A candidate who quit the race still beat Trump's pick in a GOP primary — because of his name

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A candidate who quit the race still beat Trump's pick in a GOP primary — because of his name<br>A real life audit study! And what it means for the Michigan Senate election.

Don Moynihan<br>Aug 10, 2026

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Most people are reluctant to acknowledge their own racism. This makes studying racist behavior quite hard.<br>Social scientists use the term “social desirability bias” to reflect the point that even in anonymous surveys, people are reluctant to express views they know are subject to societal disapproval. And some people might not be fully conscious of their own discriminatory views.<br>Subscribe to Can We Still Govern?

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And so researchers came up with an ingenious way to get at people’s willingness to engage in discriminatory behavior: the audit study. The audit study is an experiment, where people are usually asked to respond to information about two people who are identical except in terms of a key characteristic, such as gender or race.<br>The classic version of the audit study involves sending two sets of fictional resumes out to employers, where the resumes are identical except for one factor: the name. One name might be a White-sounding name. Another might be a name that sounds more likely to belong to a minority: someone who is Black, or Hispanic, or Middle-Eastern. People will infer the race of the sender by the name. If the responses to the two resumes are the same, no discrimination. But if one name gets systematically less responses, it is reasonable to infer discriminatory behavior.<br>The research literature based on audit studies has been impressive in offering hard-to-dispute causal evidence of systemic discrimination.1 For example, key findings include:<br>White job applicants receive systematically more callbacks than equally qualified Black or Latino job candidates, a pattern that has not improved over time.

In housing, discrimination against non-white renters and buyers has remained significant and relatively stable over time.

My own minor contribution came to this literature a few years ago, when an audit study I worked on with Asmus Olsen and Jonas Høgh Kyhse-Andersen, when we found that Muslim students in Denmark had a harder time getting school officials to allow them to join their school relative to students with classically Danish names.<br>A real life audit study

Audit studies are attractive because they provide clean causal evidence of hard-to-observe behavior. Researchers can control for all of the potential reasons why people might disfavor one group other than bias. For example, people might assume a minority group has less education, but you can ensure the fictional resumes feature the exact same level of education. In real life, of course, it is not so easy to control such factors.<br>But what if you could find a real life example where the minority candidate was given every possible advantage. Was not just the same, but clearly better. Would we still see signs of discrimination?<br>The Michigan primaries threw up such as case. In one Republican primary for a seat in the 8th District, Tom Smith faced Amir Hassan. Neither are incumbents in the seat.<br>Who do you think won? Of course, you are thinking Smith, right?<br>But what if I were to tell you that Hassan had one extraordinary advantage that Smith lacked: the coveted Trump endorsement, in a district that Trump won in 2024.

Trump even rallied with him.

And Hassan was chosen by the GOP precisely because they thought he could win in this district. Speaker Mike Johnson endorsed him. And Hassan was a Navy veteran.<br>Now, who do you think won?<br>If you still say Smith…you know Republican primary voters well. Smith won with 50% of the vote, while Hassan received 33%.<br>Share<br>Maybe there is stuff we are missing here that made Smith a better candidate? Maybe he ran a better race, was more organized, or had more money on hand? No, no, and no. And here is where things get really weird. Smith had dropped out of the race in July. His Facebook campaign page had 95 followers, and he had raised less than $2000 according to All In with Chris Hayes. Hassan reported spending $622,841.<br>This is the note Smith sent to the Federal Election Commission, testifying to his inability to raise funds, and, uh, to completing election forms:

Why did Tom Smith, a candidate with no money, no experience, no organization AND WHO HAD DROPPED OUT OF THE RACE defeat Trump-endorsed Amir Hassan? There is no obvious metric by which Smith was the better candidate. Save one: his name. And even Republicans acknowledged it. According to the Detroit News:<br>State Rep. Tim Kelly, R-Saginaw, said he could only speculate why Hassan lost but added that voters were shying away from what he described as Arabic-sounding names. Other Republicans echoed Kelly's analysis, saying the outcome was sad.

Hassan Nehme, a Muslim Republican candidate, blamed the...