Paternalistic Push & Pull: The Role of Sexism in Public Opinion of Kamala Harris (working paper)
Studies indicate that sexism played a prominent role in the 2016 U.S Presidential election (Frasure 2018; Glick 2019; Ratliff et al. 2019). President Trump’s 2024 victory signifies a tendency wherein Trump prevails upon facing a female candidate. This paper examines sexism’s influence in favorability toward Vice President Harris relative to President Trump across race and gender given Trump’s gains in minority supporters. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey I examine these attitudes across four racial groups, Asian Americans, Latinos, White, and Black U.S residents between men and women.
Reclaiming Femininity: The Role of Benevolent Sexism in Black & Latina Women’s Policy Preferences (working paper with Samantha Acuña)
To what extent does benevolent sexism influence policy preferences among Latinas and Black women? While prior scholarship explored the role of benevolent sexism among women, the results are mixed in some instances women with high levels of benevolent sexism favor more progressive policy outcomes such as equal pay (Gothreau et al. 2019). Other times they oppose these policies e.g. favoring decreased funding for planned parenthood. However, the majority of this scholarship recruits predominantly White samples. This leaves our understanding of benevolent sexism’s influence on minority women lacking. To rectify this absence we utilize the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Study to investigate how benevolent sexism influences policy preferences among Black women and Latinas. We anticipate that these women may express more conservative gender policy preferences as these women of color begin expressing higher levels of benevolent sexism. Preliminary findings demonstrate that benevolent sexism is correlated with more conservative policy preferences among Black women and Latinas.
Mayor London Breed and the Limits of Governing while Black and Female in San Francisco (with Chelsea Jones & Lorrie Frasure)
In 2018 London Breed won a hotly contested Mayoral election to become the first Black female Mayor in San Francisco’s 200-year history. Given the city’s majority white and Asian populations, sparse Black population of about 5%, and storied history of LGBTQ activism, Breed’s historic victory over an Asian woman and an openly gay, white male creates a lens through which to examine the role that descriptive representation symbolic empowerment and deracialization play in determining a candidate’s electoral strategy and success. Using a case study approach with the analysis of news reports, campaign materials, speeches and social media posts, as well as some descriptive statistics from the US Census and the Survey USA Election Poll collected in January 2018 among San Franciscans, we examine Breed’s electoral campaign success and first few years of governing, including through the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests. We highlight the pragmatic approach that led to her successful bid for Mayor of San Francisco. Symbolic empowerment theory considers how a historic first, motivates voters to participate in politics, through shared identities such as race (Simien, 2015). In this chapter, we consider how Breed as a historic first inspired Black residents to turn out to vote, in hopes of reversing the history of political neglect. Applying McCormick and Jones (1993) classic approach to successful deracialized campaigns, our case study underscores three main components: (1) avoidance of public appeals to the Black community, (2) purposeful avoidance of racially divisive issues, and (3) promotion of “non-threatening” images. Breed’s electoral success appears to have been strategically bound by these components. However, moving from an electoral coalition to a governance strategy in the face of a global mass protest for Black life, raised challenges in maintaining a deracialized strategy.