How Racially Resentful Voters Respond to Campaign Cues from Black Candidates

How Racially Resentful Voters Respond to Campaign Cues from Black Candidates December 5, 2017 Abstract In studies of voting behavior, racial resentment has consistently been associated with decreased support for black candidates. In this paper we bring together a collection of observational data and survey experiments to show how, in the certain contexts, exactly the opposite occurs: racially resentful voters prefer to vote for a black candidate over a white competitor. Higher levels of racial resentment do not imply an unyielding opposition to black candidates because such voters respond to partisan and ideological cues about the preferences of black candidates. Because the traditional measure of racial resentment captures more than just racial animus, some black candidates—most notably, Republicans with an individualist message—actually benefit from higher levels of racial resentment in the electorate. These results highlight the importance of campaign context in shaping how voters respond to racial, partisan, and ideological cues. America’s original sin of slavery echoes through contemporary politics in many ways, not the least of which is a reluctance of white voters to support black candidates. Far from being an attitude held by a small minority, a large swath of racially resentful voters has proved quite unlikely to support black candidates (Frederick and Jeffries 2009; Highton 2004; Stout 2015)—a dynamic on display not only in local and congressional elections, but also in the 2008 election of President Barack Obama (Tesler and Sears 2010). Racially resentful white voters react poorly to black candidates for reasons ranging from policy differences to simple racism, but recent electoral cycles have also included victories for conservative black candidates in places like Florida (Allen West), South Carolina (Tim Scott), Texas (Will Hurd) and Utah (Mia Love). Though black Republicans are far from common, their electoral victories have occurred in districts that are not majority-black, and are often highly conservative. Understanding the appeal of these black Republican candidates to white, racially resentful voters is crucial for a complete picture of how race and white reactions to race work in electoral politics. Mia Love’s campaigns provide an instructive example of how black Republicans raise issues of race on their own terms and in ways that are very different from the typical black Democrat. Other than a promise to join the Congressional Black Caucus, Love avoided explicit discussions of race or racial politics, though her racial identity was prominently featured in campaign photos and advertisements. At the same time, her primary messages centered around individual initiative and opposition to government assistance. As her 2012 campaign website explained, “Love is best known for her conservative positions on limited government . She advocates a return to personal responsibility and reduced government dependency.” Love did not hide her racial identity, but she used her Haitian immigrant family background to emphasize lessons of hard work and individualism learned from her parents. On her 2012 campaign website, for example, Love described herself by talking about one of her father’s favorite statements: “Mia, your mother and I never took a handout. You will not be a burden to society. You will give back.” Her entire campaign persona was built around her identity and its connection to conservative issue positions. How do whites react to these types of messages? Though we know from previous scholarship that conservative whites will vote for black candidates (Hood and McKee 2015; Hood, Kidd and Morris 2015; Huffmon, Knotts and McKee 2016), no previous work has developed a theory about the conditions under which such voting behavior is likely, nor has any comprehensive test of such a 1 theory been conducted. We know little about how the kinds of messages emphasized by candidates like Mia Love, delivered by a Republican, play out in campaigns where many voters are, to some degree, racially resentful. We bring together a new series of experiments combined with available observational data to examine the relationship between racial resentment, candidate evaluations, and ultimately voting behavior, showing surprising findings.1 We demonstrate that when black candidates send conservative cues, racially resentful whites respond, making different inferences about the candidate’s attributes and ultimately making different vote choices. Black candidates with a conservative message of individualism or self-reliance counter stereotypical expectations about black behavior (Steele 2011) and black interests (Price 2016; Goldman and Mutz 2014) and thus stand out, especially to the racially resentful. Such candidates challenge the stereotypes of black candidates as unwavering champions of government intervention and can lead racially resentful white voters to evaluate a particular type of black candidate as an exception to the rule (Sears and Savalei 2006). The racially resentful see such black candidates so differently as to utterly shift their reactions from opposition to support. More broadly, the results demonstrate how context channels the effect of racial resentment on political decisions. The response of whites to racial cues—and the way certain candidates can exploit cues to cull favor from whites and blacks—is not a static factor in elections. Rather, a candidate’s race, partisanship, and message all interact to shape how whites interpret their choices and make decisions about elections. Our approach is thus consistent with the view of Hutchings and Piston (2011), whose review of the literature concludes that scholars should focus on the conditions under which racial attitudes affect the electoral chances of black candidates (pp. 589-590). Theory & Hypotheses The idea of racial resentment began with the notion that traditional, biological racism—the kind most virulently expressed during the Jim Crow era—has declined and that contemporary racial prejudice is “expressed in the language of American individualism” (Kinder and Sanders 1996, p. 106). 1Some readers have commented that the results are so surprising that they do not believe them, while others have argued they are exactly what we should expect given how racial resentment is measured. The fact that such disparate reactions occur is, in our opinion, a key reason for the study. 2 Kinder and Sears(1981, p. 416) defined this attitude, which they labeled symbolic racism, as “a blend of anti-black affect and the kind of traditional American moral values embodied in the Protestant Ethic.” Their definition of a new form of racism blends racial prejudice with “moral feelings that Blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance, the work ethic, obedience, and self-discipline.” As Kinder and Mendelberg(2000) put it, racially resentful citizens “are preoccupied with Black Americans’ specifically individualistic shortcomings: that Blacks fail to display the virtues of hard work and self-sacrifice that white Americans claim as central to their own lives and to their society” (p. 60). The theory suggests that the racially resentful are skeptical of blacks, at least in part, because they see blacks as a group less willing to work hard in order to get ahead, instead choosing to benefit from undeserved government support. As it is both theorized and typically measured, racial resentment is multi-faceted and captures more than racial animus alone; it also includes individualist values and a conservative view of the appropriate role of government. Scholars of race and public opinion have shown (Kinder and Mendelberg 2000; Huddy and Feldman 2009; Feldman and Huddy 2005) that the various elements of the measure may be intertwined in complex ways—ways that mean the partisanship and message of a black Republican may matter quite a bit to the racially resentful, who favor messages about individualism as opposed to messages of structural racism.2 Moreover, while not every invocation of individualism is necessarily tied to race, appeals to individualism in contexts where race is salient cannot be fully disentangled from the history of white racial animus towards minorities and thus represent a form of “dog whistle politics” that invokes stereotypes about race and hard work (Lopez 2015). If this perspective is correct, an implicit possibility is that when black candidates send cues, whether through their partisan labels or through direct messages, about individual as opposed to systemic causes of political or social disadvantage, white respondents will treat those candidates differently. In essence, they will “exceptionalize” the black candidate with the welcome message and 2For a critique of the measure, see Wilson and Davis(2011), and for an exploration of how white and black respondents interpret the items in the measure, see Kam and Burge(2017). Without taking a position on debates over the complexity of the measure, we simply note that the fact that the elements of the measure are not fully independent complicates inferences and predictions about what the measure will do under different contexts—hence the need to test the measure across multiple electoral contexts. 3 draw quite different inferences about that candidate, inferences that can lead to outright support for the black candidate. Consistent with this view, Carney and Enos(2015) argue that racial resentment relies on a belief system that is primarily defined not by “targeted anti-black affect,” but by a worldview that

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