Black Consciousness and Kamala Harris’s Tepid Support from African Americans

• In Event: 2020 and beyond: Examining Black and Latino Political Preferences

Abstract

African American politicians from the Democratic party typically draw exceptionally strong support from Black voters—especially when their candidacies make racial history. Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, for example, both received astronomically high approval ratings from African Americans during their bids to become the country’s Black president, with their strongest support coming from African Americans who scored highest in racial consciousness (Dawson 1994; Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2012; Tesler 2016; White and Laird 2020). So did Stacy Abrams and Rafael Warnock during their campaigns to become Georgia’s first Black governor and US Senator respectively. And this same pattern has also historically held for African American Democrats running to become their city’s first Black mayor (Hajnal 2007).

Yet despite Kamala Harris’s ground-breaking position as the country’s first Black vice president, her popularity with African Americans lags far behind her history-making predecessors—especially among younger Black voters. So much so, in fact, that we first present data showing she has consistently received lower Black favorability ratings than her white running mate, Joe Biden, has over the past two years. Drawing on the long-line of literature on the power of ingroup racial consciousness in Black political behavior, we argue that Harris’s relatively weak Black support is rooted in perceptions that she is not sufficiently supportive African American interests. More specifically, her biracial identification as Black and South Asian, her long career in the racial hierarchy-enhancing profession of prosecutor, and her marriage to a rich white man all serve as important signals to Black voters that she may be more concerned about other groups’ interests than she is about African Americans.

The observational and experimental data presented in this paper strongly support that argument. While roughly 80 percent of African Americans thought that Barack Obama cared “a lot” about Black people’s needs and interests during his presidency, we show that only 38 percent of African Americans said the same about Harris in an August 2021 survey—lower than the share of African Americans who thought Hillary Clinton cared a lot about Black people in 2016 (Sides, Tesler an Vavreck 2019). We then draw on data from large national surveys to show that measures of ingroup consciousness were unrelated to Black support for Harris when she was a candidate for president in 2019, were a significant predictor of rating Obama more favorably than Harris in 2020, and are a significantly weaker predictor of support for Harris among Black youths than they are for older African Americans. Finally, we present results from original survey experiments showing that randomly priming respondents with a picture of Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, beforehand lowed African Americans’ favorability of the vice president by nine percentage points.

Author

• Samantha Canty, University of California, Irvine