In the past several years, Republican officials and candidates have increasingly levied racially charged accusations to mobilize voters. Debates about what’s called critical race theory roil state legislatures and school board meetings. Sen. Marco Rubio and former president Donald Trump are accusing the Biden administration of racism in its race-sensitive guidelines for using antiviral drugs to treat covid-19. Explicitly racist or otherwise biased messaging will probably show up regularly as the United States approaches the November midterm elections.
Our own and others’ recent scholarship finds that these appeals increase resentment and fear among voters worried about change — and the appeals get them to go to the polls.
But what happens once the candidate has been elected?
Elected officials’ effectiveness rests at least partly on their ability to reach beyond their own supporters as they make policy. But how they campaigned influences whom they can reach. So does campaigning on racism hurt elected officials’ ability to govern?
In a recently published article, we find that Black and liberal White people viewed an elected official as less able to represent their interests after that representative was connected to an explicitly racist statement made during the campaign. That inhibits governing.
How we did our research
We surveyed two national samples of Americans collected between Jan. 31 and Feb. 4, 2019, and May 29 through 31, 2019, using the survey platform Lucid. Both samples were census-matched for age, gender, race, education level, political party and geographic region. For our study, we focused on the 214 Black and 1,805 White respondents in the two samples.
In our survey, we wanted to know how respondents would react to a comment made by Republican candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith during a 2018 Mississippi race for the U.S. Senate. Hyde-Smith was caught on camera praising a colleague by telling her supporters, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Though Democrats and the media criticized her comments, especially given Mississippi’s violent history of racist lynchings, Hyde-Smith refused to apologize.
We randomly assigned respondents to one of two groups. The control group read short biographies of Hyde-Smith and her opponent, Mike Espy, using information taken from each candidate’s campaign website. The other group read the same biographies and then read an excerpt of an article that discussed Hyde-Smith’s “public hanging” comment.
Respondents from both groups were then asked how much each candidate represents their interests. We then disaggregated our sample by race and divided the White sample into those who identified as liberal, moderate and conservative. Overall, we found that ideology was a strong predictor of support for Hyde-Smith among Whites but not for Blacks, which is consistent with what other political science research has found about conservative Blacks’ lack of support for conservative politicians.
Black and liberal White respondents did not think Hyde-Smith represents their interests
Black and liberal White respondents who read the article about Hyde-Smith’s public hanging comments were less likely to believe that Hyde-Smith represents their interests. On average, Black respondents rated her representativeness at eight percentage points lower than those who hadn’t read the article. Liberal White respondents rated her ability to represent them at six percentage points lower than did those who hadn’t read the article. Nothing changed for moderate or conservative Whites.
To see whether this held up in the real world, we examined approval ratings of Hyde-Smith in 2018 and 2020 using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Once Hyde-Smith’s comments had become well known, we found a similar decrease in approval ratings among Black and liberal White respondents in 2020 compared with 2018, before the remarks. Black people were about 7 percent less likely to strongly approve of Hyde-Smith, and White liberals were 6 percent less likely to strongly approve of her in 2020 than they had been two years earlier. We found no such decline in approval among the same groups for Mississippi’s other senator, Roger Wicker.
Though Hyde-Smith was elected to the Senate, her racist comment may have alienated many of her constituents and colleagues, making it more difficult to forge coalitions or build support for her policy agenda.
What lies behind distrust of government and doubts about the 2020 election? White racial bias.
Lessons for governing after the 2021 and 2022 elections
More recently, in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, Republican Glenn Youngkin campaigned in part by promising to bar schools from teaching critical race theory, hoping to get sympathetic voters to the polls. Some pundits credit these appeals with helping Republicans take back the governor’s mansion. But Youngkin has lower approval ratings than his past two predecessors did at this point in their terms and is finding it hard to build relationships across the aisle.
Such racially biased appeals may also worsen political divisions. Recent scholarship finds that when Americans see political parties in racial terms — Republicans as representing Whites and Democrats as representing people of color — citizens dislike supporters of the opposing party much more. Emphasizing this, in other words, is pushing Americans even further apart. As more candidates who make racist appeals are elected, members of Congress will probably find it even more difficult to work together to pass meaningful policy.
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Maneesh Arora (@maneesh_arora) is an assistant professor of political science at Wellesley College.