Independents are less likely to vote for Democratic minority candidates because they think they are more liberal

Why do minorities continue to be underrepresented in the US House of Representatives? In new research, Sarah Fulton and Sarah Allen Gershon investigate the role of race and partisanship in shaping voters' sense of group identity, and how perceptions of the ideology of minority candidates affects vote-choice. They find that white independent and Republican voters perceive non-white Democratic candidates to to be more liberal. These voters, they write, perceive exaggerated ideological differences for those candidates who belong to two ‘out-groups’: both race and party.