This study argues that President Obama's strong association with an issue like health care should polarize public opinion by racial attitudes and race. Consistent with that hypothesis, racial attitudes had a significantly larger impact on health care opinions in fall 2009 than they had in cross-sectional surveys from the past two decades and in panel data collected before Obama became the face of the policy. Moreover, the experiments embedded in one of those reinterview surveys found health care policies were significantly more racialized when attributed to President Obama than they were when these same proposals were framed as President Clinton's 1993 reform efforts. Dozens of media polls from 1993 to 1994 and from 2009 to 2010 are also pooled together to show that with African Americans overwhelmingly supportive of Obama's legislative proposals, the racial divide in health care opinions was 20 percentage points greater in 2009-10 than it was over President Clinton's plan back in 1993-94. What I'm saying is this debate that's taking place [over health care reform] is not about race, it's about people being worried about how our government should operate. -Barack Obama, Meet the Press

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Prior research provides limited insights into when political communications prime or change citizens' underlying opinions. This article helps fill that void by putting forth an account of priming and opinion change. I argue that crystallized attitudes should often be primed by new information. An influx of attention to less crystallized preferences, however, should lead individuals to alter their underlying opinions in accordance with prior beliefs. Since predispositions acquired early in the life cycle-such as partisanship, religiosity, basic values, and group-based affect/antagonisms-are more crystallized than mass opinion about public policy, media and campaign content will tend to prime citizens' predispositions and change their policy positions. Both my review of previous priming research and original analyses presented in this study from five new cases strongly support the crystallization-based account of when mass opinion is primed or changed. I conclude with a discussion of the article's potential political, methodological, and normative implications. Priming versus Opinion ChangeN ot only is projection a plausible alternative interpretation [to priming], it is an alternative with real consequence. The political differences between priming and projection are enormous. If priming holds, then television news possesses the capacity to alter the standards by which a president is judged, and therefore the degree of public popularity a president enjoys and the power he can wield. If projection holds, then we will have discovered that people interpret new events or reinterpret old events in order to maintain consistency with their existing predispositions-an interesting discovery, though hardly a new one (e.g., Abelson 1959)

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