Should identity-based appeals be a part of the Democratic Party’s approach to electoral campaigns? In The Case for Identity Politics, Christopher Stout calls the reader to consider the effectiveness of the deracialization approach (avoiding appeals to race and focusing instead on class-based policy appeals) for campaigns in the current era.

Stout makes a convincing argument that the answer to this question is context dependent. However, using survey data as well as experiments, Stout makes it clear that the Democratic Party cannot ignore race, especially since black and Latino voters are an important part of its base. Moreover, given the partisan sorting that has occurred over time, the issue of race is not the polarizing force within the Democratic Party that it once was. Indeed, Stout provides evidence that white Democrats are open to race-based appeals.

In many ways, Stout provides a postmortem of the 2016 election. After Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, the major point of analysis was that she focused too much on race. Stout’s analysis gives us to reason to believe that her focus on race was undermined by her past statements (and those of her husband) that were antithetical to her current stances. Furthermore, as Stout aptly notes in the introduction, identity-based appeals were on display from both candidates.