Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. Political Campaigns

5. Racializing Immigration Policy: Issue Ads in the 2006 Election

 Racializing Immigration Policy Issue Ads in the 2006 Election I n CHaPtEr 1, we focused our attention on the primary forms of racebased appeals that have appeared in political campaign advertisements over the past three decades. We specifically described how race-based appeals were communicated through various combinations of racialized language and images. We discussed the electoral circumstances that gave rise to their deployment and speculated on the ways that such ads might intentionally or unintentionally disadvantage one candidate or another or work to frame sponsoring candidates in the best possible light to voters. In other words, we considered race-based appeals primarily within the particular context of an election but focused our discussion on how such ads potentially affect candidates directly. In the midst of that, we pointed out that substantive policy issues were mentioned infrequently in both racist and racial appeals. However, in some cases, policy issues can be the vehicle for deploying race-based appeals. That is, there are times when an issue, rather than a candidate of color, becomes the reference point for various racial stereotypes, images, and language that may be used in an ad. Further, we expect that, given the challenges and potential negative reactions candidates might receive from voters when making a racist or racial appeal, candidates may increasingly target issues rather than candidates of color specifically when lodging specific kinds of race-based appeals—racist appeals in particular. Thus, the case study we present in this chapter provides an opportunity to accomplish two things: first, to consider in more depth and detail how language and images in political ads become racialized; and second, to 10 Case studies in Race Appeal demonstrate how this is accomplished in and through policy discussion. We demonstrate how race-based political campaign ads racially frame policy discussions in ways that have the potential to appeal to negative racial stereotypes , prejudices, and resentments generated by the issues themselves rather than by candidates. That is, by focusing on the issue of immigration, we demonstrate how racialized issues may stand in for candidates of color as a means by which negative racial attitudes are drawn out. Standard issue-oriented political advertisements focus on one or more substantive policy issues, and sponsoring candidates attempt to align themselves with what they believe is the preferred position on the issue or issues in question while negatively associating their opponents with the less desirable position. While the electoral interests of candidates are still the most salient concern in issue ads, calling attention to certain issues and issue positions frames not only the candidates but also the issue that is the principal subject of the ad. Thus, in this chapter we are less concerned with how race-based appeals are constructed to advance candidates’ electoral hopes than with how racialized language and imagery related to immigration—replete within a corpus of ads spanning multiple elections in a given election year—racialized a policy issue in such a way to create the potential for ads’ sponsors and candidates to appeal to race through the vehicle of policy debate. ImmIgRATIon ADs In The 00 eLeCTIon public attention to immigration skyrocketed in the year preceding the 2006 midterm elections, as seen in the frequency with which the issue found its way into news reports in that year. From 2000 to the end of 2004, immigration was cited in the headline or lead paragraph of 2,423 stories in U.S. newspapers and wire service reports. In 2005, however—just one year—we found virtually the same number of stories reporting on immigration issues as in the previous four years combined. Immigration issues increasingly dominated the television news agenda, as well. In fact, lou Dobbs, formerly of Cnn—who, some assert, single-handedly elevated the issue of immigration to the national stage—featured a story on immigration in almost every episode of his nightly show, The Lou Dobbs Report.1 Immigration’s newfound position atop the media agenda shaped both the public agenda (the percentage of the population citing immigration as an issue of greatest concern) and the agenda of congressional and state-level lawmakers. By the end of 2005, 40–80 percent of American citizens surveyed (depending on the poll and the specific wording of the question) reported that immigration was on the list of issues that most concerned them. The year also ended with a prominent, hotly debated immigration bill: the Border Racializing Immigration...