Over the past month, many journalists have identified a new development in the presidential campaign: Mitt Romney’s decision to begin making coded racial appeals to the white working class. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank was one of the first on the case. In an Aug. 10 column, he bashed Romney’s misleading welfare ad, which Milbank described as a bit of race-baiting designed to bolster Romney’s standing with “white, working class men.”

A few weeks later, the theme suddenly exploded: writing on Aug. 27 for The New York Times’s “Campaign Stops” section, Tom Edsall (disclosure: a former professor of mine) described the welfare ad as an appeal to the racial and economic anxieties of “whites without college degrees.” (Edsall found a similarly racialized appeal in Romney’s Medicare ad, with the target in that case being white Medicare recipients.) The same day, John Judis wrote in The New Republic that, “With his recent ads on welfare, Romney is playing on the racial resentments of the white working class the same way Reagan did.” A day later, Peter Beinart described the welfare ad as part of Romney’s “bubba strategy” in The Daily Beast. And a day after that, National Journal’s Ron Fournier accused Romney of “playing the race card,” again in order to appeal to “working-class whites.” These are prominent names in political journalism, and they were reaching a consensus.

But according to several scholars of race and public opinion who have been writing their own findings over the past month, the journalistic consensus is only half-right. Romney’s welfare ad is an appeal to whites’ racial resentment, they say—but it’s an appeal that is most likely to resonate not with working-class voters but among college-educated whites.

Let’s first take the part where the journalists and academics agree—the contention that racial resentment shapes the welfare ad’s effect. Some evidence comes from Michael Tesler, a political scientist at Brown University and the author of Obama’s Race, who penned an Aug. 20 blog post examining the relationship between racial attitudes and viewers’ response to the ad. Tesler found that when people hadn’t seen the welfare ad, their opinions about how Romney’s policies would affect the middle class, the poor, or black people weren’t connected to their level of racial resentment. (For the questions used to measure “racial resentment,” a term of art in the field, see here.) Upon seeing the ad, though, viewers with higher levels of racial resentment thought Romney’s policies were more likely to help those groups—while viewers with low levels of racial resentment now believed the opposite. As Tesler puts it, the ad made attitudes toward blacks “a stronger predictor of respondents’ views about the consequences of Romney’s policies.” In other words, the ad apparently polarized opinion, with more racially resentful viewers thinking better of Romney after seeing it. (Interestingly, there was no parallel effect on views of Obama’s policies—presumably because racial attitudes are already strongly linked to peoples’ assessments of the president.)

Another finding, described last week on the polling site YouGov by Harvard professor Ryan Enos, is easier to explain. The Romney ad’s claim that Obama has “gutted” the work requirement for welfare has been roundly debunked by factcheckers. But Enos found that respondents with high levels of racial resentment were far more likely to believe the claim than people with low resentment levels. Moreover, high-resentment individuals were inclined to believe the claim about Obama whether or not they believed there was a work requirement in the first place. There may be ways to unpack that logical conundrum, but as Enos writes, “more likely what is holding these attitudes towards work, welfare, and Obama together is the common association with African Americans—and a resentment of African Americans.”

That’s exactly how coded appeals work—they give people enough information to bring underlying beliefs to the surface.

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