Past studies found that White Americans tend to rate Black candidates lower than White candidates on personal attributes such as “hardworking” and “intelligent,” and that they prefer light-skinned Black candidates over darker-skinned ones. White candidates have crafted political campaigns to take advantage of racial prejudices, and minority candidates have found it difficult to win in racialized campaigns. Yet since the last major study of racial politics was conducted (refer to Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card, 2001), many more minority candidates have won elections. In 2008, in fact, Americans elected their first African American president. Are race-card politics now a relic of the past? In Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. Political Campaigns, Charlton D. McIlwain and Stephen M. Caliendo show through a study of campaign ads in US Senate and House races from 1970 to 2006 that it is not.

The two scholars, one in communication studies and the other in political science, turn a clinical eye toward the politics of race in American elections. By clinical I mean that not only do they provide a meticulous definition of what constitutes a racialized campaign, they also identify the elements that can enhance the effectiveness of such campaigns. They argue that racial ads involve the use of (1) racial stereotypes, (2) racial imagery, (3) racially-coded language, (4) race-based public policy, and (5) audiences, and they find that states having large White populations had campaigns that were the most racialized.

Still they report that a new sensibility about racial norms in the American public exists. Voters generally reject candidates who make the race appeal. In fact, race-based campaigning by White candidates is considered especially repugnant by voters. In experiments involving approximately 250 subjects, Whites and Blacks watched several ads from a fictitious Black/White election contest. The subjects were randomly-selected adults who had agreed to participate in an Internet-based survey sponsored by the research group TESS (refer to www.tessexperiments.org). The Black candidate's ad contrasted himself against his White opponent as being on the “right” side of the education policy issue, stating that he favors school choice. The White candidate's ad countered that his Black opponent went to “outside” schools. A third ad for the White candidate was deliberately more racial, as the schools are shown, one nice-looking and White, and the other, run-down and Black. Whites liked the Black candidate the best in these experiments by a large margin. Furthermore, in the multivariate analysis, the measure of the White subjects' support for symbolic racism failed to predict their vote choice. Instead, voters penalized candidates whom they believed had used race in the campaign. Thus today's White voters now disfavor White candidates who use their campaigns to imply something negative about US minorities. They also dislike Black candidates who appear to focus their campaigns on race.

The experiments turn up other new discoveries. In Black-only election contests, Black subjects also rejected Black candidates making racial appeals for their votes as “authentic” Black representatives. This is important information for Black politics scholars who generally attribute the rise in “de-racialized” campaigning by Blacks as a strategic response to White, not Black, voters. Interestingly, White subjects liked the Black candidate making a Black authenticity pitch best. These experimental results, the authors write, suggest that we are perhaps in a new era, reflecting a declining prohibition against the discussion of race among Whites. However, this finding turned up only in the Black-only contests. Because most White voters don't often face a choice between two Black candidates for the US Congress, these findings can be overstated. Most White Americans are represented by Whites in the US Congress and, thus, for most, elections typically turn on the choice between two White candidates. Whites still punish Black candidates whom they feel made race appeals in hypothetical Black/White contests. Thus, Black candidates still must tread very carefully around issues of race in their campaigns against Whites, even in this new era.

A major shortcoming of their study is that McIlwain and Caliendo limited their focus to the 765 ads archived for biracial or minority-only election contests. Black/White contests (61 percent) represented the majority of the ads they examined, followed by Latino/White (21%), and Asian/White (5 percent) contests. There were also some ads from Black-only and Latino/Black contests. However, how often are race appeals made in White-only contests? Are race appeals in White-only contests found more frequently in heavily-White districts, or in areas where minorities are not yet sufficiently mobilized? Oklahoma's vote in the 2010 elections banning the use of Sharia Law in state courts comes to mind. Furthermore, when increasing numbers of Latinos enter the field as candidates, such as in California, does the propensity to racialize immigration policy by non-Latino candidates diminish? After promising to be “tough as nails” against illegal immigration in the 2010 gubernatorial primary election, California's Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman downplayed this stance, stressing her opposition to Arizona's new anti-immigration law. The political standing of minority groups could be an important contextual variable for this study and studies like it.

The study's findings also could have been extended into other areas of contention. Can an expansion in minority power change the political climate for minorities? McIlwain and Caliendo contend that the racial animosity and resentment expressed in the political system are deeply rooted in subconscious beliefs about minority groups, and thus are difficult to erase. However, White candidates may change how race and minority groups are discussed in regions where minority power has expanded. The minority politics field has entered into a new debate about the meaning of the elections of historically-disadvantaged groups, especially since Obama's election. There are two points of view. Some see positive changes in Whites' racial attitudes due to the elections of minority candidates, while others do not (see e.g., Vincent Hutchings, “Change or More of the Same? Evaluating Racial Attitudes in the Obama Era,” Public Opinion Quarterly 73 (2009): 917–942, and see also Zoltan Hajnal, Changing White Attitudes toward Black Political Leadership, 2007). Because minority officeholders probably cannot expect to win national office by castigating the system, the elections of minorities may not alter majority beliefs that hold minorities largely responsible for group inequality.

Still, Whites no longer reflexively reject minority candidates running for public office. Also, in their analysis, the authors of Race Appeal find that Whites liked minority candidates who emphasized their backgrounds of having overcome disadvantages as people of color. Mel Martinez, a Cuban American elected to the US Senate in 2004, told a story of “growing up as a racial minority in a foster family but working hard to pull himself up” (p. 174). McIlwain and Caliendo contend that minority candidates emphasizing their racial background must tell a story that is counter-stereotypical. Obama did this, too, but, as they point out, also used some racial stereotypes against Blacks. Thus, in Texas on the campaign trail, referencing a fried chicken restaurant chain called Popeyes, Obama told supporters, “‘Y'all have Popeyes out in Beaumont? I know some of y'all you got that cold Popeyes out for breakfast. I know … You can't do that. Children have to have proper nutrition. That affects also how they study, how they learn in school’” (p. 189). Obama's campaign statement suggests that the unhealthy diets of Blacks are to blame for poor educational outcomes, not segregation and unequal school financing systems. McIlwain and Caliendo's empirical findings present a challenge to academics and journalists. The authors themselves state that they had difficulty summing up, writing, “it is sometimes hard to put our finger on exactly what is happening” (p. 218). Clearly, Americans today don't like candidates who make racist or racial appeals. Voters appear ready to punish such candidates–if they consider these racial appeals as adding to existing social tensions. Yet in major contests for the US Congress, as McIlwain and Caliendo show in their case study chapters, candidates continue to use race appeals against minority candidates. Thus, the changes in American voting behavior concerning race-oriented campaigns that they document may be superficial. The authors put a great deal of work into their book and, my criticisms aside, they have provided a strong and lasting piece of research. Race Appeal importantly illuminates major areas of contention, chiefly whether America is post-racial or not. And their response to the post-racial question is a deeply probative “yes and no,” because voters don't like racial appeals, yet politicians continue to make them.