Old Friends and New Alliances: How the 2004 Illinois Senate Race Complicates the Study of Race and Religion
Melissa Harris-Lacewell1
and
Jane Junn2*
1 Princeton University
2 Rutgers University
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: junn{at}rci.rutgers.edu.
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Abstract |
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Barack Obama won the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois, becoming the only current Black senator and only the fifth in history. This election generated particular interest in the study of race and elections because Obama’s challenger, Alan Keyes, is also Black. The race was the first involving two Black men representing the major political parties in a Senate election. The election provides an opportunity to pursue the dynamics of race, religion, identity, and electoral choice. The authors ask how various racial and religious cues framing Obama and Keyes influenced voters’ perceptions and assessments. They analyze data from embedded experiments in a survey of Black and White voters in Illinois and examine the significance of stimuli framing the candidates by race and religion and the effect those treatments had in eliciting racial group consciousness and altering candidate evaluations. They present the results of models estimating the effects of various influences on attitudes and behaviors in the race.
