Did race really matter?

Race is the most enduring cleavage in American politics. It divided the authors of the Constitution and fueled the Civil War; afterward, Southern Democrats invoked white supremacy to maintain a one-party system. The success of the civil rights movement undermined that system; but after 1968, Republicans used a Southern strategy, employing both subtle and not-so-subtle racial appeals to lure white voters away from the Democratic Party.

As social scientists have demonstrated, Americans no longer subscribe to the explicit racism that denied blacks the vote and refused them entry into the same public facilities as whites. But many white Americans still harbor degrees of conscious or unconscious resentment against blacks. In an analysis of the extensive surveys conducted by the American National Election Studies, polling analyst Scott Winship and I found that this kind of resentment remains, most commonly among men rather than women, the less well-to-do rather than the wealthy, those who lack a college degree, those who work at blue-collar rather than white-collar jobs and those who live in small towns in the Midwest and South.

Thus, as the 2008 presidential election got underway in earnest last year, I certainly believed that these voters -- not just Republicans but Democrats as well -- would take exception to an African American presidential candidate and perhaps even deny Barack Obama the presidency. And the McCain campaign appeared to have been aware of these voters. While eschewing explicit racial appeals, it did play on the contrast between John McCain as an "American president Americans have been waiting for" and Obama's African roots.

McCain's campaign also portrayed Obama's tax cuts as "welfare to those who pay none" -- which is the kind of formulation Republicans have used repeatedly through the years to suggest that Democrats want to transfer money from hardworking whites to indolent blacks. And in the last weeks of the campaign, an independent Republican group ran incendiary ads trying to link Obama to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his black former pastor.

Given all this, there was good reason to expect some kind of white backlash at the polls. And it did come -- among exactly those groups that Winship and I had identified. But in the end, it didn't matter enough to decide the election.