U of Ark: Analyzing the 2008 Presidential Election in the South

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http://newswire.uark.edu/article.aspx?id=14151 or
http://arkansasmatters.com/content/news/fulltext?cid=315932

Full study available here: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/What's+the+matter+with+Arkansas%3F+Symbolic+racism+and+2008...-a0225791793

When University of Arkansas political scientists analyzed surveys conducted shortly before the 2008 election in two representative Southern states, they found that voting behavior was significantly influenced by “a deep, subtle and modern symbolic racism.”

The blatant, public racism of the Jim Crow era had declined; but, the Arkansas researchers wrote, a system of beliefs remains that “denies the ongoing struggle for equality experienced by African Americans.” Previous studies have shown that symbolic racism “is closely related to white opposition to various public policies that are indirectly linked to race, such as housing, busing and crime.”

Symbolic racism is often linked with conservative values. Maxwell traced this connection back to the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, who ran on a platform of small government and won four Deep South states, a break-through for Republicans. Subsequently, she explained, Richard Nixon’s campaign “figured out that what appealed to Goldwater voters was the part about race.” Small government philosophy “symbolically came to mean to a lot of the South that the federal government should not intervene in civil rights issues.”

The two states they chose offered different situations to test. In Arkansas, there was not a large number of black voters, and Obama never visited the state to campaign. In Georgia with its significantly large African American population, the Obama campaign targeted areas where it was possible to register significant numbers of black voters. The unique campaign environments of the two states allowed the researchers to test whether “the mere presence of an African American presidential candidate at the top of the Democratic ticket” was sufficient to activate racially conservative attitudes in Arkansas or whether Georgia’s intense presidential campaign was necessary “to bring symbolic racism to the front of voters’ decision-making processes.”

Both states went for John McCain in the election. Obama had campaigned heavily in Georgia and brought additional voters to the polls, increasing the Democratic total vote by 34 percent over the previous election. There was little presence by the Obama campaign in Arkansas, and at the presidential level, Democrats lost 11.3 percent of support from 2004.

Moving first to an initial examination of symbolic racism in both states, we find that in Arkansas, supporters of McCain had substantially higher mean scores on the symbolic racism scale compared to Obama supporters. As seen in Table 1, the average Arkansas symbolic racism score among McCain supporters was .22. In contrast, the average symbolic racism score among Obama supporters was much lower, approximately -.21. A t-test indicates that these values are significantly different at the .05 level (t = 11.7).

In Georgia, we see a similar pattern. McCain supporters had a much higher mean symbolic racism score, with an average of .32. Obama supporters, however, had a mean score of -.2 on the symbolic racism index. As in the Arkansas case, these differences are statistically significant (t = 6.4).

Despite recent works such as The End of Southern Exceptionalism (Shafer and Johnston 2006) that claim race may no longer be the primary factor influencing Southern politics, our analysis of the way in which symbolic racism was activated by the first African American presidential candidate indicates that in the 2008 election, symbolic racism was a strong and significant predictor of candidate support in both a peripheral and Deep South state. In his popular book What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, (2004), Thomas Frank argues that Kansas conservatism does not rely on race baiting. What happened in Arkansas in 2008, and in Georgia--though it was offset by an active Obama campaign and effective get-out-the-vote drives among minorities--was not a result of the race baiting that characterized Southern strategies of the 1960s. Rather, the reddening of Arkansas, made strikingly visible on the map of net party change printed in the New York Times the week of the election, resulted from a deep, subtle, and modern symbolic racism. This visual image of a lone reddening Arkansas was all the more striking because Republican dominance at the national level has not trickled down to the state level. With states such as Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina making substantial cracks in the solid "Red South," the future of Southern politics generally, and Arkansas politics specifically, may depend on the extent to which new voters continue to participate and the extent to which symbolic racism continues to play a role in the choices made by white voters.

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1. Very interesting!

I grew up in rural AR and there were no African-Americans in the entire county where I lived. I spent my early life (ages 0-18) not knowing a single African-American!! Amazingly and inexplicably, both my Mom and Dad were "radicals" who taught me (according to some of my earliest memories) that "I don't EVER want to hear you use the N-word!! We would be SOOOOO disappointed in you." (this is absolutely revolutionary, by the way; even "non-racists" used the N-word then (and now, too, probably.))

Later in life, I asked them both how they came to be Not Racist. It turns out that my Dad picked it up from his Mom and my Mom picked it up from her Dad. Where my grandparents got the radical idea it was not acceptable to consider inferior / persecute / hate people they'd never met I'll probably never know. Oh, how I wish I'd picked their brains while they were alive!!!!! :cry: