In January of this year, UVA politics professor Vesla Weaver explained her research about voters’ perceptions of race. Now that the United States has elected its first African-American president, C-VILLE asked Weaver about what she thinks it means.
“I think that along the lines of race, I found it very interesting that younger, white voters gave their vote to [Barack] Obama,” says Weaver, adding that she is both optimistic and pessimistic about the results. “The reason why I am a little pessimistic about the results is that there is something about race that is driving partisanship.”
White voters tended to vote for Republican presidential candidate John McCain while minorities gave the majority of their support to Obama.
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UVA politics professor Vesla Weaver says she is both optimistic and pessimistic about the results of the 2008 presidential election. |
“The parties and their messages are being interpreted along racial lines in such a way that you’ve got this multiracial coalition going through the Democrats and this very white group that mainly John McCain won among.”
In her election “experiment,” Weaver created fictional candidates for a senatorial campaign. Two of them were white, one was a light-skinned black candidate and one a dark-skinned candidate. She found that “skin color had as much an effect as race on the candidates.” Republican voters tended to shy away from the black candidate even when they perceived that candidate to be the more conservative.
According to Weaver, what can be generalized from the findings is that racial stereotypes still matter for black candidates. But even for political scholars, the 2008 presidential elections presented new and interesting voting trends.
The use of implicit racial appeals to galvanize “white racial resentment,” says Weaver, was replaced by a more benign concept of white racial identity and solidarity.
“Speaking about the average American and small towns being pro-America calls up images of white America, but at the same time, it’s seemingly more about class or Americanness and not about race explicitly,” she says. In fact, Obama’s race was seldom discussed. “I do think that him being biracial was a net asset,” she says.
The Obama campaign’s decision to downplay race was ultimately successful, says Weaver. “Barack Obama was really able at every turn to maintain a very, very stable, clear and consistent disposition and with that message he allowed white voters to kind of claim ownership of his candidacy.”
Weaver says, however, she does not believe Obama could have pursued a unity and change message without being racially mixed.
“I think it says a lot about how far this nation has come,” says Weaver, “but it also says that we needed a certain type of candidate to get past that racial barrier, that it couldn’t be just any old black candidate.”
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