What's the Matter with Arkansas? Symbolic Racism and 2008 Presidential Candidate Support
Presidential Studies Quarterly › Vol. 40 Nbr. 2, June 2010
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Summary
The 2008 presidential election presented voters with the nation's first African American presidential candidate. Symbolic racism theory suggests that Obama's presence on the national ticket will activate a range of racial attitudes across the electorate. The authors examine two statewide surveys from Arkansas and Georgia in order to explore the importance of symbolic racism across different campaign contexts. The findings suggest that voting behavior was significantly influenced by symbolic racism. Consequently, the authors extend the symbolic racism literature by demonstrating the effects of these attitudes at the national level and across different campaign environments.
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What's the Matter with Arkansas? Symbolic Racism and 2008 Presidential Candidate Support
The 2008 presidential election was historic in many ways, not only because an African American was the Democratic Party nominee but also because of the surge in Democratic votes across the nation. The Barack Obama candidacy provides the first opportunity for scholars to examine the impact of an African American nominee on the national ticket and the accompanying success of the Democratic Party - even in pat ts of the solidly Republican South. Two days after the 2008 presidential election, the New York Times published a map of "Election Shifts" in its special coverage of postelection analysis. The map showed substantial net Democratic gains in popular vore totals in nearly all 50 states. The Democrats successfully broke up the Republican stronghold in the South by campaigning actively and registering new voters in Southern states such as Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida.
Despite the Democratic surge throughout the country, and despite the existence of targeted campaign efforts in the South, the only areas in which Democrats experienced net losses were in Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Consequently, we chose to examine the effects of the Obama candidacy on candidate support in the two Southern states of Arkansas and Georgia. Despite theit common outcome - a victory for the Republican presidential candidate - these two states were characterized by distinct preelection conditions, creating a unique opportunity to examine the influence of race, and symbolic racism more specifically, in the 2008 presidential election.The 2008 Contest in ArkansasIn 2004, George W Bush received 54.3% of the statewide...See the full content of this document
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