Campaigning in a racially diversifying America: when and how cross-racial electoral mobilization works
In: Oxford scholarship online
In: Political Science
As the voting public continues to diversify across the United States, political candidates, and particularly white candidates, increasingly recognize the importance of making appeals to voters who do not look like themselves. As history has shown, this has been accomplished with varying degrees of success. In this work, Loren Collingwood develops a theory of Cross-Racial Electoral Mobilization (CRM) to explain why, when, and how candidates of one race or ethnicity act to mobilize voters of another race or ethnicity. The text looks at CRM trends and case studies over the past 70 years to gauge how politics in various places have changed as the American electorate has diversified.