“The age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.” This was the central claim of a widely read New York Times op-ed by Columbia University’s Mark Lilla published just after the 2016 presidential election. For Lilla, Trump’s victory was caused in no small part by the Clinton campaign’s “slip[ping] into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop.” These identitarian appeals, he counseled, drove the proverbial “white working class” straight into Trump’s waiting arms. Lilla insisted, “If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention them all. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded.” He called for a “post-identity liberalism” focused on a colorblind civic nationalism that would invite, rather than expel, white voters from the Democratic Party.

Christopher Stout developed The Case for Identity Politics in the aftermath of the 2016 election. In many ways the book is a direct response to the contention of Lilla and other liberal commentators that Democratic candidates should eschew explicit attention to racial identity and inequality in their campaigns and race-specific policies in their platforms. This strategy of “deracialization,” Stout explains, gained currency in Democratic Party discussions in the mid-1970s in the wake of a memo authored by political scientist Charles Hamilton and commissioned by the party. Hamilton contended that with the civil rights movement in retreat and the GOP’s efforts to recruit white voters through racialized appeals, Democratic candidates should emphasize colorblind, universalist issues including full employment and national health care that would benefit Black communities without amplifying the claim that the party had “abandoned” white voters.

Both the scholarly literature and media commentators cite several examples of such a deracialization strategy in action: the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama; the “Black Tuesday” election in November 1989 that saw Black candidates for mayor win in New York City, Seattle, and Durham, North Carolina, as well as Douglas Wilder’s election as governor of Virginia; and Cory Booker’s 2012 campaign for the US Senate, among others. Implicit in this assumption, though underexplored in the literature, is that white voters would have little self-interest in policy issues like affirmative action, welfare, and criminal justice reform that have been historically racialized as “Black concerns” and therefore would reject candidates who associated themselves with such priorities.

Stout is not altogether opposed to that argument in purely pragmatic terms and accepts that a deracialized campaign strategy may sometimes be effective. Yet he instead seeks to understand “when a racialized approach is most effective” and the conditions under which racialized appeals might increase a candidate’s electability.

Broadly, Stout’s study rejects the simplistic and reductionist arguments made by the likes of Lilla. He holds that “under the right conditions, appeals to underrepresented groups can boost political organizations’ chances of success by engaging racial/ethnic minorities and mobilizing sympathetic whites” (p. 19) The crux of the empirical analysis across three early chapters finds that the increased partisanship and polarization of white voters undermine the assumption that a singular and undifferentiated bloc of white swing voters must be addressed through a deracialized campaign framework. He finds that national polling data suggest that white voters nationally do not necessarily defect from the Democratic Party at greater numbers in the wake of racially progressive appeals or policy advocacy by Democratic candidates and elected officials, a claim reinforced by an online field experiment.

The second half of the book argues that the last decade of racial violence and crisis has made Black and Latino voters more supportive of racially progressive candidates and policies; this is also derived from extant polling data and experimental analysis. Stout holds that measures of linked fate have increased among both African Americans and Latinos during this period, and with some variation across context, they are more likely to be mobilized now by race-specific appeals and candidates than in the past. These findings, he concludes, suggest that in the ongoing debate in Democratic circles between focusing on swing voters and mobilizing partisans, the latter strategy will usually be more effective, both because increased partisanship has left fewer white voters to be persuaded and because a critical mass of multiracial voters can be activated by race-conscious appeals. Stout cites Doug Jones’s victory over Judge Roy Moore in the December 2017 runoff for a Senate seat in Alabama as the clearest evidence of this argument (p. 218).

The outcome of the 2020 general election endorses many of Stout’s arguments even as it undermines others. On the one hand, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers in May 2020, polls found that white support for Black Lives Matter and for government action to address racial discrimination increased to historic levels. In several key states, including Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Biden won large margins among voters of color and limited Trump’s margins among white voters, in spite of Trump’s efforts to organize them through racially charged appeals to law and order and militarized immigration enforcement. On the other hand, Trump significantly increased his margins among Latino voters not only in Texas and South Florida but also in many solidly Democratic cities nationally. Trump’s gains among Black voters were smaller but still significant.

In some ways, these mixed outcomes may underscore Stout’s argument that the appeal of deracialization is always dependent on context. But the question here is not about prognostication or hard-and-fast rules. Instead, the challenge posed by what the limits of the 2020 election might reveal about the underlying methodological approaches and assumptions used in this book, and the broader behavioralist paradigm on which it draws, is to understand the complex and contradictory terrain of contemporary racial politics. The survey and experimental measures used by Stout, which are standard in much of the related literature, draw principally on feeling thermometer questions, constructs about resentment and antipathy, and, for voters of color, measures of linked fate. These measures draw broadly from concepts in mid-twentieth-century social psychology that have been integrated with public choice frameworks from the same period, both of which privilege the individual as the central unit of analysis in an electoral marketplace. Simple measures of aversion or regard may have some utility in providing a snapshot of short-term political developments (e.g., the results of a single electoral cycle). But such sentiments are always themselves the temporal outcomes of complex and ongoing political processes. To read them as causal forces alone that explain political behavior is to bracket off many of the forces that constitute political life as a whole.

In addition, the understanding of racialization/deracialization as a binary that is either present or absent misses the ways that racial meaning, power, and context structure and constitute all forms of political discourse and interpretation in the United States. To suggest, for example, that Bill Clinton ran “deracialized” campaigns in 1992 and 1996 would miss all the ways that he deployed unmistakably racialized tropes and appeals around welfare, crime, affirmative action, immigration, and other issues in his effort to mobilize discourses of white victimhood, nativism, and anti-Blackness to his advantage. Similarly, to read Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign as simply and uniformly “racialized” misses the complex terrain on which her candidacy, platform, and political career were articulated to whiteness.

These limitations are accentuated in Stout’s work because the historical narratives and forces in which they are interpreted are quite circumscribed. Stout treats the Obama presidency as a kind of watershed moment that abruptly made race salient again to US political culture, thrusting issues “which had been swept under the rug during the pre-Obama years” (p. 39) back into the open. Although there are surely distinct dimensions to Obama’s rise and the subsequent emergence of the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter, and other formations, those only make sense in a much longer trajectory of racial formation. The very question of how “Black interests” get represented to the white populace has its roots in slavery and Reconstruction and the many decades of contestations over the possibilities of building a multiracial democracy that followed. But absent this history (and there are almost no scholarly references to such work in this volume) we are left only with an inventory of individual preferences, which seem to emerge, sui generis, absent any other forces, interests, or past.

Admittedly, this leaves us at somewhat of an impasse. Behavioralists will recognize in this book all the familiar conventions, methods, and sources that hold authority in this literature: the use of ANES data, field experiments, linked fate constructs, regression analyses, and an inquiry into how voters/consumers punish or reward candidates/sellers. The methods and data are carefully explained and executed, and the findings are appropriately warranted. The arguments and conclusions are sound.

But for readers who have questions about larger political processes, contexts, and formations, many questions will remain. The Case for Identity Politics persuasively makes the case that Mark Lilla got it wrong and that a return to the halcyon days of the Democratic Leadership Council is unwarranted. But to understand the many complexities and uncertainties that have always marked the politics of race in the United States, a good deal more is necessary.