President Obama and the Growing Polarization of Partisan Attachments by Racial Attitudes and Race

Our previous research shows that the unusually large effects of race and racial attitudes on public evaluations of Barack Obama have spilled over into multiple facets of mass political decision making. This study tests whether that spillover of racialization has extended all the way into partisan attachments. The results presented suggest that mass partisan attachments are indeed more polarized by both racial attitudes and race than they were before Obama became the Democratic nominee for president. We show, for example, that party affect was significantly more influenced by racial resentment in 2008 than it was in both 2004 and in earlier survey years. Moreover, and unlike prior panel studies, racial resentment strongly predicted changes in party identification among 2006-2008 panelists who were re-interviewed after Obama clinched the nomination. Our evidence indicates that Obama activated older and more blatant forms of racial prejudice like old fashioned racism and anti-black affect even more powerfully. While both of these outdated attitudes were unrelated to party identification in the years and decades preceding the 2008 election, we show that they have become significantly linked to white partisanship in the age of Obama. Finally, we show that Obama substantially increased the black-white racial divide in both macro partisanship and in strength of Democratic identification