Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The impact of Barack Obama’s racial background on his campaigns for both the Democratic nomination and the White House is understandably the source of tremendous interest. The findings presented in this paper offer the clearest empirical evidence to date of what role racial attitudes actually play. The study shows that one’s affective orientation towards African-Americans—as operationalized with Kinder and Sanders’s (1996) racial resentment scale—was unambiguously a prime determinant of support for Senator Obama in primaries and beyond. Moreover, we will see these effects were implicated before the first votes were ever cast and that they work in similar ways for different races and ethnicities. Contrary to the critics who say the conceptualization of racial resentment and its closely related forbearer, symbolic racism, has more to do with principled political conservatism than racial animus, our exposition of the evidence makes it apparent that these results are indeed the product of racial predispositions. Nevertheless, our interpretations of the findings deviate slightly from the traditional use of symbolic racism and racial resentment to explain white opposition to racial policies and black candidates. Instead, we provide an analysis of both the racially liberal and the racially conservative sides of the scale. Doing so is essential to understanding the extraordinary impact of racial resentment on support for Barack Obama in the primaries and beyond; for, all things being equal, we show that racial liberals are equally or more likely to support Barack Obama than racial conservatives are to back his opponents. Focusing on both sides of the racial resentment spectrum also has notable implications for racial politics in America and for academic research on this much debated topic.