When do candidates court voters whose ethnic backgrounds differ from their own? How do they go about it? And why do their efforts succeed or fail? Loren Collingwood’s Campaigning in a Racially Diversifying America tackles these questions with new data and a fresh perspective. Focusing on white candidates’ efforts to win Black and Latino support, his theory of “cross-racial mobilization” (CRM) builds on research that finds candidate co-ethnicity cues attentiveness to group interests. Collingwood argues that white candidates can approximate this heuristic when they reach across group lines. But to do so they must navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of white backlash and cultural inauthenticity. The course Collingwood charts will surely stimulate fruitful engagement between those who study US campaigns and those who run them.

Collingwood models investment in CRM as a trade-off between appealing to minority voters and alienating racially hostile whites who resent these overtures. Overt CRM in competitive elections therefore increases with the size and enfranchisement of minority constituencies and decreases with the prevalence of prejudice. Where racism and minority group sizes are both high, campaigns use “covert” CRM tactics. In short, white candidates deploy CRM in racially diverse settings because that is where the minority voters are.

Importantly, CRM is defined as a particular political style and set of tactics marked by appeals to politicized group consciousness: “referring to, or cultivating, cultural-based ideas and activities” (“outreach”) and articulating policy positions “favored by a specific racial or ethnic group” (“policy-based”). Initially, these policies are said to include “comprehensive immigration reform, education reform, community services, or job-growth and economic-development programs” (p. 22), most of which minority voters and white racists could agree on. But the measurement of policy-based CRM in the book’s empirical studies brings the concept into focus: it means opposing segregation in one study (p. 59) and liberal stances on immigration, U.S.-Mexico relations, and bilingualism in two others (pp. 84, 112–15). Sure enough, the criterion for a policy’s CRM-relevance shifts subtly at that point from one Latinos favor to one that “disproportionately affects Latinos” (p. 115).

The unstated, and crucial, assumption in Professor Collingwood’s model is that CRM, so defined, is the most efficient strategy for winning minority votes. Save a passing allusion to candidates’ emphasis on “more universalist policies” instead of “specific ethnic issues,” the alternatives are not spelled out (p. 84). Nor is there discussion of budget constraints that would force rational campaigns to weigh opportunity costs. But real campaigns do have limited time and money and will therefore assess CRM’s efficiency relative to alternative strategies. Where alternatives, such as class or partisan appeals, garner as many votes as CRM at less cost, candidates will eschew CRM, even if minority voters are numerous and racists scarce.

So, do minority voters prefer CRM? Most Latino voters say they care more about economic issues than immigration. In some cases, majorities of Latino voters oppose policies included in Collingwood’s CRM scales. E-Verify is a case in point. According to a 2013 Pew poll, more than 60% of Latinos supported requiring business owners to check employees’ immigration status. But candidate opposition to E-Verify and employer sanctions counts positively toward policy-based CRM. On this and other immigration and multiculturalism policies such as sanctuary cities, Latino voters widely disagree with elites and activists who claim to speak on their behalf. Whose preferences and priorities does Latino-targeted CRM reflect? Notably, a candidate notches a CRM point if she “speaks nicely about La Raza Unida or other Latino organizations” (p. 107).

Survey evidence that Collingwood marshals to demonstrate that Latino voters demand CRM in fact suggests that many do not. When asked their likelihood of voting for an “Anglo” candidate who holds various liberal positions on immigration, speaks Spanish, has Latino family, and hires Latinos (Table 5.1)—each presented in isolation—Latino voters consistently average above the scale midpoint (neither likely nor unlikely). Collingwood interprets this to mean that CRM works. Setting aside acquiescence bias, the fact that most of these attributes cue partisanship and ideology, and given the lack of comparison to alternative mobilization strategies, what the results actually show is that Latino voters’ ethnic consciousness and feelings about immigration are as varied as one would expect in a diverse pan-ethnic group comprising individuals with different backgrounds and notions of the good life. Average responses are all below “somewhat likely,” and multivariate analyses show enormous variation by partisanship, ideology, national origin, linked fate, and generation. This undermines the book’s equation of “group characteristics” with group size and its claim that CRM is in general the most effective way to win Latino votes.

Another impediment to CRM is that many white candidates are bad at it. Culturally “incompetent” CRM reeks of “inauthenticity.” If candidates are self-aware, the maladroit will avoid CRM even where minority groups are large. Some, evidently, are not. Hillary Clinton’s self-styling as “abuela” in 2016 serves as Collingwood’s recurring example. Readers could be forgiven for thinking this an inconsequential gaffe. After all, Clinton earned strong support among Latino voters in the 2016 primary against the man Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez later dubbed “Tio Bernie.” Tio Bernie himself takes heat for cultural incompetence, a failing he must have rectified by 2020. Having acquired no known Hispanic family members and learned no Spanish, he may have heeded Collingwood’s advice to hire Latino campaign staff and consultants (pp. 19, 40). There is no evidence in the book that political consultants of any race, color, or creed are worth hiring. But without budget constraints, candidates in Professor Collingwood’s model have little to lose.

What, then, of the evidence concerning CRM’s prevalence and success? To illustrate covert CRM, chapter 2 recounts Florida senator Claude Pepper’s coordination with the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) Operation Dixie during an infamous 1950 primary against race- and red-baiting Donald Smathers. But as labor historian Robert Zieger writes, Operation Dixie focused on class consciousness rather than racial justice. The CIO’s Southern PAC was the prime mover, not the Pepper campaign; if Pepper donated to the CIO, the CIO also donated thousands to Pepper. Finally, the initiative was in no meaningful sense covert. The Smathers campaign bombarded voters with pictures of Blacks lined up to register. Pepper lost badly.

The rest of chapter 2 reminds us that hard-nosed segregationists were most prevalent in the “Black Belt.” Especially post–Voting Rights Act, this may conform to Collingwood’s model (racism dampens CRM) or contradict it (minority voters increase CRM). Covert CRM is not considered. Black registration and candidate racial moderation both increased sharply in the South between 1940 and 1970 (Fig. 2.15). But so did white opposition to segregation, so the causal dynamics are opaque.

Chapters 3 turns the focus to Latino-targeted CRM in Texas statewide races over time. The state’s Latino population increased slowly until around 1970 and rapidly thereafter. White hostility, as Collingwood measures it, also declined steadily between 1948 and 2010. This measure—the average of Texas representatives’ second-dimension DW Nominate scores— doubtless conflates the dimensionality of roll-call voting with change in racial attitudes. More importantly, a cursory look at Figure 3.5 reveals a striking anomaly that receives no mention: CRM growth flattens by the late 1970s, almost precisely the point at which Latino population growth takes off. Curiously, Latino group size is left out of the multivariate analysis of CRM (p. 94).

Support for CRM’s effectiveness in Texas comes from a matching analysis finding that Spanish-language radio ads boosted Eisenhower’s 1956 county vote share by four points. Counties are matched on Latino population and Eisenhower’s 1952 vote share. However, it is unknown whether these counties differed in other ways, whether vote share increases reflected Latino turnout or support, and whether treated counties received other interventions (p. 103).

Multivariate analyses of 2010–12 Senate races provide more up-to-date evidence on Latino-targeted CRM in chapter 4. These models do include states’ citizen voting-age Latino population share and a more credible measure of white hostility: a survey-based index of opposition to illegal immigration. Policy-based and outreach CRM both correlate positively with Latino population. Policy-based CRM, but not outreach, correlates negatively with white hostility. So, candidates tend to align with voters’ preferences on immigration, but cultural appeals are undeterred by anti-immigrant sentiment. It is hard to know what to make of the association between Latino group size and policy-based CRM, because the models include no control for citizen ideology or any other demographic variable. CRM correlates negatively with Republicans’ vote share but significantly more positively with Democrats’ vote share than Republicans’. Nonetheless, CRM appears insignificantly associated with Democrats’ vote share (pp. 125–28). One wonders, in any case, why Collingwood anticipates a net positive relationship among Democrats between CRM and vote share, because his theory implies CRM is helpful in some contexts and harmful in others.

Among Collingwood’s most important contributions is an implicit critique of Robert Dahl’s classical formulation of ethnic politics in Who Governs—a theory that also highlights cross-ethnic mobilization as an electoral imperative and driver of political integration. Collingwood’s depiction of ethnic politics imputes to minority voters above all a desire for cultural and racial recognition. If politicians who invest in CRM consequently reinforce politicized racial identity, ethnic politics is likely self-reinforcing. Dahl instead regarded the roots of ethnic politics as a temporary convergence of class interests and ethnic consciousness. Ethnic voters wanted, and were promised, equal opportunity, not enduring group-based recognition or rights. Because successful ethnic politics fostered assimilation, it was ultimately self-extinguishing. Future research might benefit from grappling with these older ideas. In the meantime, Campaigning in a Racially Diversifying America demonstrates that the study of race and ethnicity in American campaigns remains as relevant as ever.