After the ballot box: How explicit racist appeals damage constituents views of their representation in government

Abstract

Recent scholarship finds that the use of explicit racial appeals can be an effective mobilization strategy in some situations. Consequently, U.S. politics has witnessed the resurgence of such appeals. Yet, the effects of racial appeals are not ensconced in electoral contexts, but may have potential downstream effects on interest representation and the ability for politicians to build broader coalitions This study uses a survey experiment to test the effect of exposure to racist comments used by a 2018 U.S. Senate candidate on perceived interest representation among Black and White respondents. The results show that Black and liberal White respondents who are exposed to these comments feel that the candidate is less able to represent their interests. Thus, we find that the use of explicit racial appeals potentially alienates a substantial proportion of people which could potentially lead to greater dissatisfaction with government.

Keywords

Racial priming representation racism partisanship survey experiment

There has been a resurgence in explicitly racist remarks from politicians, and in particular, Republican politicians in recent years. For example, Donald Trump reportedly referred to majority Black nations as “shithole” countries.¹ Representative Steve King was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?”.² Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith praised one of her supporters by stating, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”³ While each of the candidates was criticized for their racist remarks, two of them were elected or re-elected after making these statements.

Mendelberg, 2001 research on this topic suggests that politicians who make such explicit racist appeals should face punishment by the electorate because racism contradicts societal norms and American’s belief in equality (see Valentino et al. 2002; White, 2007). As such, most Americans reject the sponsors of racist rhetoric. However, recent studies suggest that the downsides of explicitly racist appeals have largely disappeared, a reversal which is partially driven by increased political polarization and greater exposure to negative racial rhetoric by politicians (Stephens-Dougan, 2016; Valentino et al. 2018).

While this research provides important insight into how explicit racist appeals may influence vote choice, politicians’ performance at the ballot box is just the beginning. Representatives' success in government is based on their ability to broaden their electoral coalition and ultimately make voters feel heard (Pitkin, 1967). How legislators campaign plays a large role in ensuring or inhibiting these opportunities after an election (Gutmann and Thompson, 2014). While partisanship and changing racial norms may drown out a candidate’s racial messages with regards to vote choice, we suspect that explicit racist appeals will lead Black Americans and White liberals to feel that they are poorly represented by the politicians who use them.⁴ Such a finding would have important implications for our understanding of American politics. The use of explicitly racist appeals may mobilize some voters without electoral consequences, but these actions do not come without a price.

This study explores the impact of racist messages on voters’ views of elected officials as being able to represent their interest in government. Based on our review, we argue that White liberals and Black Americans will view elected officials as significantly worse representatives when they are tied to racist statements. In contrast, we expect that these statements will not influence the opinions of White moderates or White conservatives. We test this proposition using a Lucid Academia survey experiment in which respondents are exposed to Cindy Hyde-Smith’s “public hanging” comment. We find that White liberals and Black respondents rated Hyde-Smith as being less able to represent their interests when she was connected to her explicitly racist statement.

Campaigning and governing

Polarization and changing racial norms may make explicitly racist appeals acceptable and even mobilizing for some voters (Arora, 2019; Valentino et al., 2018). Some argue that Whites feel that the nation’s focus on racial inequality is coming at their expense during a period of growing income inequality (Parker and Barreto, 2014). Jardina (2019) and Banks (2014) find that Whites increasingly feel marginalized which increases their sense of a common fate. This feeling of marginalization leads some Whites to be more supportive of explicit racist attacks.

In addition to changing views on race, Americans are becoming more stable in their party identification (Dimick et al., 2014; Levendusky, 2009). As Americans' political views have become more rigid along their partisanship (Mason, 2018; Schickler, 2016), candidates can focus more on mobilization rather than persuasion given that there are fewer undecided voters and opposing party members are unlikely to support them regardless of their actions. As a result, politicians can make explicitly racist comments and not face an electoral backlash because individuals’ minds are already set. The use of explicit racist appeals may help candidates mobilize their base without much of a backlash. In doing so, racist appeals may be advantageous for elections.

However, we argue that racist appeals make Black Americans and liberal Whites feel unrepresented by their elected officials. There is a large body of research which suggests that Black people pay a significant amount of attention to issues around race and ethnicity (White, 2007; Stout, 2015). Moreover, research shows that Black people tend to reject policies and politicians which are perceived as being racially biased. White (2007) shows that Black people became less supportive of policies when they were framed as being in opposition to Black interests. Similarly, Towler and Parker (2018) demonstrate that Black individuals who view Donald Trump as being antagonistic to Black interests are the least favorable toward him. In both cases, the authors argue that racially regressive positions lead Black people to view the policies and politicians as working against their interests. This increases the distance between Black people and these policies/politicians. We expect the same logic to hold for legislators. When legislators are framed as holding racially insensitive views, it is likely that Black voters will view these individuals as being hostile to their interests and view them as being poorer representatives.

There is also reason to believe that White liberals will feel further from politicians who utilize racist appeals. With the integration of social movements like Black Lives Matter into liberal politics and the contrast of Trump’s racist rhetoric in the 2016 election to Clinton’s and Biden’s focus on racial diversity, White liberals have become much more uniformly racially progressive in recent years (Stout, 2020). Moreover, race is becoming a more salient issue, leading White liberals to be more aware of and responsive to racially insensitive rhetoric (Sides et al., 2018). While White liberals would be unlikely to support a Republican candidate regardless of their rhetoric, there are several reasons why elected officials who are perceived as being racist should lead White liberals to feel less well represented.

First, the use of racist rhetoric may be used by Whites as a proxy for ideology. Previous work demonstrates that racially insensitive language is more likely to be used by more conservative politicians (Parker and Barreto, 2014). White liberals, who have become increasingly racially progressive over the past 10 years (Stout, 2020), may use these messages as markers that the elected official is ideologically different from themselves. Second, African Americans have become an essential part of the Democratic Party’s coalition and have led many White liberals who support the party’s candidates to feel closer to African Americans politically (Stout, 2020). When Black people are disparaged, White liberals may view these attacks as slights against key members of their coalition. This should lead White liberals to view the sponsor of racially insensitive rhetoric as working against their political interests. This should lead to perceptions that the elected official does not represent their interests in government.

In contrast, we expect a less uniform response to racist appeals among White conservatives. While some White conservatives may view racially antagonistic language as appealing, others may feel uncomfortable endorsing racially biased rhetoric (Mendelberg, 2001; Stephens-Dougan, 2016). While both groups of conservatives may vote for the sponsor of this language, those in the former group may feel better represented by elected officials who use explicitly racist attacks while those in the latter may publicly say they reject this language but would support the candidate in an election based on a lesser of two evils argument. This divergent response may make explicitly racial rhetoric less impactful for White conservatives.

Data and methodology

To test these hypotheses, we rely on two samples collected between January 31–February 4, 2019 and May 29–May 31, 2019 using Lucid Academia. Lucid constructs a nationally representative sample by matching national census demographics based on age, gender, ethnicity, Hispanic identification, and region. Recent tests of the Lucid platform find that demographic and experimental findings are similar to those using nationally representative probability samples (Coppock and McClellan, 2019). Moreover, Online Appendix Tables A1 and A2 show that both samples are similar to the U.S. population on several key demographics.

For the purposes of this paper, we focus on Black and White respondents. Together, the two samples contain 214 Black respondents and 1805 White respondents. Online Appendix table A3 demonstrates that our Black and White samples are representative across several key demographics. However, there are discrepancies, particularly among the Black sample which is younger, more highly educated, and more likely to identify as liberal than the Black population in the U.S. Though our sample of Black respondents is not representative across all of these demographic attributes, extant scholarship demonstrates that convenience samples, and Lucid in particular, are appropriate for research that models the relationship between variables (Baker et al., 2013; Coppock and McClellan, 2019).

An experiment embedded in the survey exposed respondents to an explicitly racist comment made by Republican candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith during a 2018 Mississippi Senate race. On November 11, 2018 Hyde-Smith was caught on camera telling one of her supporters that she would “be on the front row” of a public hanging if invited. Hyde-Smith is a White Republican who was running in a run-off election against Black Democrat Mike Espy for a U.S. Senate seat. Democrats and the media roundly criticized Hyde-Smith’s comments as racially charged and violating social norms, particularly given the violent racial history of Mississippi and the prominent role that public hangings played in that history. Though the comment does not explicitly mention the targeted group, we believe respondents will recognize the racial connotations because a growing portion of the public is adept at recognizing racial appeals (Valentino et al., 2018) and because the article respondents are exposed to contextualize the comment as racially insensitive.

Racial priming literature generally relies on survey experiments which tend to be lacking in external validity. One helpful strategy to overcome this weakness is to ensure that “the stimulus used in the study resembles the stimulus of interest in the real world” (Devroe and Wauters, 2019). Thus, using a real-world explicitly racist appeal such as Hyde-Smith’s comment helps us to match the stimulus used in the experiment with the stimulus that actual voters are receiving.⁵

Respondents were randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups. The control group was told that Cindy Hyde-Smith and Mike Espy had competed in a run-off election for the U.S. Senate from Mississippi and read short biographies of both candidates using information taken directly from their campaign websites.⁶ The treatment group read the same biographies and then read a short excerpt of an article which discussed Hyde-Smith’s comment about the public hanging and said that she was being criticized by her opponent and the African American community for “evoking language reminiscent of lynchings that scar Mississippi’s history.”⁷ The article excerpt served as the basis to test the effects of exposure to these comments on perceived interest representation. Respondents were then asked how much each candidate represents their interests on a 5-point scale ranging from “a great deal” (1) to “not at all” (0). This question, which measures interest representation, serves as our dependent variable and is normalized to be on a 0 to 1 scale.

Results

Table 1 displays the results of two-sample t-tests that assess mean differences in interest representation of Hyde-Smith among Black, White liberal, White moderate, and White conservative respondents.⁸ Black perceptions of interest representation are eight percentage-points lower in the treatment group than in the control group. In other words, exposure to Hyde-Smith’s comments led to a decrease in perceptions of interest representation. This effect is just outside of marginal significance (p = 0.104), but we believe this is due to the relatively small sample size of Black respondents. Among White respondents, overall, there is only a moderate decrease in perceptions of interest representation, which is driven by White liberals. Perceptions of interest representation are six points lower in the treatment than control group among liberal Whites (p < 0.1). Changes in perceptions of interest representation among White moderates and conservatives are small and well outside of statistical significance. The results provide evidence for our hypothesis that exposure to an explicitly racist comment will decrease perceptions of interest representation among Black and liberal White respondents, but not among moderate and conservative Whites.⁹

Table 1.

Mean differences in how much Cindy Hyde-Smith represents the interests of black and white respondents in the treatment and control groups based on two-sample t-tests.

Group	Treatment mean	Control mean	Difference
Black	0.26	0.34	−0.08
White	0.37	0.35	−0.025
White liberal	0.21	0.27	−0.06⁺
White moderate	0.28	0.30	−0.02
White conservative	0.54	0.56	0.02

⁺ p<0.1. *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001.

Figure 1 displays the marginal treatment effect on perceptions of interest representation among Black, White liberal, White moderate, and White conservative respondents. The coefficients are derived from OLS regression models which control for partisan identification, education, racial resentment, gender, and age. The model for Black respondents includes ideology as a covariate as well. The treatment and control groups are randomly assigned, and chi-square tests show the groups to be balanced, but regression models can provide additional support that the results hold up to various controls.

Figure 1.

Marginal treatment effect on perceptions of interest representation based on OLS regression models controlling for partisan identification, education, racial resentment, gender, age, and ideology.

The results demonstrate that the t-test results hold up to the various controls included in the models. Namely, perceptions of interest representation marginally significantly decrease among Black respondents (p < 0.1), significantly decrease for White liberal respondents (p < 0.01), and remain statistically unchanged among White moderates and conservatives. In combination, we find support for our hypothesis that Black and liberal White respondents are less likely to view Hyde-Smith as someone who can effectively represent their interests after being exposed to her comments in support of public hangings. It is important to note that respondents are presented with the partisan identity of Hyde-Smith from the beginning. Even with the often overwhelming effects of party affiliation (e.g., Mason 2018) we still find treatment effects showing that the effects of explicitly racist rhetoric can influence perceived interest representation even when the audience is aware of the partisanship and other biographical information of the candidate.

Conclusion

In spite of Cindy Hyde-Smith’s racist comments during the 2018 U.S. Senate election which appeared to show support for Mississippi’s racist and violent history, she still prevailed in her bid for elected office. While her success may indicate to many that her racist comments are inconsequential, our research suggests that these statements likely damaged her reputation with Black and liberal White people. Both groups who read her comments saying she would be “on the front row” of a public hanging were less likely to believe she represented their interests.

African Americans make up 37.8% of the total population of Mississippi (U.S. Census Bureau) while 19% of White adults in the state identify as liberal (Pew Research Center, 2014). Hyde-Smith may have alienated a substantial portion of her constituents with her racist comments. Thus, beyond electoral politics, these types of statements may make it difficult for politicians to build coalitions across the aisle and get voters to support their agenda. Both factors may limit racially insensitive politicians’ effectiveness as legislators and leaders. This is a particularly important finding given the prevalence of explicit racism in contemporary politics (Valentino et al., 2018).

In addition to the implications for elected officials, our findings help us understand how explicit racist appeals may lead to greater levels of disillusionment for some groups. In the past, politicians refrained from using explicit racist appeals because they worried about being punished at the polls (Mendelberg, 2001; Valentino et al., 2002). However, the growing acceptance of these statements along with potential upsides in mobilizing key electorates makes this outreach more attractive. Yet, when candidates who make racist remarks succeed, it may add an extra feeling of alienation for opposing voters which may lead them to view the government significantly more negatively. As a result, the rise of politicians who are using explicit racist appeals may lead to a greater number of people feeling disinterested and less trusting in government.

Additionally, the use of explicit racist appeals may exacerbate political polarization (see Valentino and Zhirkov, 2017). While this negative racial outreach may mobilize and excite voters about a particular politician, it appears to lead others to view the sponsors of these statements as being less concerned about representing them. This may breed higher levels of disapproval and possibly disdain for these elected officials. Black people and White liberals may dislike members of a different party, but not to the degree in which they dislike those of the opposite party who use these racist appeals. This greater distance between voters and elected officials of a different party may increase polarization. While explicit racist appeals may be a good electoral strategy in some circumstances, it does not preclude the possibility that this form of outreach does long term damage to the political system.

Future research can expand on our findings in multiple ways. First, our study relies on one case of an explicitly racist appeal from one survey experiment. Future studies can strengthen the confidence we have in these results by replicating this design using different data, time-points, and instances of explicitly racist messages. Indeed, our real-world example may have minimized treatment effects due to prior knowledge of the candidates or comments. Testing the effects of similar comments in hypothetical scenarios can help determine if the treatment effects are actually stronger. Second, future studies can explore boundary effects. Our stimulus involves a White, Republican candidate. It is unclear that the results would hold if a Democrat or person of color said the same thing. On the one hand, the reservoir of support these candidates enjoy from liberal groups may inoculate them from the same punishment that conservative White candidates receive. On the other hand, such language may feel especially offensive from supposed allies which could diminish their support at greater levels.

Relatedly, future work can explore the use of different explicit appeals. Do people react differently to appeals depending on the stereotypes being invoked by the message or are there other attributes that influence the effect of the appeal? Finally, more work needs to be done examining levels of diversity of journalists within states and the identification of both implicit and explicit racial statements. While the historical context of hanging in Mississippi left little room for doubt that Hyde-Smith’s statement was explicitly racial, other implicitly racial comments may be less apparent. Given their greater awareness of racial stereotypes, we suspect that more diverse newsrooms will be better at identifying insensitive comments which may have an effect on perceptions of interest representation.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-rap-10.1177_20531680211052135 – Supplemental Material for After the ballot box: How explicit racist appeals damage constituents views of their representation in government

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-rap-10.1177_20531680211052135 for After the ballot box: How explicit racist appeals damage constituents views of their representation in government by Maneesh Arora and Christopher T. Stout in Research & Politics

Footnotes

Author’s Note

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2019 annual American Political Science Association conference.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the UC Irvine Center for the Study of Democracy

Correction (March 2025):

The article has been updated with correct dataverse link in the supplemental material section. For more details, please see the correction notice: .

ORCID iD

Maneesh Arora

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

The replication files can be found at .

Notes

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