Race relations have influenced American politics and society since the founding of the North American colonies in the seventeenth century, and they continue to be a moral and political concern in the dynamics of electoral politics in the twenty-first century. Race has been used as both a carrot and a stick, with most major candidates today eager to promise new forms of equality and harmony beneficial to all races on the one hand (the carrot), and the occasional instance of race bashing and scare tactics (the stick), sometimes overt, other times subtle, employed by more ruthless candidates in elections of the past.
An early example of the latter can be seen in the politics of Reconstruction, with mostly southern Democrats using the race card to evoke fears of a carpetbag South dominated by greedy Republicans and their new political lackeys, the recently freed slaves. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, African American voters identified with the GOP, the Party of Lincoln, while Democrats opposed efforts to incorporate the black population fully into the democratic process. This situation remained until the realignment of the 1930s, which produced the Roosevelt Coalition, uniting more black voters with the Democratic Party, although some African Americans remained loyal to the GOP into the early 1960s. In 1932 just over 70 percent of African Americans who could vote supported Democratic candidate Franklin Roosevelt; by 1956 the number of African American voters supporting Democrat Adlai Stevenson dropped to around 60 percent. However, the African American support for Senator John Kennedy in the 1960 general election reached again to approximately 70 percent, after which it rocketed to nearly 95 percent for incumbent president Lyndon Johnson in 1964, due largely to the president’s critical role in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Democratic Party was firmly established as the principal party of choice for African Americans, while the Republican Party sustains a small, loyal, conservative African American contingent.
Hispanic voters have also historically been associated with the Democratic Party, but not universally. In California and much of the Southwest, as well as the urban Northeast, the Hispanic/Latino vote has been predominantly supportive of Democrats. However, in the Sunbelt states of Florida and Texas, Spanish-speaking voters have inclined toward the GOP in increasing numbers. As the Hispanic population expands, surpassing African Americans as the nation’s largest racial minority, the electoral muscle and divided loyalties of the Hispanic vote will become increasingly critical to the outcome of general elections and increasingly desired by major candidates.
Other racial minorities, such as Asian Americans, Arab Americans, and Native Americans, have historically attracted far less electoral attention than the two larger minority groups. During his 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Robert Kennedy, to the frustration of his campaign handlers, went out of his way to visit Native American reservations as well as spending time with migrant workers, mostly Hispanic, during his fated California primary campaign. Sen. Kennedy’s actions, however, were decidedly unusual then, and in many ways they continue to be so. However, as the United States continues to diversify into an increasingly heterogeneous society, these groups should continue to grow in political clout and social influence in the near future.
While race has become less volatile as an issue since the civil rights victories of the 1960s, racial division, suspicion, and bigotry continues to corrupt the undercurrent of political culture. Campaigns in the late twentieth century, in spite of a more general enlightenment regarding race compared to the previous century, could, through implication or inference, cynically play the race card. The “welfare queen” imagery spun by the Reagan campaign led many to draw a racially charged inference singling out impoverished, urban African Americans, and the Willie Horton ad produced by the elder Bush’s campaign was perceived as thinly veiled race baiting. Recently, and perhaps as an attempt to correct the impolitic racial tactics of the 1980s, the Republican Party has attempted to overhaul its homogeneous reputation by projecting a more diverse image. The 2000 GOP national convention was noticeably conscious of diversity, with politicians of various races and ethnic backgrounds brought on stage to tout the raised consciousness of the Party of Lincoln.
The Campaigns of 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 followed the trends of the previous decades—in each new election, most minority groups voted in increasing numbers for the Democratic Party. The one anomaly of this trend occurred with Latino voters in 2004. In this election, Republican candidate George W. Bush received approximately 40 percent of the Latino vote, mostly due to his extensive voter-outreach efforts with this community, as well as his more moderate position on immigration issues. His successor in the Campaign of 2008, John McCain, was not able to sustain this level of Latino support, despite McCain’s long history of moderation on immigration. A likely factor in McCain’s poor showing among Latinos was the anti-immigration rhetoric that marked much of the Republican primary, particularly from the campaign of hopeful Tom Tancredo. McCain’s opponents in the primary helped to define the Republican Party label for many Latinos and thwarted his efforts to build upon Bush’s success with this community.
McCain’s Democratic rival Barack Obama, on the other hand, advocated a path to citizenship for undocumented residents and aired several campaign ads (on television and radio) in which he spoke Spanish to his audience. Democratic primary candidates also competed in a debate on Univision, a Spanish-language channel. Republican candidates declined a similar offer to debate.
The Campaign of 2012 was notable for repeating the pattern of racial polarization that has continued to divide the political parties and their supporters. The Republican nominees battled each other during the primary season in an effort to prove that each supported the most restrictive measures on immigration, with the toughest rhetoric being reserved for undocumented Mexican workers in the United States. (Texas governor Rick Perry was a notable exception to this pattern.) Republican hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum explicitly linked African Americans with social welfare programs, subtly implying that the primary beneficiaries of government assistance were not white but the primary funders of government assistance were. Efforts by GOP-controlled legislatures to enact voting reforms that restricted early voting (including Florida’s efforts to limit “Souls to the Polls,” a mobilization drive sponsored by black churches), rollbacks in efforts to re-enfranchise felons, and strict new identification requirements for voters were also viewed as efforts by Republicans to silence the political voices of minority voters. Hispanic voters strongly supported President Obama in the Campaign of 2012 even though Gov. Romney’s proposal for “self-deportation” of undocumented residents seemed to many observers as a softer approach to immigration, especially with regard to Hispanic immigrants, than previous positions by GOP candidates.
Yet the racial divisions that have always permeated American society became still more difficult for presidential candidates to ignore in the Campaign of 2016. After the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teen, by George Zimmerman, an armed white member of a neighborhood watch group, and Zimmerman’s subsequent exoneration by a Florida jury, black activists sought to publicize the unequal treatment of blacks and whites by the American criminal justice system. They focused their attention on the deaths of people of color at the hands of law enforcement officers, using the moniker Black Lives Matter. Polls at the time had demonstrated that views of the Martin-Zimmerman incident were divided by race, with African Americans more sympathetic to Martin and whites more sympathetic to Zimmerman. But between 2014 and 2015, a series of police shootings of unarmed black men, many of them videotaped, challenged whites’ assumptions about how fairly black Americans were being treated at the hands of law enforcement. Their names became familiar to many Americans: Michael Brown (Ferguson), Eric Garner (Staten Island), John Crawford (Dayton), Akai Gurley (Brooklyn), Tamir Rice (Cleveland), Eric Harris (Tulsa), Walter Scott (North Charleston), Freddie Gray (Baltimore), Samuel Dubose (Cincinnati), and other names less familiar (including Sandra Bland in Prairie View, Texas, which was a death in police custody but not a police shooting). Some deaths sparked protests, and even violence. Several viral videos have exposed evident and frequent examples of racism exhibited by white police officers in their encounters with African American citizens. Consequently, Pew finds substantial, stable gaps between blacks and whites regarding confidence in local police and faith in the criminal justice system. Black Lives Matter has been an effective means of publicizing the loss of life and demanding accountability. More broadly, it has become a grassroots movement that has demanded that political candidates respond to questions about how they will solve institutional racism in American society, notoriously disrupting campaign speeches for Democrats Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Bernie Sanders. It is also focusing efforts (albeit at a slower pace) on GOP candidates, who have been notably more critical of the movement.
At the same time, the GOP critique of birthright citizenship that emerged in the 2016 campaign has been viewed by Asian Americans and Latinos as a challenge to their legitimate place in American society. Suggesting that more recent immigrant groups should be subject to different standards for what constitutes citizenship than were previous (primarily northern European) groups reveals a more serious, enduring divide about the value that American society places on the rights and cultural inheritance of those who are less familiar with the practices and experiences shared within the dominant culture.
See also Affirmative Action; Civil Rights Issue; Economic Inequality Issue; Immigration Issue; Jim Crow Laws; Symbolic Racism; Voting Reform Issue; Voting Rights Act of 1965
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Craighill, Peyton M. “Martin Luther King’s Dream Not Realized, Most Say.” Washington Post, August 23, 2011.
Drake, Bruce. “Divide between Blacks and Whites on Police Runs Deep.” Pew Research Center, April 28, 2015. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/28/blacks-whites-police/. Accessed September 6, 2015.
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