Traiting Places: Race and the Evaluation of Black and White Presidential Candidates

While there are a number of studies that explore perceptions of black politicians' strengths and weaknesses relative to white politicians, most of these studies use hypothetical black candidates and focus on white respondents' attitudes. We explore whether research on attitudes about black candidate attributes in controlled settings hold for real-world presidential candidates. Moreover, we assess whether black and white respondents view co-racial politicians' relative strengths differently. We use the 1992-2012 American National Election Study to test our research questions. We find that blacks consistently view Democratic presidential candidates' traits more positively than whites. However, the racial gap in perceptions of presidential candidate traits is greatest for Obama relative to Clinton. Moreover, we demonstrate that the greater racial divide in perceptions of Obama's traits is in part driven by whites who view blacks as a group negatively.