Has Barack Obama's success transformed the racial divide? Did he somehow transcend or help bring to an end centuries of racial division in the United States? Did he deliberately run a strategically race-neutral, race-evading campaign? Did his race and ingrained American racism constrain the reach of his success? Have we arrived at that postracial moment that has long been the stuff of dreams and high oratory? Or was the outcome of the 2008 presidential election driven entirely by nonracial factors, such as a weak Republican ticket, an incumbent party saddled with defending an unpopular war, and a worsening economic crisis? It is at once too simple and yet entirely appropriate to say that the answers to these questions are, in a phrase, complicated matters. These complexities can, however, be brought into sharper focus.

In 2008, following a campaign in which racial issues were largely absent, Americans elected their first Black president. This article argues that Obama's election does not signal the dawn of a postracial era in U.S. politics. Rather, it reflects the current structure of racial politics in the United States—a division between those who favor color-blind policies and seek to keep racial discussions out of politics, and those who favor race-conscious measures and whose policies are often political liabilities. The Obama campaign sought to win support from both camps. Only if pervasive material racial inequalities are reduced can such a strategy succeed in the long run.

Barack Obama's political strategies during the 2008 presidential election were those of a cohort of younger, new Black politicians, who have rewritten the playbook by which Blacks can win election. Their success suggests that White racism is no longer the insuperable barrier to Black success that it has been for all of American history and that the old style of Black politics, which relied heavily on racial bloc voting and influence peddling within the Black community, may be obsolete. However, Obama's strategy of not appealing to narrow racial solidarities but instead of drawing broad support from voters of all races cast a shadow of doubt on Obama's racial loyalties. It remains unclear whether the Obama phenomenon will mark the renewal of civil rights or the repudiation of its historical commitment to the most disadvantaged.

President-elect Barack Obama will take office after a campaign that was pathbreaking on many levels. The argument here, necessarily somewhat speculative, is that Obama's management of his racial identity and of racial politics is roughly predictive of his soon-to-begin management of executive power in the United States. Obama is characterized as a “practical idealist,” a true pragmatist in the deeply grounded, philosophical (as opposed to vulgar) sense of that term. Attention is directed to the way Obama has handled or may be likely to handle the racial politics of the election itself, the ongoing realities of structural racism in the United States and the problem of exercising executive power in an endemically racial state, the role of race in national politics, and the role of race in global politics. The uniqueness of this new administration—headed by a preternaturally skilled and intellectually prepared Black politician—is not chiefly located in the symbolism of Obama's Blackness, important as that is. Rather it is Obama's formation as a Black intellectual and politician that may be expected to guide his thought and action in the White House.

The issue of race has followed Barack Obama since he emerged on the national political scene, continuing unabated throughout his successful 2008 presidential campaign. Although the issue of race is not always explicitly acknowledged or discussed by Obama himself, the implications of his successful candidacy for U.S. politics and the ways people in the United States think about race more generally have been of great interest to media pundits, social scientists, and laypersons alike. Race has been considered a substantial barrier to the electoral success of previous non-White political candidates; therefore Obama's success requires reconsideration of how race can be expected to influence political outcomes in the future. In addition, his biracial identity also raises questions about how his role as a prominent cultural figure will affect existing racial categories in the United States. A review of social psychological evidence highlights the importance of understanding the ambivalence that characterizes contemporary racial attitudes, as well as the ways in which definitions of race and racial categories may be changing, in order to understand the impact that Obama could have on the future of racial politics. We conclude that Obama's victory represents a large step in the direction of increasingly positive racial attitudes and more sophisticated public conceptualizations of race, but steady progress in the coming years is not guaranteed. We consider some of the opportunities and obstacles that may affect the trajectory of future gains in the struggle for racial equality in the Obama era.

Images of Black Americans are becoming remarkably diverse, enabling Barack Obama to defy simple-minded stereotypes and succeed. Understood through the Stereotype Content Model's demonstrably fundamental trait dimensions of perceived warmth and competence, images of Black Americans show three relevant patterns. Stereotyping by omission allows non-Blacks to accentuate the positive, excluding any lingering negativity but implying it by its absence; specifically, describing Black Americans as gregarious and passionate suggests warmth but ignores competence and implies its lack. Obama's credentials prevented him from being cast as incompetent, though the experience debate continued. His legendary calm and passionate charisma saved him on the warmth dimension. Social class subtypes for Black Americans differentiate dramatically between low-income Blacks and Black professionals, among both non-Black and Black samples. Obama clearly fit the moderately warm, highly competent Black-professional subtype. Finally, the campaign's events (and nonevents) allowed voter habituation to overcome non-Blacks' automatic emotional vigilance to Black Americans.

We conducted a longitudinal study involving 734 college students over a three-month period that included the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The study investigated factors such as respondents' personality characteristics and ideological proclivities in predicting perceptions of the major candidates and both stability and change in voting preferences for Barack Obama and John McCain. Previous research on personality and political orientation suggests that Openness to New Experiences is positively associated with liberal political preferences, whereas Conscientiousness is positively associated with conservative preferences; we replicated these results in the context of the current study. Several ideological factors also predicted conversion to Obama's candidacy. These included respondents' degree of self-reported liberalism, perceptions of their parents as liberal (versus conservative), and lower scores on measures of authoritarianism and political system justification (i.e., support for the prevailing system of electoral politics and government). The effects of Openness and Conscientiousness on candidate preferences were statistically mediated by ideological variables, providing further evidence that general predispositions exist that link personality and political orientation, and these are likely to play a significant role in electoral politics. Implications for the integration of “top-down” (institutional) and “bottom-up” (psychological) approaches to the study of political behavior are discussed.

The presidential campaign of Barack Obama was remarkable for the millions of volunteers and donors it inspired. In this article, we argue that the Obama campaign was inspirational because it communicated an ecosystem perspective—a perspective in which people care about something larger than the self. We describe the characteristics of ecosystem perspectives revealed in a program of social psychological research and how these characteristics translate to ecosystem leadership. We then consider Obama's speeches and actions at critical moments in the campaign that suggest to us an ecosystem perspective.

Barack Obama's election as the first Black president of the United States has stimulated much discussion about progress toward racial equality in the United States. Opinion surveys document that White Americans reliably perceive the rate of progress toward racial equality as greater than do Black Americans. We focus on two psychological factors that contribute to these diverging perceptions: (1) the tendency of White Americans and Black Americans to adopt different reference points to assess racial progress, and (2) the general tendency to frame social change as a zero-sum game in which Black Americans' gains entail losses for White Americans. We review research examining how these two factors contribute to racial polarization on the topic of progress toward equality. We also draw on excerpts from Barack Obama's speeches and writings to demonstrate that he often frames issues in ways that, our research suggests, has the potential to substantially bridge these racial divisions.

During his campaign, Barack Obama inspired record numbers of Americans to donate their time and money to his electoral efforts. Now that the campaign is over, can Obama sustain this civic engagement as he begins to govern? This paper examines the possibilities for sustaining Obama's electoral mobilization, introducing new data from fieldwork conducted from September 2008 to Election Day 2008 in Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; and Charlotte, North Carolina. The data include staff interviews and observations of canvassing, rallies, and other get-out-the-vote efforts of the local Obama and McCain campaigns, the local Democratic and Republican Parties, and various nonprofit groups in each city. Based on these data it is clear that each city was characterized by excitement and heightened activity; however, the number of activities and the strength of the grassroots organization varied across the cities according to national electoral imperatives in ways that should affect the potential for future mobilization. As such, sustaining the mobilization of Obama's supporters faces several hurdles: campaign staff and volunteers in many cities were drawn from outside the community, tensions arose between local grassroots organizations and the campaign over resources and issue focus, and the extremely large amounts of money needed to finance the mobilization were not distributed evenly across cities and states.

This paper explores how race/ethnicity and perceptions of racial discrimination and inequality shape beliefs about the implications of an Obama presidency for U.S. race relations. Specifically, using data from a June/July 2008 Gallup/USA Today survey, we examine how African Americans, Hispanics, and Whites differ in their perceptions of the importance of an Obama victory and in beliefs about the implications of such for race relations, racial progress, and opportunities for Blacks in their careers and in national politics. We also examine how perceptions of the extent and nature of racial discrimination and inequality shape these outcomes (overall and by race/ethnicity). Results show that African Americans, relative to Whites and Hispanics, are especially likely to see an Obama victory as important and meaningful in terms of relatively abstract notions of racial change. In contrast, Hispanics are more likely than African Americans and Whites to believe that an Obama win will translate into concrete societal changes, such as expanded opportunities for Blacks in work and politics. In addition, perceived discrimination and inequality positively shape all of the outcomes under study (more perceived discrimination equals more importance and optimism attached to an Obama win), though this association is especially strong among Whites—a pattern possibly rooted in divergent meanings attached to perceived discrimination and inequality by race/ethnicity. Overall, our findings suggest that African Americans view an Obama victory as meaningful primarily because of its symbolic significance, rather than because they believe it will result in substantive racial progress. We conclude by offering some speculation and selected questions for future research on race and U.S. politics.

Race and patriotism were recurring themes during the 2008 presidential campaign that were used to highlight differences between Barack Obama and his opponents. Yet we know little about how racism and patriotism ultimately affected support for Obama among Whites. Appeals to working-class Whites, a lot of which were thinly veiled allusions to Obama's race and perceived lack of patriotism, also figured prominently in the campaign. Accordingly, this paper explores how racism and patriotism shaped support for Obama, as well as the extent to which the effect of each is moderated by class. We find that rising symbolic racism dampened his support among Whites, as did patriotism. Moreover, we find the effects of patriotism on support for Obama were contingent upon class.

In the 2008 presidential primaries, Barack Obama seemed to have a problem connecting with Asian American voters, as he lost heavily to Hillary Clinton in states such as California and New Jersey. Many speculated that race-based considerations played a significant role in Asian Americans' overwhelming support for Clinton over Obama, with conjectures built on a limited set of aggregate exit poll data from three states. Race may also have accounted for the high proportion of Asian Americans who in polls said they were undecided heading into the November election. In this article, we analyze the importance of race-based considerations in the Asian American vote, after controlling for other factors such as partisanship, issue preferences, age, and gender. We rely on the National Asian American Survey, a large-scale telephone survey of Asian American voters conducted mostly in the fall of 2008, with interviews in eight languages and with sizable numbers of respondents from the six largest national-origin groups. We find that race-based considerations do indeed help explain the Asian American vote in 2008. Respondents who failed to see political commonality between Asian Americans and Blacks were less likely to vote for Obama in the primary, although other factors, such as age and gender, played a more significant role. Finally, the role of race-based considerations paled in comparison to party identification and issue preferences in the general election, suggesting that election contexts can play an important role in shaping whether or not race is relevant to vote choice.