Another Dog Whistle

After signing his landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson is said to have become depressed. When asked what was troubling him, he said, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” He was wrong. It was not just the South. Although Johnson won that fall, since 1964 a majority of whites have voted for the Republican candidate in every presidential election. The last column of the table shows the Republican margin of victory among white voters.

Year	Republican Candidate	Democratic Candidate	Margin
1964	Goldwater	Johnson	-29%
1968	Nixon	Humphrey	16%
1972	Nixon	McGovern	40%
1976	Ford	Carter	4%
1980	Reagan	Carter	20%
1984	Reagan	Mondale	32%
1988	Bush I	Dukakis	20%
1992	Bush I	Clinton	2%
1996	Dole	Clinton	2%
2000	Bush II	Gore	13%
2004	Bush II	Kerry	17%
2008	McCain	Obama	12%
2012	Romney	Obama	20%

In Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney Lopez makes a strong case for the argument that race has been the driving force in American politics since the '60s. Beginning with Nixon in 1968, the Republican Party developed a winning strategy of appealing to white voters with messages based on symbolic racism. One of the results is that the Republicans have increasingly become the “white man's party.” A new set of studies by Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern University suggests that what is now a bad situation is likely to become worse.

The Census Bureau projects that by 2042, the US will become a majority-minority nation. That is, more than 50% of Americans will be non-whites. The authors hypothesized that this information is threatening to white voters, and making it salient will cause them to shift toward a more conservative ideology and become more likely to vote Republican. The information is, in effect, a dog whistle, that Republicans will be able to use to their advantage in future elections.

This is not the first time that threats have been shown to lead to conservative shifts. For example, American political opinion moved sharply in the conservative direction following the 9/11 attacks. In controlled experiments, proponents of terror management theory have shown that asking participants to think about their own death leads to conservative shifts in social and political attitudes and increased support for then-President George W. Bush.

The Craig and Richeson article presents three increasingly impressive experiments. The first is an internet study of a random sample of white Independent voters—that is, voters not affiliated with either the Republican or Democratic Party—living in the Western US. California is already a majority-minority state, and in one condition, respondents were informed of this fact. In the control condition, they were told that Hispanics had become roughly equal in number to blacks in the US. Participants were then asked to indicate the extent to which they leaned toward one of the two major parties, and to rate their political attitudes on a 5-point scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” The results of the political leaning question are shown below.

People informed of the majority-minority status of California also rated their political attitudes as significantly more conservative than the control group.

A second experiment used a random sample of white American adults from all regions and political parties. Some of the participants—the racial shift condition—were told that America would become a majority-minority nation in 2042, while those in the control group were given information about geographic mobility. Attitudes were measures toward five social policies, such as immigration and health care reform. The authors proposed that the conservative shift was mediated by group status threat. This was measured by two questions about whether the American way of life is threatened, and whether conditions in the US are getting better or worse. Three other potential mediators of the conservative shift were measured, but, as expected, none of them panned out.

As in study 1, the participants in the racial shift condition shifted in the conservative direction on the five attitudes and those in the control group did not. Those in the racial shift condition also showed greater evidence of group status threat, and, as predicted, group status threat mediated the relationship between the racial shift information and political conservatism. (See my earlier post explaining how mediation is inferred.)

Finally, if the conservative shift is mediated by group status threat, then providing participants with information that mitigates that threat should reduce the size of the shift. Their third experiment had three conditions. Some participants were given the racial shift information. The control group was again told about geographic mobility. And finally, there was an assuaged-threat condition. Two sentences were added to the racial shift information reassuring the respondents that, despite the majority-minority shift, white privilege would be maintained. Specifically, “white Americans are expected to continue to have higher average incomes and wealth compared to other racial groups.” Some new social policy questions were also added.

As expected, only the racial shift group showed a conservative shift on the social policy questions. The participants in the assuaged-threat condition did not differ from the control group.

It should be noted the authors divided their social policy questions into those they thought were race-related, i.e., immigration, and those they thought were not, i.e., health care reform. The size of the conservative shift was the same on both sets of questions. This result would not surprise Lopez, since he maintains that virtually all domestic political issues have been racialized. For example, the term “Obamacare” is a dog whistle meant to persuade white voters—incorrectly, of course—that their heard-earned money is being taken by the government and given to “Obama's people”—undeserving minority citizens.

The Craig and Richeson article may help Republicans to identify another reliable dog whistle, although Pat Buchanan called it to their attention years ago. The majority-minority shift is sometimes said to foretell the demise of the Republican Party. However, in the short run, it is likely to increase the racial polarization of the two parties, and it may help Republicans temporarily by increasing their appeal to white voters. Lopez suggests that whether the Republican Party can remain viable in the long run may depend on their ability to persuade some non-whites, i.e., Asian-Americans and light-skinned Hispanics, to redefine themselves as “white.”

You may also be interested in reading:

Dog Whistle Politics

The Singer, Not the Song

Old-Fashioned Racism