Let’s Talk About Race, Baby: Racialized Rhetoric and the Democratic Party

• In Event: Interrogating Racism

Abstract

Hillary Clinton talked more explicitly about race and racial issues during the 2016 election than previous Democratic Presidential nominees (Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2018). This trend continued in 2018 and into 2020 with Democratic presidential hopefuls being increasingly overt in signaling their stances on racial issues. Yet, many pundits argue that the Democratic Party’s explicit advocacy of minority interests and appeals to minority mobilization distract from their economic message and alienate working-class whites. To achieve electoral success in 2020 and beyond, should the Party adopt a “post-identity liberalism” or should it continue its transformation into a party that explicitly signals its support for minority interests? I argue that the Party faces important incentives to transition from silence on racial issues to overtly signaling racially liberal stances and support for minority groups due to four major factors: a partisan realignment which has homogenized the racial stances of the party base; reactions to perceived prejudice and bigotry in society; the growing salience of racial and gender group identity in political evaluations; and the growing prominence of identity-based social movements. I then test this hypothesis using data from the 2016 American National Election Study, an original experiment embedded in the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and three nationally representative, original survey samples of roughly 1,000 respondents collected using Lucid Fulcrum Exchange. Preliminary evidence from these sources indicate that candidates benefit from appealing to pro-minority sentiments in Democratic primaries. Pro-minority sentiments activate support for candidates particularly among strong partisans and racial liberals. However, there may be a cost to doing so in general elections as support for candidates who use these appeals is low among weak partisans and Independents. Moreover, the racial and gender identities of the candidates moderate the effect of these appeals on candidate and policy support.

Author

• Maneesh Arora, Wellesley College