Racial Cues in Campaign News: The Effects of Candidate Strategies on Group Activation and Political Attentiveness among African Americans

Abstract

In this chapter, we attempt to fill this explanatory void by synthesizingolder ideas about the role of group cues in campaign communication withnew theories about the impact of emotional reactions in the realm of poli-tics. We argue that candidates can activate latent support among large socialgroupings by emphasizing the distance between them and their oppositionin terms of their support for group interests. The reason group cues are soeffective in the activation process is that they trigger various emotionalreactions among group members, reactions that in turn affect candidateevaluations and stimulate campaign learning (Marcus, Neuman, andMacKuen 2000). In sum, we hope to illuminate and precisely test a mech-anism by which different campaigns produce fairly consistent, yet neveridentical, electoral outcomes.