, they found that light-skinned blacks were dramatically overrepresented as a share of the black population. Similarly, they found that when light-skinned blacks run for office, they win at higher rates than their darker-skinned brethren.

But how do we know that this particular species of racism informs people’s view of Obama? Because in 2009, Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago, Emily Balcetis of New York University and Nicole Mead of Tilburg University in the Netherlands proved it. They showed three pictures of Obama—one lightened, one darkened and one undoctored—to people who planned to vote for him, and to people who did not. The Obama voters were significantly more likely to claim that the lightened photo was the real one. The McCain voters were more likely to claim that the darkened photo was. No wonder Hillary Clinton’s campaign famously darkened Obama’s image in a TV commercial.