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Christopher T. Stout

Following the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016, many prominent scholars and political pundits argued that a successful Democratic Party in the future must abandon identity politics. While these calls for Democrats to distance themselves from such strategies have received much attention, there is scant academic work that empirically tests whether nonracial campaigns provide an advantage to Democrats today. As Christopher Stout explains, those who argue for deracialized appeals to voters may not be considering how several high-profile police shootings and acquittals, increasing evidence of growing racial health and economic disparities, retrenchments on voting rights, and the growth of racial hate groups have made race a more salient issue now than in the recent past. Moreover, they fail to account for how demographic changes in the United States have made racial and ethnic minorities a more influential voting bloc.

The Case for Identity Politics finds that racial appeals are an effective form of outreach for Democratic candidates and enhance, rather than detract from, their electability in our current political climate.

University of Virginia Press

Race, Ethnicity, and Politics

The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals

Benjamin Gonzalez O'Brien

Handcuffs and Chain Link enters the immigration debate by addressing one of its most controversial aspects: the criminalization both of extralegal immigration to the United States and of immigrants themselves in popular and political discourse. Looking at the factors that led up to criminalization, Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien points to the alternative approach of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and how its ultimate demise served to negatively reinforce the fictitious association of extralegal immigrants with criminality.

Crucial to Gonzalez O’Brien’s account thus is the concept of the critical policy failure—a piece of legislation that attempts a radically different approach to a major issue but has shortcomings that ultimately further entrench the approach it was designed to supplant. The IRCA was just such a piece of legislation. It highlighted the contributions of the undocumented and offered amnesty to some while attempting to stem the flow of extralegal immigration by holding employers accountable for hiring the undocumented. The failure of this effort at decriminalization prompted a return to criminalization with a vengeance, leading to the stalemate on immigration policy that persists to this day.

Handcuffs and Chain Link: Criminalizing the Undocumented in America

Bringing Race Back In empirically investigates whether "post-racial" campaign strategies, which are becoming increasingly common, improve black candidates’ ability to mobilize and attract voters of all races and ethnicities. In contrast to existing studies, this analysis demonstrates that black candidates who make positive racial appeals (for example, racial appeals that indicate that the candidate will either advance black policy interests or highlight the candidate’s connection to the black community without attacking outside political players) not only perform better among blacks; they also improve their standing among Latino voters. Moreover, these appeals do not diminish white voter support. This finding counters conventional wisdom, which suggests that black candidates can succeed in majority white settings only if they distance themselves from the black electorate.

Following President Barack Obama’s 2008 success, both scholars and the popular media began examining how black candidates address race and racial issues in their campaigns, and scholars and journalists are now exploring whether black voters rally around black candidates who fail to discuss racial issues or who distance themselves from the black community. Bringing Race Back In addresses these issues by using a wide variety of data sources and a number of sophisticated statistical techniques. The study utilizes content analysis of over two thousand newspaper articles on over thirty presidential, U.S. Senate, and gubernatorial elections with African American candidates, in combination with quantitative analysis of state exit polls and U.S. Census voter surveys. In addition to its significant contribution to the scholarship on American politics, African American studies, campaigns and elections, and public opinion, the book also provides valuable insight for political practitioners who want to better understand how deracialized campaigns influence the electability of black candidates in the age of Obama.

Bringing Race Back In: Black Politicians, Deracialization, and Voting Behavior in the Age of Obama