Traiting Places: Race and the Evaluation of Black and White Presidential Candidates

Abstract

While there are a number of studies that explore perceptions of black politicians' strengths and weaknesses relative to white politicians, most of these studies use hypothetical black candidates and focus on white respondents' attitudes. We explore whether research on attitudes about black candidate attributes in controlled settings hold for real-world presidential candidates. Moreover, we assess whether black and white respondents view co-racial politicians' relative strengths differently. We use the 1992-2012 American National Election Study to test our research questions. We find that blacks consistently view Democratic presidential candidates' traits more positively than whites. However, the racial gap in perceptions of presidential candidate traits is greatest for Obama relative to Clinton. Moreover, we demonstrate that the greater racial divide in perceptions of Obama's traits is in part driven by whites who view blacks as a group negatively.

Voting Can Be Hard, Information Helps

“…Voters’ “feelings toward groups” are also likely to matter (Brady and Sniderman 1985, p. 1073). Indeed, studies of implicit attitudes make clear that most Americans view individuals through racial and gender lenses, and evidence indicates that voter prejudices can influence support for candidates with particular traits (Banaji and Greenwald 2013; Piston 2010; Stout and Le 2017; Visalvanich 2017).…”

Did sexism drive Latino support for Trump? Latinx, sexism, and presidential vote choice

“…Several studies have demonstrated its influence on political attitudes (Rabinowitz et al 2009;Sears et al 1999) and support for Republican presidential candidates (Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2012;Tesler and Sears 2010). Symbolic racism has also been shown to have a negative effect on support for Barack Obama (Pasek et al 2014;Stout and Le 2017;Tesler and Sears 2010) and a positive effect on support for Donald Trump (Hooghe and Dassonneville 2018;Jardina 2019;Schaffner et al 2018).…”

“…Symbolic racism has also been shown to have a negative effect on support for Barack Obama (Pasek et al. 2014; Stout and Le 2017; Tesler and Sears 2010) and a positive effect on support for Donald Trump (Hooghe and Dassonneville 2018; Jardina 2019; Schaffner et al. 2018).…”

Whose Party is It?: Lame Ducks, Presidential Candidates, and Evaluations of the Party

“…Next, the historical nature of both Obama’s presidency and Clinton’s nomination increased the importance of race and gender, respectively, for public opinion about presidential politics (McThomas & Tesler, 2016; Siders et al, 2019; Stout & Le, 2017; Tesler, 2016). 1 These findings suggest two implications for our analysis.…”

“…1 These findings suggest two implications for our analysis. First, there should be a consistent racial gap in attitudes toward Obama and Clinton among Black respondents that does not diminish over time (Stout & Le, 2017). Race, like partisanship, may therefore yield greater stability in evaluations across time.…”