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Speaking in Code

Campaigns can still thrive on racial stereotyping and coded language.

Politicians historically have used race as a wedge issue and, in the American context, that’s most often meant appealing to white voters through negative stereotypes of African Americans. Whether it was during Reconstruction or the Jim Crow era or in contemporary American politics, African Americans have often been the target of negative stereotypes around work ethic, criminality, and things of that nature.

There’s a traditional political science model that might have predicted the tactics of racial stereotyping and coded language would become less effective over time. It says you have this median voter, and you have a party on the left, and you have a party on the right, and they are going to try to converge toward the middle to reach that median voter. But we’re not seeing that in our politics.

During Barack Obama’s presidency and in its aftermath, we actually saw greater use of racial stereotyping and coded language. If you look back to the discussions following the defeat of Mitt Romney to President Obama in 2012, what emerged was the idea that you couldn’t continue to build a party just of white people and that the party had to reassess its strategies. But rather than taking that approach, they doubled down in 2016, nominating a winning presidential candidate who was by far the most willing of any Republican candidate for national office in recent memory to explicitly appeal to white grievance and white identity.

One reason candidates continue to make race-based appeals to voters is that the tactic works. My research has shown that even candidates of color have been successful winning the votes of racially conservative and moderate whites by evoking negative racial stereotypes. For African American candidates, these efforts succeed in signaling to white voters that they won’t disrupt the status quo.

One departure from this dynamic came from the Warnock campaign in the high-profile Georgia Senate race last fall between Rafael Warnock, a Black pastor, and Kelly Loeffler, a white incumbent. Warnock didn’t really engage in racial distancing in his effort to attract white support. I would say that he embraced the strategy of deracialization. He did a lot to appear nonthreatening—one Warnock ad that got a lot of airtime showed him playing with a puppy—but not to the extreme that he was necessarily distancing himself from African Americans.

In fact, Warnock was the pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, which was the church that Martin Luther King Jr. pastored. Thus, for many voters, Warnock was associated with the legacy of Dr. King. Although King was hugely unpopular when he was alive, posthumously, popular culture has a sanitized version of him and his legacy. If you invoke King, for many people that’s about the content of our character, and not being judged by the color of our skin—about blacks and whites joining together. It’s a hopeful, aspirational message that’s associated with him at this political moment, which, to some degree, Warnock was able to capitalize upon.

The Loeffler campaign tried to portray Warnock as an extremist and as a socialist. But when Loeffler charged Warnock with being a socialist, it was never because of whatever tangential association he had with King, who embraced socialist principles. It was because of Warnock’s own sermons, which are part of general Black liberation theology. They’re not different from what you’d hear in the average Black church on a Sunday morning. And given the tremendous role of churches in Black communities, that has made it easy for white candidates to charge Black candidates with being too liberal.