Abstract
During the 2008 presidential election, and briefly following it, researchers and pundits wondered whether the election of America’s first African-American President could create a post-racial America. But while political scientists have done much to analyze the election itself, we remain largely uninformed about the potential long-term effects of the Obama presidency on racial attitudes in America. This paper addresses the effects of the Obama presidency using multiple original surveys of the electoral battleground states conducted from 2008 through 2012. Using a measure of racial antagonism, the analysis tests the rally and presidential-popularity cycle theories of public opinion. It demonstrates that racial sentiments rallied positively behind Obama after his 2008 election but then spiked to unprecedentedly antagonistic levels during his first term. At the same time, racial antagonism polarized dramatically by party from 2008 to 2012.
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Notes
Thomas Friedman, “Finishing Our Work,” New York Times, 05 November, 2008.
Eli Saslow, “Hate Groups’ Newest Target,” Washington Post, 22 June, 2008.
Howard Witt, “Hate Incidents in U.S. Surge: Election Seen as Factor Behind Revival of Klan,” Chicago Tribune, 23 November, 2008.
Marisol Bello, “Hate Crimes against Blacks, Religious Groups Rise,” USA Today, 23 November, 2009.
Vincent L. Hutchings, “Change or More of the Same? Evaluating Racial Attitudes in the Obama Era,” Public Opinion Quarterly 73 (2009): 917–42; Steven A. Tuch and Michael Hughes, “Whites’ Racial Policy Attitudes,” Social Science Quarterly 77 (1996): 723–45.
Michael Tesler and David O Sears, Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Susan Welch and Lee Sigelman, “The “Obama Effect” and White Racial Attitudes,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 634 (2011): 207–20.
Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Paul Krugman, “The Obama Agenda,” New York Times, 7 November, 2008, A35.
John E. Mueller, “Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson,” The American Political Science Review 64 (1970): 18–34.
Brian Newman and Andrew Forcehimes, ““Rally Round the Flag” Events for Presidential Approval Research,” Electoral Studies 29 (2010): 144–54.
ABC News polls; http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob1.htm (accessed 9/12/2013).
Suzanne L. Parker, “Toward an Understanding of “Rally” Effects: Public Opinion in the Persian Gulf War,” Public Opinion Quarterly 59 (1995): 526–46.
Brian J. Gaines, “Where’s the Rally? Approval and Trust of the President, Cabinet, Congress, and Government since September 11,” Political Science & Politics 35 (2002): 531–536, at 535; Parker, “Rally Effects.”
Marc J. Hetherington and Michael Nelson, “Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism,” Political Science and Politics 36 (2003): 37–42.
George C. Edwards and Tami Swenson, “Who Rallies? The Anatomy of a Rally Event,” The Journal of Politics 59 (1997): 200–12; John R. Oneal and Anna Lillian Bryan, “The Rally ’Round the Flag Effect’ in US Foreign Policy Crises, 1950–1985,” Political Behavior 17 (1995): 379–401. Baum, however, finds the opposite effect, that out-partisans respond more than in-partisans: Matthew A. Baum, “The Constituent Foundations of the Rally‐Round‐the‐Flag Phenomenon,” International Studies Quarterly 46 (2002): 263–98.
Oneal and Bryan, “The Rally ‘Round the Flag Effect.’”
Sources: ABC News poll, December, 2008; and New York Times Poll, November, 1983. (In both surveys the majority of respondents said the events had no effect on their American pride.) Data provided by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut.
We focus on white voters in this piece in order to compare our hypotheses, research, and conclusions with the bulk of the existing research on the effect of Obama’s election on racial attitudes. Systematic analyses of black and Latino (among others) attitudes is also necessary and valuable, but such a project would require much more space and still more specialized data.
Another reason, some speculated, was that Obama’s reelection would prove that the first election was not just a fluke or an accident. Electing him a second time would reinforce that something real had changed in racial attitudes.
Keli Goff, “Reelection could Signal a Giant Step Forward,” The Washington Post, 2 November, 2012, B2.
Helmut Norpoth, “Economics, Politics, and the Cycle of Presidential Popularity,” Political Behavior 6 (1984): 253–73, at 253.
Raymond Tatalovich and Alan R. Gitelson, “Political Party Linkages to Presidential Popularity: Assessing the ‘Coalition of Minorities’ Thesis,” The Journal of Politics 52 (1990): 234–42.
For example, Randall Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (New York: Random House, 2011).
Michael Tesler, “The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care: How President Obama Polarized Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race,” American Journal of Political Science 56 (2012): 690–704. We also find direct evidence (rather than merely relying on the existing literature) for the unique role racial attitudes play in views of Obama. Correlating the ANES feeling thermometer of blacks with evaluations of presidential performance, we see that while racial attitudes typically correlate with presidential approval, the correlations are substantially weaker for white presidents than for Obama. Attitudes towards blacks and presidential job approval correlate positively at 0.11 for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (1980 was the first year the ANES measured presidential approval), and they correlate negatively at 0.08 for Republican presidents from 1980 through 2008. In contrast, in 2012 the correlation between attitudes towards blacks and job approval for Obama was more than twice as strong at 0.25.
For example, Norpoth, “Presidential Popularity.”
An alternative to H2, besides the null hypothesis, is the issue of whether racial attitudes are actually polarizing by party, or whether individuals are “sorting” themselves into partisan groups with which their racial attitudes are more closely aligned. See Morris P. Fiorina and Samuel J. Abrams, “Political Polarization in the American Public,” Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008): 563–88. The two phenomena can look similar and have caused some academic dispute. We provide a further explanation of the difference and a test of this alternative hypothesis at the end of the analysis section.
The November 2008 post-election survey was a national sample from which we have eliminated respondents from all but these fourteen battleground states for consistent comparison. Additionally, to maximize the available data, we use all of the 2008 battleground states throughout the analysis, despite the fact that some of these states may not have been true battlegrounds in 2012 as well.
Donald R. Kinder and David O. Sears, “Prejudice and Politics: Symbolic Racism versus Racial Threats to the Good Life,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 40 (1981): 414–31; Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
There is a possibility that answers to these questions could suffer from a basic agree-response bias, inflating the overall measure. Since the measure is a relative one, however, relying on answers to many questions, any such aggregate inflation should be constant and not affect the results or analysis. Additionally, as Table A1 shows, modal answers do demonstrate substantial variance.
Kinder and Sears, “Symbolic Racism”; Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color.
Paul M. Sniderman, Thomas Piazza, Philip E. Tetlock, and Ann Kendrick. “The New Racism,” American Journal of Political Science 35 (1991): 423–47.
For a summary of typical interviewer race effects on racial attitude questions, see: Rachel E. Davis, Mick P. Couper, Nancy K. Janz, Cleopatra H. Caldwell, and Ken Resnicow, “Interviewer Effects in Public Health Surveys,” Health Education Research 25 (2010): 14–26.
While this effect is predicted by rally and presidential cycle theories, other forces were no doubt also at work. For example, the racialization of issues such as health care and the rise of the Tea Party during Obama’s first term contributed to a racialized atmosphere. For the effects of race and health care, see Tesler, “The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care”; and for Tea Party effects see Matt A. Barreto, Betsy L. Cooper, Benjamin Gonzalez, Christopher S Parker, and Christopher Towler, “The Tea Party in the Age of Obama: Mainstream Conservatism or out-Group Anxiety?” Political Power and Social Theory 22 (2011): 105–37. We leave specific examination of the strength of the rebound and its additional causes to future research.
To ensure that these effects are specific to the Obama presidency and not a common presidential pattern or return to a pre-election baseline, we again analyzed racial attitudes using the ANES. We calculated polarization based on the difference between Democrats’ and Republicans’ thermometer ratings of blacks from 1964 to 2012, a measure common to most years. While the ANES did not conduct a midterm survey in 2010, the data nevertheless demonstrate unprecedented racial polarization during the Obama presidency. Prior to Obama’s election the highest partisan difference on the black thermometer scale was just under five points (1980). In 2012, in extremely stark contrast, the polarization difference was 10 points – more than double its highest point since 1964. While not a perfect test, these results lend substantial support to the polarization findings in this paper and their uniqueness to the Obama presidency.
For example, Fiorina and Abrams, “Political Polarization.”
Ibid.
We choose to compare these two surveys because they demonstrate the strongest polarization effects and thus the best opportunity for testing the alternative hypothesis of party sorting. Because the 2012 survey demonstrates a second, if weaker, rally, the effects of polarization are likely to be temporarily muted.
Brad S. Chissom, “Interpretation of the Kurtosis Statistic,” The American Statistician 24 (1970): 19–22.
Fiorina and Abrams “Political Polarization.”
Alan I. Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
Kimberly Gross, Johanna Harvey, and Claire Low, “Racial Framing in Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Election,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Toronto, Canada, 2009.
Barreto et al., “The Tea Party in the Age of Obama.”
Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks, The Wrongs of the Right: Language, Race, and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama (New York: NYU Press, 2014).
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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2013 annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Hollywood, CA.
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McDermott, M., Belcher, C. Barack Obama and Americans’ Racial Attitudes: Rallying and Polarization. Polity 46, 449–469 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.8