Candidate evaluations only become racially driven when the candidate herself signals race

Evidence

Racial attitudes also influence evaluations of black and ethnocentric white candidates but do not have a clear independent influence on evaluations of the major-party presidential candidates. … Presumably, the explicit racial content of these attitude objects evoked racial predispositions. The mainstream white candidates, in contrast, seem to have evoked primarily nonracial predispositions. Moreover, higher education (as with higher information flows more generally) increased the constraint of all these predictor attitudes with policy and candidate evaluations—but did not influence the balance between racial and nonracial predictors. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3737

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the common assumption that education or sophistication mutes racial effects — the constraint moves but the racial/nonracial balance does not.