Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.
Although there was plenty of discussion during
the 2012 presidential campaign about the Hispanic vote and how intense black turnout would be, the press
was preoccupied with
the white vote: the white working class, white women and upscale whites.
Largely missing from daily news stories were references to research
on how racial attitudes have changed under Obama, the nation’s first
black president. In fact, there has been an interesting exploration of
this subject among academics, but before getting to that, let’s look
back at some election results.
In the 16 presidential elections between 1952 and 2012, only one
Democratic candidate, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, won a majority of the
white vote. There
have been nine Democratic presidential nominees
who received a smaller percentage of the white vote than Obama did in
2008 (43 percent) and four who received less white support than Obama
did in 2012 (39 percent).
In 2012,
Obama won 39 percent of the white electorate.
Four decades earlier,
in 1972, George McGovern received a record-setting low of the ballots
cast by whites, 31 percent. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey won 36 percent of
the white vote; in 1980, Jimmy Carter got 33 percent; in 1984, Walter
Mondale took 35 percent of the ballots cast by whites. As far back as
1956, Adlai Stevenson tied Obama’s 39 percent, and in 1952, Stevenson
received 40 percent – both times running against Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Two Democratic nominees from Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis in 1988 (40
percent) and John Kerry in 2004 (41 percent), got white margins only
slightly higher than Obama’s in 2012 — and worse than Obama’s 43 percent
in 2008. In other words, Obama’s track record with white voters is not
very different from that of other Democratic candidates.
Ballots cast for House candidates provide another measure of white partisanship. These contests have been
tracked
in exit polls from 1980 onward. Between 1980 and 1992, the white vote
for Democratic House candidates averaged 49.6 percent. It dropped
sharply in 1994 when Newt Gingrich orchestrated the Republican take-over
of the House, averaging just 42.7 percent from 1994 through 2004. White
support for Democrats rose to an average of 46.7 percent in 2006 and
2008 as public disapproval of George W. Bush and of Republicans in
Congress
sharply increased.
How can the percentage of people holding anti-black
attitudes have increased from 2006 to 2008 at a time when Obama
performed better among white voters than the two previous white
Democratic nominees, and then again from 2008 to 2012 when Obama won a
second term?
In the aftermath of Obama’s election, white support for Congressional
Democrats collapsed to its lowest level in the history of House exit
polling, 38 percent in 2010 — at once driving and driven by the
emerging Tea Party. In 2012, white Democratic support for House
candidates
remained weak at 39 percent.
Despite how controversial it has been to talk about race, researchers
have gathered a substantial amount of information on the opinions of
white American voters.
The political scientists
Michael Tesler of Brown University and
David O. Sears of UCLA have published several studies
on this theme and they have also written
a book,
“Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial
America,” that analyzes changes in racial attitudes since Obama became
the Democratic nominee in 2008.
In their 2010 paper,
“President Obama and the Growing Polarization of Partisan Attachments
by Racial Attitudes and Race,” Tesler and Sears argue that the
evidence strongly suggests that party attachments have
become increasingly polarized by both racial attitudes and race as a
result of Obama’s rise to prominence within the Democratic Party.
Specifically, Tesler and Sears found that voters high on a
racial-resentment scale
moved one notch toward intensification of partisanship within the
Republican Party on a seven-point scale from strong Democrat through
independent to strong Republican. To measure racial resentment, which Tesler and Sears describe as
“subtle hostility towards African-Americans,” the authors used data from
the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey,
an extensive collection of polling data maintained at the University of
Chicago.
In the case of A.N.E.S. data, Tesler and Sears write:
The scale was constructed from how strongly respondents
agreed or disagreed with the following assertions: 1) Irish, Italian,
Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way
up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors. 2)
Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that
make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.
3) Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
4) It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks
would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.
The General Social Survey included questions asking respondents to
rate competing causes of racial discrimination and inequality:
The scale was constructed from responses to the following
4 items: 1) Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame
prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any
special favors. 2) A 3-category variable indicating whether respondents
said lack of motivation is or is not a reason for racial inequality. 3)
A 3-category variable indicating whether respondents said
discrimination is or is not a reason for racial inequality. 4) A
three-category variable indicating whether respondents rated whites
more, less or equally hardworking than blacks on 7 point stereotype
scales.
Supporting the Tesler-Sears findings,
Josh Pasek, a professor in the communication studies department at the University of Michigan,
Jon A. Krosnick, a political scientist at Stanford, and
Trevor Tompson,
the director of the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center
at the University of Chicago, use responses from three different surveys
in
their analysis
of “The Impact of Anti-Black Racism on Approval of Barack Obama’s Job
Performance and on Voting in the 2012 Presidential Election.”
Pasek and his collaborators found a statistically significant
increase from 2008 to 2012 in “explicit anti-black attitudes” – a
measure based on questions very similar those used by Tesler and Sears
for their racial-resentment scale. The percentage of voters with
explicit anti-black attitudes rose from 47.6 in 2008 and 47.3 percent in
2010 to 50.9 percent in 2012.
Crucially, Pasek found that Republicans drove the change: “People who
identified themselves as Republicans in 2012 expressed anti-Black
attitudes more often than did Republican identifiers in 2008.”
In 2008, Pasek and his collaborators note, the proportion of people
expressing anti-Black attitudes was 31 percent among Democrats, 49
percent among independents, and 71 percent among Republicans. By 2012,
the numbers had gone up. “The proportion of people expressing anti-Black
attitudes,” they write, “was 32 percent among Democrats, 48 percent
among independents, and 79 percent among Republicans.”
At the moment, the population of the United States (
314 million) is heading towards a majority-minority status
in 2042.
The American electorate, on the other hand
(126 million) is currently 72 percent white, based on the voters who cast ballots last November.
Obama’s ascendency to the presidency means that, on race, the Rubicon has been crossed (2008) and re-crossed (2012).
What are we to make of these developments? Is the country more or
less racist? How can the percentage of people holding anti-black
attitudes have increased from 2006 to 2008 at a time when Obama
performed better among white voters than the two previous white
Democratic nominees, and then again from 2008 to 2012 when Obama won a
second term?
In fact, the shifts described by Tesler and Pasek are an integral
aspect of the intensifying conservatism within the right wing of the
Republican Party. Many voters voicing stronger anti-black affect were
already Republican. Thus, in 2012, shifts in their attitudes, while they
contributed to a 4 percentage point reduction in Obama’s white support,
did not result in a Romney victory.
Some Republican strategists believe the party’s deepening conservatism is scaring away voters.
“We have
a choice:
we can become a shrinking regional party of middle-aged and older white
men, or we can fight to become a national governing party,” John
Weaver, a consultant to the 2008 McCain campaign, said after Obama’s
re-election. Mark McKinnon, an adviser to former President George W.
Bush, made a similar point: “The party needs more tolerance, more
diversity and a deeper appreciation for the concerns of the middle
class.”
Not only is the right risking marginalization as its views on race
have become more extreme, it is veering out of the mainstream
on contraception and
abortion, positions that fueled an 11 point
gender gap in 2012 and a 13 point gap in 2008.
Given that a majority of the electorate will remain white for a
number of years, the hurdle that the Republican Party faces is building
the party’s white margins
by 2 to 3 points. For Romney to have won, he needed 62 percent of the white vote, not the 59 percent he got.
Working directly against this goal is what Time Magazine
recently described
as the Republican “brand identity that has emerged from the stars of
the conservative media ecosystem: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill
O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and others.”
It is not so much Latino and black voters that the Republican Party
needs. To win the White House again, it must assuage the social
conscience of mainstream, moderate white voters among whom an ethos of
tolerance has become normal. These voters are concerned with fairness
and diversity, even as they stand to the right of center. It is there
that the upcoming political battles — on the gamut of issues from race
to rights — will be fought.
Credits:
Op-ed by Tom Byrne Edsall, New York Times, Feb, 6, 2013
Photo of Christopher Jordan Dorner via ChicagoNow, Feb. 8, 2013
Photo of President Obama skeet shooting, Pete Souza/White House, via the NYTimes
, Feb. 2, 2013
