At the beginning of their book, Donald Kinder and Allison Dale-Riddle include the following quotation from Gary Wills: “Each election year is a revelation—in the way the electorate is consulted, wooed, or baffled; in the way the issues are chosen, presented, or evaded; in the demands and promises made, compromises struck, strains felt tacitly or voiced. The nation at once celebrates and mourns itself” (p. 1).

The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States was indeed a revelation, as Americans sought to understand what it said about the role of race in American politics and life, past, present, and future. These two excellent books offer important social science insights into these questions.

In The End of Race? Kinder and Dale-Riddle offer a thorough overview of the ways in which racial attitudes influenced both the nomination and election of Obama. They begin by constructing what they call “A Theory of Voting With Social Groups in Mind.” According to the authors, voters are relatively uninformed about politics, parties, and candidates, and so they rely on easily available heuristics. Among these heuristics is ethnocentrism, defined as “a deep human predisposition to divide the social world into in-groups and out-groups” (p. 18). Under the right conditions, identification with an in-group or attitudes toward an out-group can influence voters.

The authors explicate this process by first examining the influence of gender and race in the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Obama. They find that while gender attitudes (represented by belief in traditional roles for women) had little influence among Democratic primary voters, racial attitudes (represented by the degree of racial resentment) did have a strong influence. To the extent that Clinton was able to garner support among women, it was overwhelmed by African American support for Obama and opposition to him among racially conservative Democrats.

The impact of ethnocentrism is also evident in general elections. The authors show this first by looking at the 1960 election, where religious beliefs powerfully influenced the voting behavior of both Catholics and Protestants. They undertake a similar analysis of the 2008 general election between Barack Obama and John McCain. They find that African Americans voted overwhelmingly for Obama and that support increased among those who displayed the most identification with their racial group. Among whites, racial resentment had a powerful impact on vote choice, as the least resentful whites voted heavily for Obama while the most resentful went heavily for McCain. Moreover, this relationship is not an artifact of party or otherwise race-neutral beliefs in egalitarianism or limited government. Even when controlling for these factors, the impact of racial resentment remains statistically significant and substantively powerful.

Kinder and Dale-Riddle then go on to determine the net impact of racial attitudes on the 2008 election results, suggesting that they served as a drag on the Obama vote, denying him the landslide that would have gone to a white Democrat in such an advantageous political environment. The authors estimate that approximately half of the increase in African American turnout in 2008 and half of the increase in Democratic support among African Americans are attributable to Obama's presence on the ticket. They find that this increased level of turnout and support among African Americans because of Obama gained him an extra 2.2 percentage points.

Conversely, they find that the impact of racial resentment among whites in 2008 was higher than in any election since 1988 (the first year the racial resentment questions were asked by the ANES). Had the impact of racial resentment among whites been at the average for 1988–2004, the white vote for Obama would have been 10.2 percentage points higher. Overall, they indicate that had Obama's race not been a factor, he would have won with a landslide of just over 60% of the vote.

The authors go on to show that the impact of ethnocentrism is not fixed. Despite having such an important impact in the 1960 election, the divide between Catholics and Protestants has nearly disappeared. The same is true of race: they point out that in 2008, Obama was able to neutralize such views to a much greater degree than Jesse Jackson did in 1988. Furthermore, they show that in 1996, when Colin Powell publicly entertained the possibility of a White House run, racial resentment had no impact on white attitudes. The authors suggest that Powell's standing as a victorious general allowed whites to look past his race. Still, the authors are not sanguine about the easy ability of America to transcend race. They indicate that white racial resentment played a role in the swift decline in Obama's postinauguration approval ratings, and they suggest (though without resort to data) that white racial resentment might also have played a role in the larger-than-predicted seat gains by Republicans in the 2010 election.

These claims are thoughtfully made and carefully analyzed, especially for the sure-to-be controversial argument of a missed Obama landslide. In this respect, the authors are building upon and complementing previous work by Michael Tesler and David Sears (Obama's Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America, 2010) and Michael Lewis-Beck, Charles Tien, and Richard Nadeau (“Obama's Missed Landslide: A Racial Cost?” PS: Political Science and Politics 43 [January 2010]: 69–76).

The authors, however, leave one major question unaddressed. In building their case that race cost Obama a landslide victory, Kinder and Dale-Biddle construct several models of presidential election outcomes. Relying on such variables as economic change, war, incumbency, and candidate ideology, each of their models shows that the Democrats should have won in 2008 with between 57% to 59% of the vote. Such models and their hypothesized outcomes are indeed plausible, but other models with other hypothesized outcomes showing a much closer race are also plausible. In fact, a preelection analysis of various predictive models showed a median forecast of 48 percent of the popular vote for the Republicans (see: James E. Campbell, “Editor's Introduction: Forecasting the 2008 National Elections,” PS: Political Science and Politics 41 [October 2008]: 679–82). If race was a significant factor in the 2008 election, how did these models come so close to predicting the outcome without taking race into account?

This question aside, the authors nonetheless provide an important and valuable contribution to our understanding of the role of ethnocentrism in electoral politics, particularly regarding the 2008 election.

The 2008 election was also a revelation in that it placed black politics at the center of American politics (perhaps for the first time since 1876), since black Americans made Obama's nomination and election possible. In Trust in Black America, Shayla Nunnally provides an important resource for understanding black politics. Building upon the work of political theorists who posit the crucial role of trust in the operation of democratic societies, Nunnally sets out to understand the factors that influence black trust. As she points out, despite research showing significantly lower levels of trust among black Americans, few recent studies have examined the racial dimension of political and social trust, often dismissing it as just a weird paradox undeserving of fuller study.

Nunnally examines black political trust and how it varies across different racial, social, and political contexts by developing what she calls a theory of racial-psychological processing. According to the author, this theory posits the development of racialized trust through an internal process of 1) racial socialization, by which black Americans learn about their racial status; 2) racial homogenization where racial stereotypes are acquired; 3) racial uncertainty in which black Americans assess the perceived likelihood of racial discrimination; and 4) racial discrimination experiences, or the degree to which black Americans have suffered actual racial discrimination. This process leads black Americans to develop a hierarchy of racialized trust, with whites distrusted the most and Latinos and Asians somewhat less so. This racialized trust is further influenced by the particular context, either social or political, in which it operates.

Relying on an analysis of survey data, Nunnally then shows the various factors that operate at each stage of this process and how they influence the degree of trust exhibited by black Americans. Her findings are copious and not readily summarized; nonetheless, a few salient points stand out. First, black Americans are highly distrustful of whites, and this distrust leads to distrust of people in general. Furthermore, distrust of whites is evident in nearly every context. In particular, black Americans are nearly as distrusting of white Democrats as they are of white Republicans. On the other hand, black Americans are usually more trusting of Latinos and Asians, and this trust is more nuanced and dependent on context.

Nunnally's methodology is careful and precise, yet in some cases her findings raised questions because they were based on a limited number of observations, especially given the number of control variables included. Still, the author should not be faulted for doing the best job possible with the data available, but it would be interesting to see if and how her findings might be altered by the use of more comprehensive survey data.

Nunnally concludes by examining the prospects for black trust in the age of Obama. On the one hand, she points out that Obama's nomination and election could serve as a powerful antidote to black distrust since they indicate that large numbers of whites are willing to support a black for the highest office in the land. On the other hand, black Americans are not blind to the realization that Obama has engendered an immense amount of opposition among some white Americans and that this opposition is highly racialized, ranging from Glenn Beck's claim that Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people” to Tea Party protest signs depicting the president as a witch doctor to the large numbers of whites who believe that Obama is a secret Muslim or not a natural-born citizen of the United States. As she writes (p. 238): “Perhaps they [Black Americans] are questioning, if a black person cannot be respected as president of the United States, then what does this imply about the probability of their being treated equally and respectfully as black persons?”

Together, these two books provide a detailed examination of how race and racial attitudes inform American politics and, how, in light of the election of Barack Obama, “the nation at once celebrates and mourns itself.”