David Obama's Race Summary

The authors of the book Obama’s Race is Michael Tesler and David O. Sears. Michael Tesler is a doctoral student in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. This is his first book. David O. Sears is distinguished professor of psychology and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has served on the board of overseers for both the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey. He is the coauthor or coeditor of numerous books, most recently Racialized Politics: The Debate about Racism in America, Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, and The diversity Challenge: Social Identity and Intergroup Relations on the Multiethnic Campus. He is recipient of the 2002 warren E. Miller …show more content…
Instead, the racial hopes and fears evoked by his potential to become the country’s first black president sharply divided racial conservatives form racial liberals. The impact of racial attitudes on individual vote decisions in the 2008 democratic primary was so strong that it appears to have even outstripped the substantive impact of racial attitudes. Racial attitudes were also a much more important determinant of general election vote choice in 2008 than they were in any of the presidential contests of the recent past, despite the absence of explicit references to race during the campaign. In the campaign Obama performed worse than Hillary Clinton did in trial heats against John McCain among racial conservatives, but offset that deficit by performing markedly better than she did among racial liberals. It was also mentioned that the general election vote choice in 2008 was more heavily influenced by feelings about Muslims than it was in either 2004 voting or in McCain-Clinton trial heats. Opinions about Muslims had similarly large effects even for individuals who knew Obama was not an adherent of Islam, and they held up after controlling for the significant relationship between anti-Muslim and anti-black attitudes. We argued elsewhere that the large and independent effects of attitudes about Muslims. Muslims had the large effects of racial attitudes on general election vote choice and Obama …show more content…
Whether or not this novelty eventually fades away and President Obama becomes primarily evaluated on the same partisan and performance factors that served as the principal basis for past presidential assessments remains to be seen. However, there is nothing in our most recent evidence, amassed one year after Obama’s victory to suggest that this would happen any time soon. If anything, these results suggests that we may well be headed into another one of America’s periodic hyper-racial