Racial stereotypes, racial context, and the 2008 presidential election

Abstract

As the first African-American nominee for president of a major political party, Barack Obama's campaign and ultimate victory reminded voters, scholars, pundits, and the press of the centrality of race in American political life. Speculation by observers of all types centered around the potential impact of race as an individual psychological prejudice and/or as a geographic/contextual factor. These two themes parallel different leading scholarly treatments of race and racism in the USA. Rather than choose one theme or the other, in this paper, we bring both traditions together in a unified analysis of white voter response to Obama. We find strong evidence that the level of prejudice toward African-Americans held by whites affected their evaluations of Obama as well as their probability of voting for him. In contrast, we find little evidence that whites responded to the racial context of their immediate geographic environment.