Research suggests party affiliation is main voter cue, but identity of candidates could offer boost

The presidential election is just weeks away, and the matchup between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is historic in so many ways. In one instance, a former president was renominated but faces conviction on 34 felony counts of business fraud, and in the other instance, a vice president replaced her party’s standing president as the presidential nominee after the Democratic primary concluded.

The matchup is also historic because it is the first time a woman candidate of color is one of the two presidential nominees. As voters are evaluating the candidates in terms of their policies, some pundits have questioned how the identity of the candidates—whether age, gender or racial identity—could impact their chance of winning over consideration of their party affiliation.

Research from Michigan State University can help answer that question in terms of the success of minority political candidates.

Eric Juenke, associate professor in the Department of Political Science, found that minority candidates were successful at the same rate as white candidates. Further, in some cases, they held a slight advantage—suggesting racial biases factor less often in minority candidate success compared to their party affiliation.

“The original puzzle was when Black, Latino and Asian Americans run for political office, do they face a penalty for not being white? For decades, the answer was yes,” Juenke said. “However, our research challenges this notion and suggests it is more nuanced.”

Research setup

The study, published in the British Journal of Political Science, examined around 400 state legislative elections where a white candidate was narrowly defeated or narrowly won an election against a candidate of color.

It’s important to note that there are not many Black, Latino or Asian American officeholders outside of majority minority districts, and this could be seen as a bias against minority politicians. In the study, races that fit the model from 2018 and 2020 were used, which are elections where a minority candidate faced a white candidate in the primary and then faced a competitive general election afterwards.”

Therefore, for this study, Juenke, who also serves as a faculty member in Chicano/Latino Studies in the College of Social Science, needed to examine results in close races between white and non-white candidates. The fact that there are only 400 of these kinds of elections out of thousands in the data shows how rare it is that voters get to choose a minority candidate in a competitive race.

“So we asked what happens when we code the candidates by the gender, race and ethnicities as presented by them in websites and interviews and look at the actual candidate choices the parties were giving voters, and we found that voters are just as likely to choose a minority candidate as the white counterparts,” he said.

From these 400 or so races, voters relied more on party affiliation when selecting a candidate as opposed to their identity.

Additionally, from this study, when a candidate is a minority against a white opponent, they might get a slight advantage compared to white candidates. This effect has been supported in other research, but Juenke and co-authors offer more robust evidence in the real world.

This appears to be the case because partisans on both sides, particularly Democrats, tend to have a slight preference for minority and women candidates within their own party whether they want to see more representation or because they believe those candidates will do a better job delivering on the issue voters in that party care about.

Implications of findings

The findings affirm that, for example, a conservative voter would be more likely to vote for a Black Republican than a white male Democrat, or a liberal voter would be more likely to vote for a female Democrat over a male Republican. It does not mean there is no bias—but that party affiliation is the most important factor.

Because there are more elected minority Democrats than Republicans, it appears that voting Democrat is the primary driver for more liberal voters, but we see both parties recruiting more minority candidates for office, and those candidates have also been winning.

The big implication from this study is that there could be some benefit to having a racial and/or ethnic minority identity within one’s own political party.

“We are not saying race doesn’t matter, and this is key, but party affiliation is more responsible for voters when selecting the candidates,” Juenke said. “In the last 10 years we’ve seen parties recruit more women and candidates of color, leading to the biggest growth of representation.”

So, although the research was for state races, in terms of the presidential election, Harris will need to rely on winning over the Democratic base. And while some pundits might say that her racial identity could hinder her chances, others might argue that it could help boost her, or have minimal impact on the choices voters make on Election Day.