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POSTRACIAL POLITICS?

Counterevidence from the Presidential Elections, 2004–2012

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2014

Baodong Liu
Baodong Liu*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, The University of Utah
*
*Corresponding author: Professor Baodong Liu, Department of Politial Science, The University of Utah, Room 252, 260 South Central Campus Drive, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112.
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Abstract

This paper examines the claim that the historical election of Barack Obama demonstrated a new era of postracial politics in America (Ceaser et al., 2009). Drawing on arguments in the recent American political development literature (King and Smith, 2005; Novkov 2008), this research proposes a racial tension theory to link Obama’s White voter support to the deep-seated racial tension at the state level. In doing so, a theoretic and empirical solution is offered to solve the problem of high correlations between the major contextual variables measuring Black density (Key 1949), racial diversity (Hero 1998), state political culture (Elazar 1984), and social capital (Putnam 2000). The converged findings based on multiple methods clearly show that the state-level White support for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 was directly related to the racial tension of a state. In contrast, racial tension did not affect the White vote for John Kerry, the Democratic nominee in the 2004 Presidential election.

Keywords

ObamaWhite VotingRacial TensionSocial CapitalBlack Threat
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , Fall 2014 , pp. 443 - 463
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2014 

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