IntroductionWhile it represents a decidedly shameful chapter in the history of modern democracies, many politicians have discovered that appealing to voters' racial, ethnic, and nativist prejudices can be an effective means of both winning elections and building the necessary political capital to advance preferred legislative agendas. This strategic exploitation of racial discord relies on what is colloquially known as race-baiting, herein referred to as racially divisive (RDAs). In this analysis, RDAs are defined as political statements in which the speaker denigrates a particular minority group, frames that group as a threat to majority group resources or privileges, advocates for special restrictions against that group, or reassures potential supporters of their rightfully superordinate position vis-a-vis the targeted minority. In addition to stoking resentment against particular groups, RDAs may use frame-bridging discourses (Benford and Snow 2000) to create cognitive links between ostensibly race-neutral policies, such as the anti-poverty programs colloquially known as welfare, and non-white populations.Racially divisive appeals are aimed at backlash voters, individuals whose electoral choices are heavily motivated by fear or resentment of minority encroachment and/or the belief that the economic, political and social advancement of historically marginalized groups can only be engineered by taking rights and opportunities away from native-born whites (Hewitt 2005; Hughey 2014). While politicians still sometimes use openly racist discourse to court this constituency, post-Civil Rights-era RDAs are more likely to mobilize coded racial language and the double-speak and face-saving equivocations of color-blind instead (Bonilla-Silva 2013). Although there are plentiful examples of the use of RDAs by both left and right-wing politicians across most national contexts, this research focuses on their use in contemporary US presidential campaigns by candidates affiliated with the Republican Party. This choice is motivated by the GOP's1 well-documented history of mobilizing RDAs, most notably during the so-called a decades-long campaign wherein political operatives systematically exploited white racism to shift the former slave states of the South from a Democratic voting bloc into the solid Republican constituency that they are today (Feagin 2012; Lowndes 2008).In this paper, I will provide a brief overview of the political uses of RDAs and will explore the evolution of these appeals over time. The focus will be on the extent to, and means by which, minority groups are defined as threats to white resources or economic privileges, either by framing them as abusers of tax-funded government benefits, or, as historically been the case with immigrants, by framing them as job stealers. Finally, following the Republican National Committee's formal 2005 apology for the use of the Southern Strategy, and repeated promises to move away from such divisive tactics, I will examine whether GOP Presidential candidates in the 2008 and 2012 election cycles have continued to court racial conservatives by presenting minorities as resource threats. As a corollary, I will examine the extent to which promises to cut government funded anti-poverty programs and other public services are justified through narratives which present benefit programs as primarily benefitting non-whites. If so, I will determine the extent to which these appeals exploit Strategy type anti-black sentiments, or whether they have switched focus to new minority populations made especially salient by increased immigration and demographic trends that are challenging the majority status of Caucasian whites.Politics and Prejudice: Nativism and Anti-Black RacismInsofar as it was a period of historically high immigration, the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries saw a surge in popular nativist movements. …