Are Republicans really racist? Jimmy Carter thinks some of them are, based upon his interpretation of South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson’s “You Lie” outburst during President Obama’s speech to the joint session of Congress. Republicans emphatically deny that they are racist. Who is right?

To test this, without biasing the results, I look at six statewide elections in three states in 2006. In these three pairs of statewide elections, an African-American Republican was running for governor or the U.S. Senate, while the other Republican (running for the other governor/senate office) was white. In each state (Pennsylvania, Ohio and Maryland), the Democrats handily won the election. The question is whether the GOP white candidate did significantly better than the GOP black candidate in these statewide elections. In other words, are Republicans deserting their African-American GOP candidates for statewide office, giving them fewer votes than the white Republican candidate for statewide office?

But that’s not the only comparison I do. Additionally, I look at disparities in four other states from the 2006 election from the neighborhood (New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Massachusetts) where the Democrats won both contests. In each of the states in the second subset, the GOP fielded a white candidate for both governor and US Senate. Then I compare the differences between these pairs, and the states with pairs where there is an African-American GOP candidate.

Sounds complicated? Perhaps, but it might tell us more than asking folks if they are racist in a survey, or relying on exit polls, remembering some columnist (I think it was Mike Royko from Chicago) who admonished his readers to lie to exit polls to confuse the media.

In the three states where at least one of the GOP candidates in the statewide election was a Republican (Pennsylvania, Ohio and Maryland), the gap between the Democrat and Republican average is 6.05 points. In all three cases, the African-American Republican candidate received fewer votes than the white Republican candidate.

So are Republicans racist? On one hand, there is a gap, but on the other hand, it is pretty small. In two of the states (Pennsylvania and Maryland), the gap was only 3.5 points or so, with Ohio reflecting an 11.2 point gap between the white GOP candidate and the black GOP candidate. And Ohio Republicans did pick African-American GOP candidate Kenneth Blackwell, the Secretary of State over white Republican Jim Petro, the state’s Attorney General, in the gubernatorial primary, with 56 percent of the vote. Political scientists often define landslides as winning 55 percent or more.

Now let’s compare those gaps to the four other states with white Republicans running for governor and senator in 2006. In those states, the gap between white candidates averaged out to a 13.56 percent difference between white candidate A and white candidate B running in the same state, more than twice the gap in states where at least one African-American was on the ticket.

What does this mean? In this limited sample of 14 elections from the Northeast in 2006 that the Democrats won, African-American Republicans performed slightly behind their white counterparts, but much closer than in states with an all white ticket. Most Republicans don’t seem too bothered by having an African-American on the ticket for statewide office. Perhaps that’s why they picked one of those black candidates who ran office in 2006, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele of Maryland, as their party chairman.