Barack Obama's “American” Problem: Unhyphenated Americans in the 2008 Elections^*

Abstract

Objectives. The largest increase of any ancestry group between the 1990 and 2000 Census in the United States were “unhyphenated Americans,” those whites who claimed an “American” or no ancestry. This article measures this group's voting habits in the 2008 elections. Methods. With individual‐level attitudinal data and county‐level voting data from the 2008 primary and 2000–2008 general elections, the analyses use quantitative methods to estimate unhyphenated Americans' voting behavior. Results. Evidence indicates a strong rejection of Obama among counties with high proportions of unhyphenated Americans in both the 2008 primary and general elections. Conclusion. While spatially concentrated in and near Appalachia, unhyphenated Americans' politics are distinctive irrespective of socioeconomic status, religion, and geography, being one of the few groups in which Barack Obama lost votes compared to previous Democratic nominees. Variation in the share of unhyphenated Americans explains more of the difference between 2008 and past elections than variation in the share of African Americans per county.

A Muslim President? Misperceptions of Barack Obama's Faith in the 2008 Presidential Campaign

“…(Please see the supporting information for these results). Confirming the electoral consequences of the “de‐Americanization” of Obama, Arbour and Teigen () show that as the number of “unhyphenated” white Americans—those who do not mention any ethnic or country origin for their ancestors—increased in a county, Obama's vote share decreased significantly in the 2008 general election as well as in the Democratic primaries. Sheets, Domke, and Greenwald () use an online sample to undertake an implicit association test of the relationship between Christianness and Americanness of the 2008 candidates.…”

Race, Religion, and Obama in Appalachia*

“…Some political scientists have started examining the political implications of what sociologists labeled “unhyphenated Americans”—that is, white Americans who identify themselves as ethnically American, rather than European (Lieberson, ; Lieberson and Waters, , ). Arbour and Teigen () use aggregate‐level data to show that, controlling for other factors, variation in the county‐level share of individuals identifying as ethnically “American” is a strong predictor of opposition to the Obama candidacy in 2008. Knoll () complements this by using individual‐level data from a 2012 exit poll of voters in Boyle County, Kentucky, to show that unhyphenated American identity is associated with opposition to Obama, but is mediated by sentiments related to nativism and cultural threat.…”

Cracker craic: the politics and economics of Scots-Irish cultural promotion in the USA

“…Even as Scots-Irish identity goes unrecognized, contested, or confused in certain quarters, there are scholars (see Stockton 2008, Arbour andTeigen 2011) as well as political journalists, and politicians who detect its presence to this day in a set of distinguishing political sensibilities. The Scots-Irish have been cast as archetypal 'Reagan Democrats' (Joseph 2009), the 'core culture around which Red State America has gathered and thrived' (Tilove 2008), and the reason for Barack Obama's poor performance among working-class white voters in the Upland South (Scallon 2008).…”