It seems that the next election is ever looming in U.S. political culture. With the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and the 2022 midterm elections now in hindsight, Christopher T. Stout’s The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals succeeds at being both timely and timeless scholarship. This work is well researched and data-rich, which helps because, in this post-Obama, MAGA era where insurrections happen and defeated former presidents attempt to overturn the results of an election, Stout’s thesis sets a tall order for itself. Exploring themes of class, race consciousness, the notion of linked fates, and racial polarization, The Case for Identity Politics queries whether racial appeals improve the electability of Democrats in the current political context.
Stout begins by highlighting Charles V. Hamilton’s 1977 argument that the Democratic Party’s electoral racialization strategy—whether to explicitly center race in its campaigns—should be determined by the political context...
University of California Press