“…Scholarly research backed up Atwater’s point. In her influential 2017 book “The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality,” Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg argued that explicit appeals to race had become ineffective because many voters had a conception of themselves as believers in equality even as they continued to respond to race-based appeals. In order to work, those appeals had to be packaged in a way that enabled voters to maintain that self-conception.”