Black candidates who create positive feelings among voters can overcome implicit racist attitudes

With more explicit forms of racism having declined in recent decades, the implicit racial attitudes of how people feel about policies designed to help minorities, or ‘symbolic racism’, has begun to gain attention. But how do these forms of more implicit racism affect how minority political candidates are evaluated by voters? Using national election surveys carried out in 2012, David Redlawsk, Caroline Tolbert and Natasha Altema McNeely find that both positive and negative emotional responses to candidates running for office can help to condition the influence of underlying levels of racial resentment in shaping how voters evaluate them. More negative emotions, such as fear, make levels of symbolic racism worse, while more positive ones, such as hope, can help to overcome the effects of such racism.