“You Had Better Mention All of Them:” Race and Gender Effects in Election Loss Narratives

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231217511
• Author: Pavielle Haines,Seth Masket
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(1) 417–431

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231217511

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“You Had Better Mention All of Them:”

Race and Gender Effects in Election Loss

Narratives

Pavielle Haines

1

and Seth Masket

2



Abstract

A common explanation for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential election was that she catered to minorities at

the expense of the broader electorate. How does such a loss narrative inf‌luence voters’interpretation of subsequent

elections? In a conjoint experiment, white and Black Democratic respondents were randomly exposed to a vignette that

ascribed Democrats’2016 losses to their focus on identity politics. This narrative had an asymmetric effect on attitudes

toward the 2020 election based on both race and gender. While it had no impact on white men’s or Black women’s

understanding of why the Democrats lost the last presidential election or their candidate preferences for the next, it had

a substantial impact on the electoral attitudes of white women and a moderate impact on those of Black men. Specif‌ically,

it shifted their support away from candidates committed to gender and racial equity and toward those emphasizing broad

economic policies. The identity politics loss narrative thus may have acted as a self-fulf‌illing prophecy that advantaged

white male candidates in the 2020 election.

Keywords

identity politics, primary elections, loss narratives, 2016 election

Introduction

A common explanation for the outcome of the 2016

American presidential election was that Hillary Clinton

lost because of her practice of “identity politics.”That is,

her outreach and championing of women, people of color,

the LGBT community, and other politically marginalized

and underrepresented groups ultimately alienated white,

male, middle class voters, who in turn voted for Donald

Trump. A Democratic nominee promoting a more in-

clusive and universal message, the argument goes, would

have kept those swing voters within the Democratic fold.

In this paper, we are less concerned with evaluating the

truth of this argument than examining the consequences of

making it. If voters heard this election loss narrative, how

did it affect their interpretation of the 2016 election? First,

did they accept it as valid? If so, did it inf‌luence who they

saw as an ideal Democratic presidential nominee for

2020? These are not idle questions. The Democratic

presidential f‌ield for the 2020 election was the most di-

verse in the party’s history, and questions of identity were

at the fore of consideration by party leaders and voters. If

political observers and party elites can use an election loss

narrative to inf‌luence how voters interpret the role of

gender and race in recent elections, and consequently how

they evaluate current presidential candidates, they can do

much to shape the contours of the next major election.

We examined these questions with a unique conjoint

survey experiment in which white and African American

Democratic identif‌iers chose between two Democratic

candidates in a series of primary trial heats. We exposed a

subset of the respondents to an identity politics narrative

about Democratic losses and measured how the narrative

inf‌luenced the kinds of candidates that Democratic

identif‌iers preferred for the 2020 presidential election. Our

f‌indings suggest that potential Democratic voters reacted

Department of Politics and Philosophy, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID,

USA

2

Department of Political Science, University of Denver, Denver, CO,

USA

Corresponding Author:

Pavielle Haines, Department of Politics and Philosophy, University of

Idaho, 875Perimeter Drive, Moscow, ID 83843, USA.

Email: phaines@uidaho.edu