Is There A Race Card in the Deck? Implicit and Explicit Racial Appeals in Modern Presidential Campaigns

Presenter: Graham C. Backman

Faculty Sponsor: Tatishe Nteta

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Political Science and Government

Session: Poster Session 5, 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM, Auditorium, A49

ABSTRACT

In The Race Card (2001) Tali Mendelberg argues that campaigns, given the prevalence and strength of the norm of racial equality, use implicit racial appeals as a method to mobilize white voters. Since then, many scholars have tested Mendelberg’s theory concerning the impact of exposure to these messages with varied results (for review see Stephens-Dougan 2021). While these scholars have expanded our knowledge of the influence of racial appeals, few have examined whether the implicit or explicit messages that Mendelberg discovers are actually seen in modern presidential campaigns. To fill this gap, we leveraged the Wesleyan Media Project’s database of Presidential ads and systematically hand-code the population of presidential television ads from 2012 to 2020 for their usage of implicit or explicit racial appeals. We find that while implicit racial messages can be found in every presidential campaign since 2012 they make up a smaller proportion of a campaign’s total advertisement strategy. These implicit messages are also found with less frequency over time as campaigns diversified and specified their ads to appeal to specific constituencies instead of a one size fits all approach. The declining use of implicit racial appeals by these campaigns leads to questions regarding the modern utility and applicability of Mendelberg’s theory of implicit-explicit racial appeals and whether these appeals still mobilize white voters in the ways that they did over thirty-five years ago.

RELATED ABSTRACTS