When journalists say what a candidate doesn't: Race, nation, and the 2008 Obama presidential campaign

Research indicates that U.S. news coverage of non-White political candidates tends to be race-focused and often prompts White voters to bring racial considerations to the polls. Indeed, racial considerations likely cost Barack Obama a significant percentage of White voters in the 2008 presidential election. Nonetheless, scholarship also suggests that Obama aggressively sought to transcend difference-racial or otherwise-during his 2008 campaign via explicit appeals to the national identity. Given these competing dynamics, we conducted a content analysis of both Obama's nationally televised campaign speeches and U.S. news coverage to assess the relative salience of nation- and race-related language present in this discourse. We find that Obama consistently emphasized nation over race, but that journalists overwhelmingly reprioritized race over nation.