Part of the idea of using your rhetoric to keep issues in the voter’s head has been how black candidates can gain support from different groups of people even if they do not support all the same policies. Love and Tosolt (2013) as well as Utley and Heyse (2010) have all talked about how black leaders have had to toe the line between speaking about their race but also essentially ignoring it to gain support from those who might not completely trust a black politician. Utley and Heyse (2010) call this idea accommodation, talking about politicians who have been able to successfully gain support from those groups of people, using Booker T. Washington, Douglas Wilder, and David Dinkins as examples. They talk about how those politicians, as well as Barack Obama in the modern era, can look “non-threatening” and electable to the white middle class but still talk about their race (Utley and Heyse 2010).
“Fearful that white voters would be turned off by policy positions that steered too closely to black interests, black candidates running before majority or near-majority white constituencies have to adopt campaign strategies that deemphasize race”
Utley and Heyse 2010; 155
Love and Tosolt (2013) continue with this idea, writing about how a “traditional” black candidate forces white people to confront their ideas regarding racism. They note how Obama did not follow the traditional black candidate role. He used his voice to create a narrative about his life that removed himself and his family from the idea of slavery and segregation so that it did not trigger white guilt (Love and Tosolt 2013). Instead of forcing white people to confront their racism, he created a persona that many did not consider as black (Love and Tosolt 2013). The examples presented in these two studies help to show that presidents, and politicians more broadly, have had to use their rhetoric to present themselves in a way that is non-threatening to groups just to gain their support.
Continuing on the idea of blackness and race in speeches, it has been shown that bringing race up can negatively affect public perception of a candidate. The biggest example of this was Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., referring to the United States as the “U.S. of K.K.K. A” and how Hillary Clinton will “never know what it was like to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people” (Howell 2011; 767). This quote came at a time when then-candidate Obama was still trying to gain broad support across the country and not focus on his race. This caused Obama to give one of his now-infamous speeches entitled “A More Perfect Union.”
By acknowledging his race this scandal helped to set him back in the polls. Since race was brought up, Obama then had to address it even though he had previously tried to talk about race in a way that shows a country striving for equality (Love and Tosolt 2013). In comparison, when then-candidate Donald Trump spoke about race he was praised and it ended up helping drive out more people to vote for him. He was able to use the history of hatred towards “out-groups” mainly immigrants, refugees, and Muslims to gain broad support (Lamont, Park, and Ayala‐Hurtado 2017). “While addressing this gap required making salient the structural character of the economic changes that have transformed the lives of these workers, it also required drawing strong moral boundaries toward undocumented immigrants, refugees, and Muslims, and making salient workers’ high-status characteristics in their role as protectors of women” (Lamont, Park, and Ayala‐Hurtado 2017; S173). His language during the campaign and later on in his presidency are prime examples of the positives of playing into race. After giving any type of major speech a candidate will most likely see a bump in the polls, showing how the context of the speech does not matter (Cohen and Hamman 2003). These polls will end up going back down but will, in the short term, have a positive effect. Obama and Trump are two examples that show how speaking about race can either negatively or positively affect public perception of their candidacy.
There have been other scholars who have split politicians into groups based on what their rhetoric might entail, mainly looking at populist sentiments. Scholars have tried to understand how politicians use that type of sentiment to gain broad-based support. Çinar, Stokes, and Uribe (2020) make the distinction between those who they consider anti-elitism and those who are not, with those who are anti-elitist being considered Populists, including President Trump. This is where the idea of targeting out-groups and ethnic groups came from. Through their study, they were able to find that the two Republicans they included in their study, Trump and Ronald Reagan, are the most anti-elitist compared to the Democrats in their study, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders (Çinar, Stokes, and Uribe 2020). The use of populism has been built on talking about those “out-groups” (Lamont, Park, and Ayala‐Hurtado 2017). The use of populist sentiments has helped to create a system that is allowing racist language and policies to be put in place.
