Abstract
Although Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, some Whites nevertheless penalized him because of his race. In part, these penalties involved persistent rumors about his citizenship and religion. How did the Obama campaign respond to these rumors? We argue that the Obama campaign drew attention to his bi-racial ancestry and highlighted his association with Whites in order to curry favor with this constituency. We also argue that Republicans and conservatives were most receptive to this “Whitewashing” strategy, although Democrats and liberals were not immune. We test these hypotheses with a content analysis of presidential ads from the 2008 general election, an online experiment manipulating the racial content of an Obama ad, and two nationally representative surveys. Our hypotheses are generally confirmed and suggest that Obama succeeded in part because he accommodated, rather than challenged, existing racial hierarchies.
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Notes
Although small, these figures represent a potentially pivotal fraction of the electorate. For example, in 2008 exit polls indicated that Whites made up 74% of the electorate, and (according to the ANES) about 60% of these voters identified as conservative. Thus, about 44% of the electorate was composed of White conservatives. If 17% of these voters supported Obama then this represents about 7% of the entire electorate – larger than the share of Latinos voting for Obama in this election.
The ads are available at https://pcl.stanford.edu/campaigns/2008. The director of the lab, Shanto Iyengar, indicates that they endeavor to compile all available ads sponsored by the major party candidates. He acknowledges, however, that there may be a bias in favor of ads that generate news coverage (personal communications, July 22, 2014).
Our study was conducted over two years after President Obama had been inaugurated. The fact that he had been in office this long likely undermined the credibility of the disqualifying “birther” rumor in particular. As a result, we view this experiment as a conservative test of our central hypothesis.
This sixty-one second ad was first released on June 19, 2008 in 18 states, where it aired approximately 15,759 times (See https://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/advertising/ads/6477960--barack-obama-the-country-i-love-60).
In one brief still image, Obama is shown addressing a group of individuals during his time as a community organizer in Chicago. The black-and-white image is fleeting, but the crowd appears to include a racially diverse group of people.
The former is a nationally representative sample survey conducted over the Internet between February 18 and February 23 of 2012. Although the questionnaire was administered over the Internet, respondents were recruited through traditional address-based sampling and random-digit dial telephone procedures. Additionally, respondents who did not already have an Internet connection were provided with a free notebook and Internet service. The face-to-face 2012 ANES Time Series is a representative sample of voting-eligible Americans conducted in the period immediately prior to and following the 2012 presidential election. For information about response rates and sampling procedures, see https://www.electionstudies.org.
We also find that the “birther” rumor is somewhat more popular than the Muslim rumor in the 2012 ANES time series. We find that 40% of White Republicans indicate that Obama was “probably” or “definitely” born outside the U.S., but only about 33% indicate that he is a Muslim. The “birther” rumor likely posed the greater threat to the Obama campaign, which may explain why the “Country I Love” ad focused more squarely on rebutting this misconception.
To address concerns about the number of respondents per cell, our analyses are based on a 3-category partisanship variable where strong, moderate, and leaning partisans on each end of the spectrum are collapsed. The three-category variable is coded from 0 to 1 with Democrats being 1. Our results hold with either a 5-category or 7-category partisan variable.
Control variables are included because although exposure to the treatments is randomly assigned partisanship is not. Nevertheless, all of the significant results remain when the controls are removed from the analyses.
This survey did not include a question asking whether the president was born in the U.S. or directly assessing perceptions of racial favoritism in the Obama administration. Fortunately, both questions were asked in the 2012 ANES Time Series; see Table 4.
There were relatively few Black respondents in the 2012 EGSS (N = 94). Nevertheless, African Americans were far more likely than Whites to select “Black” as at least one of the descriptions of Obama’s race (54% versus 31% for Whites). Similarly, Black respondents were far less likely than Whites to describe Obama as “mixed” (55% versus 70%)”.
We also examined the effects of racial favoritism on the endorsement of rumors among ideological conservatives and liberals. The substantive and statistical significance levels are generally comparable to the effects for the different partisan groups as shown in Table 4. For example, the relevant coefficient on racial favoritism for White conservatives is 1.23 (p = .04) for the “birther” rumor, and 1.51 (p = .08) for misperceptions that Obama is a Muslim.
Of course, it is worth reiterating that only about 5% of White Democrats, compared to about 28% of White Republicans, believe that Obama favors Blacks over Whites.
The results are also statistically significant and more comparable in magnitude when focusing on ideological groups. The estimated probability of support for Obama for an average White conservative who was certain Obama was born in the U.S. was .28, versus .0 (difference = .28) if they were certain that he was not born in the U.S. The comparable figures for White liberals are .91 and .56 (difference = .35).
Given the observational nature of the ANES data, we cannot rule out the possibility that instead of perceptions of Obama’s race and his racial group sympathies driving support for negative rumors about him, the direction of causality may be reversed.
Our argument also differs from Perry’s (2011) theory of universalizing Black interests (UBI). The UBI thesis holds that Black candidates running in majority-White jurisdictions often strategically frame policies that might disproportionately aid minorities as having universal appeal. The Whitewashing argument, on the other hand is more about a group-oriented appeal rather than a policy-oriented appeal. That is, candidates employing the Whitewashing strategy focus less on specific policies and more on their association to Whites and their sympathy for White racial group interests.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Nyeeyah Waldron and Troy Schott for their assistance on the content analysis portion of this project. We also thank Ted Brader, Denia Garcia, Dorainne Green, Shanto Iyengar, Kristyn Karl, Tyson King-Meadows, Arthur Lupia, Michelle Moyd, Dina Okamoto, Aaron Ponce, Tennisha Riley, and Nicholas Valentino, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. All data and replication codes for each study in this article are available at the Political Behavior Dataverse website: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/polbehavior.
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Hutchings, V.L., Cruz Nichols, V., Gause, L. et al. Whitewashing: How Obama Used Implicit Racial Cues as a Defense Against Political Rumors. Polit Behav 43, 1337–1360 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09642-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09642-1