Racialized Campaign Ads

Despite pundits and scholars suggesting that racial appeals play to voters’ emotions, very little is known about the emotional impact of these appeals. Most of the research on racial priming seems to conflate the effect of negative emotions. Our theory suggests that anger and fear, in the context of an implicit racial appeal, influence whites’ views about race differently. We suspect this effect occurs because anger and whites’ negative racial attitudes are tightly linked in memory. Using an experiment over two waves, we induce anger and fear from an implicit racialized campaign ad and find that anger uniquely boosts opposition to racial policies among white racial conservatives. We also find that anger from an implicit racial appeal motivates racial liberals to be more supportive of racial policies.