Volume 14, Issue 1

Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, is approaching the end of his second and final term. Obama’s impending departure raises questions about his legacy. Here we explore what the consequences of the Obama Presidency might be for the future of racial politics in America: for prejudice itself; for the racialization of policy; for the mobilization of the Black vote; and for the racial polarization of the party system.

This examination of Obama and race in America has three themes. The first is his African-American identity, and concludes that it has marked and useful resemblances to John F. Kennedy’s Irish Catholicism. It then examines Obama’s record affecting race relations in America: what he has done and, as revealing, what he has not done. Finally, it seeks to set Obama’s approach to race relations in the context of its rich and diverse history in this nation.

Since 1968 a racially-defined conservative populism – what Richard Nixon called the “Silent Majority” – has been a durable part of Republican political identity. Yet across this era the GOP has continued to move away from protecting the rights and livelihoods of the very middle and working-class whites through which they built the modern party. For decades these whites have been experiencing falling or stagnant wages, the deterioration of collective bargaining, and the largest wealth gap in US history – an economic reality that was made worse by the Great Recession of 2008. Today the Silent Majority that made the rise of modern conservatism possible over the last half century is no longer a reliable element of national Republicanism. A combination of downward economic pressure, demographic changes, and political abandonment by GOP elites has created deep rifts that have destabilized the Republican Party and left its future uncertain.

There are few advanced democracies that simultaneously make voting as easy and as difficult as the US. This essay outlines some of the recent changes in voting rights and election law, with a particular attention to the causes and consequences of restrictive changes. I argue that both historically and today this pattern has been driven by strategic partisan calculation, which in the American context almost necessarily results in patterns of access and exclusion that fall sharply on lines of race, class, and civic status. The recent skirmishes in the “voting wars” are a continuation of this historical dynamic, enabled by the unique institutional context in which American elections take place, in which parties retain control over the parameters and administration of a highly fragmented electoral system. So long as this remains the case, and so long as there are relatively few institutions capable of checking the incentive to engage in partisan manipulation, the “voting wars” will continue and are likely even to intensify.

This article describes and analyzes the evolution of African American political participation in the states of the former Confederacy since the time of V.O. Key’s classic study of southern politics (1949). Expanded voting and electoral success for African Americans in the south have dramatically transformed the politics of the region and portenddeeper and longer-lasting change in the future, unless the Republican Party can begin to appeal to more minority voters. Current trends point toward possibly a major shifting in the politics of the region given demographic patterns and the difficulties of the Republican Party grappling with issues that drive African American voting.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a contemporary examination of the political party system in the Southern US. In doing so, an assessment is undertaken to determine which cleavage line – race, class, or religion – does the best job of explaining the division between Republicans and Democrats in the region. Using survey research data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study three multivariate models are employed to study partisan affiliation, presidential voting, and voting in US Senate elections. The results indicate that race, especially the Black-White dichotomy, is the largest dividing line between the Republican and Democratic Parties in the region. In fact, in terms of party identification race dwarfs the effects of religion and class. As related to presidential and Senate voting behavior race continues to exert a significant influence, even after controlling for partisan identification. Conversely, class and religion produced minimal or no effects in models of vote choice. In conclusion, it would appear that the contemporary Southern political landscape, like its predecessor, continues to be defined by racial divisions.

Sidney Verba’s distinguished career, particularly his books, demonstrate a talent for finding superb collaborators, a deep normative concern about the health of civil society, and a commitment to using social science methods to understand the working of democratic systems. A re-reading of these books shows the development of an increasingly complex theory of political participation undergirding a complex portrait of American representative democracy, with all its flaws and strengths.