Racial Context and the 2008 and 2012 US Presidential Elections

White voter support was a key to Barack Obama’s historical win of the Presidency in 2008, which begs the question of whether America had entered into an era of post-racial politics. Obama’s white support, however, declined in his 2012 reelection. To account for the variation in Obama’s white voter support in states, this article examines the previous contextual explanations of white voting behavior. Drawing on arguments in the recent American political development literature (King and Smith 2005, Novkov 2008), this research proposes a new racial tension theory to link Obama’s white voter support to the deep-seated racial tension at the state level. In doing so, a theoretic and empirical solution is offered to solve the problem of high correlations between the major contextual variables measuring black density (Key 1949), racial diversity (Hero 1998), state political culture (Elazar 1984) and social capital (Putnam 2000). The converged findings based on multiple methods clearly show that the state-level white support for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 was directly related to the racial context of a state. Overall this study reveals the enduring, rather than vanishing, effect of race.