Post-Racial or Most-Racial?
Chicago Studies in American Politics
A SERIES EDITED BY BENJAMIN I. PAGE, SUSAN HERBST, LAWRENCE R. JACOBS, AND ADAM J. BERINSKY
Also in the series:
UNDERSTANDING THE POLITICS OF RESENTMENT by Katherine J. Cramer
LEGISLATING IN THE DARK: INFORMATION AND POWER IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES by James M. Curry
WHY WASHINGTON WONT WORK: POLARIZATION, POLITICAL TRUST, AND THE GOVERNING CRISIS by Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph
WHO GOVERNS? PRESIDENTS, PUBLIC OPINION, AND MANIPULATION by James N. Druckman and Lawrence R. Jacobs
TRAPPED IN AMERICAS SAFETY NET: ONE FAMILYS STRUGGLE by Andrea Louise Campbell
ARRESTING CITIZENSHIP: THE DEMOCRATIC CONSEQUENCES OF AMERICAN CRIME CONTROL by Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver
HOW THE STATES SHAPED THE NATION: AMERICAN ELECTORAL INSTITUTIONS AND VOTER TURNOUT, 19202000 by Melanie Jean Springer
THE AMERICAN WARFARE STATE: THE DOMESTIC POLITICS OF MILITARY SPENDING by Rebecca U. Thorpe
CHANGING MINDS OR CHANGING CHANNELS? PARTISAN NEWS IN AN AGE OF CHOICE by Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson
TRADING DEMOCRACY FOR JUSTICE: CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS AND THE DECLINE OF NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICAL PARTICIPATION by Traci Burch
WHITE-COLLAR GOVERNMENT: THE HIDDEN ROLE OF CLASS IN ECONOMIC POLICY MAKING by Nicholas Carnes
HOW PARTISAN MEDIA POLARIZE AMERICA by Matthew Levendusky
Additional series titles follow index
Post-Racial or Most-Racial?
Race and Politics in the Obama Era
MICHAEL TESLER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
MICHAEL TESLER is assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Obamas Race, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN -13: 978-0-226-35296-1 (cloth)
ISBN -13: 978-0-226-35301-2 (paper)
ISBN -13: 978-0-226-35315-9 (e-book)
DOI : 10.7208/chicago/9780226353159.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tesler, Michael, author.
Post-racial or most-racial? : race and politics in the Obama era / Michael Tesler.
pages cm (Chicago studies in American politics)
ISBN 978-0-226-35296-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) ISBN 978-0-226-35301-2 (papererback : alkaline paper) ISBN 978-0-226-35315-9 (e-book) 1. United StatesRace relationsPolitical aspects. 2. United StatesPolitics and government2009 3. Race awarenessUnited States. 4. Ethnic attitudesUnited States. 5. Obama, Barack. I. Title. II. Series: Chicago studies in American politics.
E 184. A 1 T 465 2016
305.80097309'0512dc23
2015027993
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
TO MARY, BEST FRIENDS FOREVER
Contents
Donald Kinder begins Divided by Color by asking, When do books begin? That book, he wrote, got its start, perhaps in the fall of 1969 when [he] wandered into graduate school and had the good fortune to meet up with David Sears. It so happens that the book youre now reading, which owes an unquantifiable amount to Divided by Color, has a remarkably similar origin. It began in the fall of 2006, when I stumbled into graduate school and had the good fortune to meet up with David Sears. I wasnt quite sure what I was doing those first few weeks at UCLA, but I knew that his research on race and politics was fascinating. So, pretty soon I began sending Sears results to try to impress him. Before I knew it, he had turned those findings into a lucid outline for a volume on racial attitudes and the 2008 election. The upshot was our 2010 book, Obamas Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America. David very graciously encouraged me to establish a place for myself in the discipline by doing this follow-up project on my own. But it goes without saying that this book was much harder to write and much less fun to work on without him. And, hopefully, David Searss immense influence can still be found on just about every page.
I also owe enormous debts to my other advisors at UCLA. Lynn Vavreck, in particular, has done more for me than any advisee could possibly ask for. In fact, this book simply would not exist without Lynns extraordinary mentorship, encouragement, and generosity. It is difficult to put into words, then, just how grateful I am to her. Its also hard to imagine graduate school without John Zaller. I learned a ton from him, and those teachings are never far from my mind. My most sincere appreciation goes to Jim DeNardo, as well, for introducing me to quantitative research methods and for being the best teacher I have ever had.
My home departments, first at Brown University and then at UC Irvine, provided similarly supportive environments to work on the book as an assistant professor after graduate school. In particular, I thank Brown for its Solomon Research Award in financial support of this project, and my former department chair at UC Irvine, Keith Topper, for providing me with a flexible teaching schedule while I put the finishing touches on the manuscript.
I received terrific feedback on various parts of the project presented at conferences and invited talks at the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, the International Society of Political Psychology, the West Coast Experiments Conference, Brown University, Harvard, Loyola University of Chicago, MIT, Ohio State, Vanderbilt, University of Arizona, UC Irvine, UCLA, and Washington University in St. Louis. Among others, I thank Matt Atkinson, Matt Baretto, Paul Beck, Matt Beckmann, Graeme Boushey, Jim DeNardo, Darin Dewitt, Ryan Enos, Paul Goren, Zoltan Hajnal, Marc Hetherington, Leonnie Huddy, Vince Hutchings, Shanto Iyengar, Ozan Kalkan, Cindy Kam, Don Kinder, Des King, Rose McDermott, Mary McThomas, Susan Moffitt, Jacob Montgomery, Jim Morone, Chris Parker, Spencer Piston, Lynn Sanders, Lynn Vavreck, and John Zaller for the very helpful comments they provided during those visits and elsewhere. Im also especially indebted to Adam Berinsky and David Sears for reading early versions of the manuscript and for helping reorganize the findings into a more coherent final product.
This book uses a wide array of survey data to test its hypotheses. I therefore express my sincerest gratitude to the National Science Foundation for its general funding of benchmark surveys like the American National Election Study and the General Social Survey, and for its particular funding (SES-0968830 and SES-1023942) of three original panel studies that re-interviewed three thousand respondents in 2009, 2011, and 2012, who had previously been surveyed during the 2008 campaign. I also thank Doug Rivers, Stephen Ansolabehere, Lynn Vavreck, Samantha Luks, and the folks at YouGov for their work in making massive political surveys affordable and accessible for academic research. Lynn Vavreck, Gary Jacobson, Adam Berinsky, and Christopher Warshaw deserve thanks, as well, for their willingness to share data.
Some of the analyses in chapters Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race, and in Political Psychology (2015: Advances in Political Psychology Supplement) under the title, The Conditions Ripe for Racial Spillover Effects. I am grateful to the publisher of both journals, Wiley Blackwell, for their permission to reprint this material in the book.
