Post-Racial or Most-Racial?

Race and Politics in the Obama Era

Michael Tesler

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226353159
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

When Barack Obama won the presidency, many posited that we were entering into a post-racial period in American politics. Regrettably, the reality hasn't lived up to that expectation. Instead, Americans' political beliefs have become significantly more polarized by racial considerations than they had been before Obama's presidency—in spite of his administration's considerable efforts to neutralize the political impact of race.Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people's evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama's dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.One of the most important books on American racial politics in recent years, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? is required reading for anyone wishing to understand what has happened in the United States during Obama's presidency and how it might shape the country long after he leaves office.

CHAPTER ONE

Racial Attitudes and American Politics in the Age of Obama

There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues. You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government—that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable—and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and [pro-slavery and secessionist leader Senator John. C.] Calhoun. — President Barack Obama, January 20141

As Barack Obama’s comments above suggest, race occupied a prominent place in the modern partisan alignment long before he became the first African American president. While the two political parties largely ignored Jim Crow segregation and the plight of African Americans for generations after the Civil War and Reconstruction sharply divided Democrats from Republicans on race, the American party system once again polarized over racial issues during the civil rights era. That renewed organization of partisan politics around racial issues and race, many have convincingly argued, stemmed from elite-level differences between politicians in the two parties’ support for civil rights initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s (Carmines and Stimson 1989; Kinder and Sanders 1996; Edsall and Edsall 1992; Frymer 1999; Lopez 2014).2 Most notably, the enactment of civil rights legislation by the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which was opposed by the Republicans’ 1964 presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, helped generate a new race-based schism between the parties.

Racial conservatism went on to divide Republican politicians from their Democratic counterparts throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. In Congress, the two parties grew increasingly polarized over racial issues, with Democratic lawmakers clearly establishing themselves as the more racially liberal party (Carmines and Stimson 1989). So much so that congressional roll call votes on racial issues were almost entirely split across ideological and partisan lines by 1990 (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006; Atkinson 2012).3 Those partisan divisions in the House of Representatives and the Senate were further solidified by the two major parties’ presidential platforms. In particular, the Republican Party explicitly denounced racial quotas and race-based preferences in every one of their party platforms from the 1970s up through Barack Obama’s elections, while every Democratic platform openly endorsed “affirmative action” during that same period (King and Smith 2011, 115).

Along with those elite-level policy differences, there was also a growing divide between Democratic and Republican politicians’ racial rhetoric in the post–civil rights era. Mayer (2002) found a consistent partisan division over race in presidential campaign appeals from 1964 to 2000 (also see Gerstle 2002; O’Reilly 1995; and Schaller 2006); and several other scholars and journalists documented the emergence of subtle appeals to antiblack stereotypes by Republican candidates at all levels of government in the post–civil rights era (Edsall and Edsall 1992; Kinder and Sanders 1996; Glaser 1998; Mendelberg 2001; McIlwain and Caliendo 2011; Lopez 2014).

These implicit racial appeals became a staple of Republican presidential campaigns when Richard Nixon deployed the “southern strategy” in 1968 to try to win over disaffected white Southern Democrats with subtle appeals to antiblack stereotypes and racial resentments (Mendelberg 2001; O’Reilly 1995; McGinnis 1969; Lopez 2014). Or as Republican campaign consultant Lee Atwater infamously put it, “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.”4 Ronald Reagan seemed to take that advice from Atwater, who served as political director of his 1984 presidential campaign. President Reagan was accused of similar tactics with his use of the racially loaded term “states’ rights” and his repeated invocation of the racially stereotypical “welfare queen” anecdote (Gilens 1999; Gilliam 1999; Mendelberg 2001; Lopez 2014).5 Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, drew even more race-based criticism after his 1988 presidential campaign, which was managed by Lee Atwater, employed provocative materials about a violent black criminal, Willie Horton, to help attract racially conservative voters (Jamieson 1992; Kinder and Sanders 1996; Mendelberg 1997, 2001; McIlwain and Caliendo 2011; Lopez 2014).

Mass politics, in light of these elite-level developments, also grew increasingly divided by and over race in the latter half of the twentieth century. African Americans had been loyal to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln up until the Great Depression (Sitkoff 1978; Weiss 1983), but the 1964 presidential election solidified their bourgeoning affiliation with the Democratic Party (Dawson 1994; Tate 1994). Democrats’ share of the black vote increased substantially in 1964 and has remained consistently high ever since (Kinder and Sanders 1996; see also results in chap. 8). Americans’ partisan identifications also became increasingly sorted by racial attitudes in the post–civil rights era, as older citizens who came of age before the parties diverged so sharply on racial issues were gradually replaced by incoming partisans whose attachments were formed after that racial schism in American politics (Carmines and Stimson 1989; Layman and Carsey 2002; Stimson 2004; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Valentino and Sears 2005).6 The aforementioned differences between the two parties in both their positions on racial policies and their race-related rhetoric also help explain racial conservatism’s significant independent impact on support for GOP presidential candidates from 1988 to 2004 (Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2012; Tesler and Sears 2010; Valentino and Sears 2005).

That growing influence of racial attitudes on white Americans’ partisan preferences was considered a boon to the Republican Party. Race was the great wedge issue in post–civil rights era American politics, with unpopular racially charged policies like busing to desegregate schools, affirmative action, and welfare splintering the Democratic Party’s longstanding majority coalition (Huckfeldt and Kohlfeld 1989; Edsall and Edsall 1992; Sniderman and Carmines 1997; Gilens, Sniderman, and Kuklinski 1998; Kinder and Sanders 1996; Valentino and Sears 2005). The two parties’ realignment over race helped turn the once solidly Democratic South into a Republican stronghold (Valentino and Sears 2005; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2014; Kuziemko and Washington 2015); and racially conservative “Nixon/Reagan Democrats”—Democrats who switched sides to vote for Republican presidential candidates in part because of their own party’s support for unpopular racially liberal policies (Klinkner and Smith 2002, 303–5)7—often tipped the balance for Republican candidates in national elections held after 1964.

The two parties’ respective needs to win over or retain such racially conservative swing voters also gave rise to what Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders (1996) adroitly termed the “electoral temptations of race.” The Republican Party’s electoral temptation, according to Kinder and Sanders, was to appeal to culturally conservative whites (e.g., Reagan Democrats) without turning off voters by being overtly racist. Hence, their electoral temptation in the years leading up to Barack Obama’s election had been implicit racial appeals like the race-coded language referenced above. The Democratic Party, however, had to maintain the loyalty of African Americans without alienating racially conservative swing voters. Hence, their electoral temptation in recent years was benign neglect or racial silence.

Both parties heeded their electoral temptations in the years leading up to Barack Obama’s election. Republicans, as mentioned earlier, often made subtle appeals to racial stereotypes in local and national elections. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party increasingly answered the Republicans’ racial conservatism with racial silence.8 The Democrats’ more recent party platforms have not displayed the same enthusiasm for affirmative action expressed by the Democratic Party of the 1970s (King and Smith 2011, 115–16). Bill Clinton’s efforts to distance himself from controversial civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson during the 1992 presidential campaign and his reactive “mend it, don’t end it” approach to affirmative action further exemplified the Democrats’ electoral temptations of racial evasion. So much so, in fact, that Klinkner and Smith (2002) found some similarities between the Democrats’ unenthusiastic position on civil rights issues in the 1980s and 1990s and the Republicans’ abandonment of racial equality after their party advocated for the abolition of slavery during the Civil War and for programs to help freed slaves during Reconstruction. “The Democratic record on civil rights in the 1980s and 1990s,” they wrote, “has been characterized more by fairly passive resistance to conservative efforts than by any strong positive program. When the Clinton administration has found itself linked with persons identified with strong civil rights activism . . . it has quickly severed those links” (Klinkner and Smith 2002, 345).

As a result of the Democrats’ fairly passive resistance to conservative attacks on race-targeted policies, the racialized issues that once dominated the national political landscape lost much of their political prominence. By the end of the 1990s, Supreme Court rulings and state ballot initiatives had limited the reach of busing and affirmative action.9 The enactment of welfare reform by the Democratic Clinton administration in 1996—an ostensibly nonracial policy that powerfully evokes race-based opposition nonetheless (Gilens 1999; Mendelberg 2001; Winter 2008; DeSante 2013)—also neutralized this venerable racialized wedge issue. Democratic passage of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and plummeting crime rates during Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s presidencies seemed to remove crime policy—another highly racialized issue (Hurwitz and Peffley 1997, 2005; Gilliam and Iyengar 2000; Peffley and Hurwitz 2010)—from the national partisan dialogue as well.

With race-based and race-evoking issues largely receding from the national political scene in the years preceding the 2008 election, there were some indicators of a declining significance of race in Americans’ political preferences before Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee for president. The partisan attachments of white youths who came of voting age from 1997 to 2008 were significantly less influenced by racial attitudes than the party identifications of both their older counterparts and prior youth cohorts (Sears and Tesler 2009).10 Kinder and Drake (2009) similarly argue that the increased focus on terrorism and national security after 9/11 reduced the impact of white racial prejudice on public opinion. And Hajnal and Lee (2011, 104) show that “in the last few decades—at least until the successful candidacy of Barack Obama—African Americans have been slowly but surely moving away from an exclusive relationship with the Democratic Party” (see also Luks and Elms 2005).

The main contention of this book, however, is that Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy and victory helped breathe new life into this potentially flagging association in the American public’s mind between the Democratic Party and African Americans. If, as suspected, a black president from the Democratic Party once again situated race at the forefront of the party’s image, then the upshot should have been a renewed organization of mass politics around racial attitudes and race. Or so the book’s argument on the spillover of racialization goes.

Racial and Ethnocentric Attitudes in the 2008 Election

Just because Barack Obama is African American, though, did not guarantee that race was an especially important determinant of how the public assessed either his presidential candidacies or his job performance as president. To be sure, pre-Obama research showed that racial attitudes were often strong determinants of white Americans’ candidate preferences in biracial elections (Sears and Kinder 1971; Vanneman and Pettigrew 1972; Kinder and Sears 1981; Citrin, Green, and Sears 1990; Finkel, Guterbock, and Borg 1991; Reeves 1997; Sears, Citrin, and Kosterman 1987; Hajnal 2007). Yet, as discussed more in chapter 3, racial attitudes are not always implicated in mass opinion about black candidates for elected office (Citrin, Green, and Sears 1990; Hajnal 2007). Moreover, Americans’ vote choices in presidential elections are consistently shaped by a number of different variables, most notably party identification and retrospective evaluations of the job performance of the incumbent administration (Campbell et al. 1960; Sears et al. 1980; Fiorina 1981; Kinder and Kiewiet 1981; Miller and Shanks 1996; Bartels 2000; Lewis-Beck et al. 2009; Vavreck 2009; Lenz 2012; Sides and Vavreck 2013). The profound effects of these factors on presidential elections could have overwhelmed all other considerations, leaving racial attitudes as only a minor cause of Americans’ 2008 vote preferences. The same partisan attachments that have such a dominant impact on Americans’ presidential vote preferences were also significantly shaped by racial attitudes and race in the pre-Obama era. There may not have been any room left, then, for racial attitudes to influence 2008 voting behavior more powerfully than they affected pre-Obama presidential contests. And, of course, many commentators viewed Barack Obama’s electoral success as a sign that race did not matter in his presidential victory (Tesler and Sears 2010). So, it remained to be seen whether racial attitudes had an unusually strong impact on 2008 voting behavior.

It did not take very long, however, to see that racial attitudes had an extraordinarily large effect on Americans’ 2008 vote choices. Several social science studies showed that racial attitudes were deeply implicated in mass assessments of Barack Obama throughout the election year. In fact, racial attitudes were an especially powerful predictor of white Americans’ Obama evaluations even before he announced his intention to run for president (Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2012).11 With Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama having almost identical issue positions, racial attitudes were probably the most important determinant of Americans’ vote choices in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries (Tesler and Sears 2010; Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2012). Several different racial attitudes, which included negative stereotypes, opposition to interracial marriage, favorability ratings of blacks, and racial resentment—an attitude that emphasizes blacks’ lack of commitment to traditional American values—all had larger impacts on voter preferences in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries than did Americans’ policy positions and nonracial ideologies (Tesler and Sears 2010; Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2012; Jackman and Vavreck 2010; Tesler 2013b).

Many studies also showed that racial attitudes had a sizable impact on Americans’ 2008 general election vote choices (Pasek et al. 2009; Windett, Banda, and Carsey 2012; Sniderman and Stiglitz 2008; Popkin and Rivers 2008; Sides and Vavreck 2013). More important, racial resentment, antiblack stereotypes, and old-fashioned racist opposition to intimate interracial relationships all had significantly stronger effects on 2008 voter preferences than they did on pre-Obama presidential contests (Tesler and Sears 2010; Weisberg and Devine 2010; Piston 2010; Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2012; Jackman and Vavreck 2012; Tesler 2013b; see also results discussed in chap. 3). These same racial attitudes were also much stronger determinants of individuals’ 2008 vote preferences than they would have been had John McCain faced a white Democrat like...