Like millions of people, Matthew Tokeshi will be following Election Day—and the days that follow—closely, waiting to find out the outcome of the tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

He’ll be watching to see how Harris performs in key battleground states and how that compares to President Joe Biden’s narrow wins in 2020 and Hillary Clinton’s losses in 2016. He’s wondering whether immigration and culture war issues will be tipping points for voters, and how the Democratic and Republican parties will reshape their positions if they lose.

But the assistant professor of political science will also be keeping an eye on another detail: how pundits talk about the role of race and gender in light of a Harris win or loss.

“If Harris wins, I expect a lot of punditry saying, ‘See, race and gender don’t matter anymore,’” Tokeshi says. “And to some extent, it’s true that if she wins, she would prove that a Black woman can win a national election.

“But it’s also misleading in the sense that Harris has avoided any discussion of doing anything significant about existing racial inequalities in the United States,” he adds. “She has also made a point to avoid commenting on the conjecture that racism and sexism have hurt her in this campaign. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a candidate who happens to be a Black woman can win, but it remains to be seen whether a Black woman who makes issues of racial inequality and sexism a core part of her message can win.”

Toskeshi has been considering questions of race—both of the candidate and the issues they champion—since he watched former President Barack Obama’s win in 2008.

“When I was growing up in the 1990s,” he says, “the most powerful positions in American politics—the president, senators and governors—were pretty much reserved for whites only, usually white men. To see a Black man have a good chance to win was eye-opening.”

In his book Campaigning While Black: Black Candidates, White Majorities, and the Quest for Political Office, Tokeshi considers whether Black candidates fare worse because of their race, if they face different kinds of attacks than white candidates, and how Black candidates should respond to race-based attacks. His answers to these questions—and more—are highly data-driven. He has created a database with hundreds of candidates and election results, analyzed campaign news coverage, and conducted original experiments.

Tokeshi has already released some initial research about the 2024 race. In an August 2024 post on the Good Authority blog, he shared his findings about how Americans perceive Harris’ racial identity and how those results varied among different racial groups. Black Americans were more like to say that Harris is Black, while Asian Americans were more likely to identify her as Asian or biracial Black and Asian. This is significant because, as Tokeshi says in a September post on the Columbia University Press blog, voters’ opinions are often based on their attitudes toward the social groups that candidates appear to stand with or against. And one of the most effective ways a candidate can align with a social group is to belong to that group.

However, these results come from surveys conducted in early March, when Biden was still the presumptive nominee. Tokeshi is continuing to survey respondents throughout the fall and beyond the election to track how perceptions of Harris’ racial background evolve alongside her rise in prominence.

“I imagine that there will be somewhat fewer people saying they do not know what she is, but I don’t expect the changes to be very dramatic,” he says. “While it’s true that there has been a lot of discourse around her identity in the media, it’s unclear how much of that has actually penetrated the national consciousness.”

Tokeshi says it will be months after the election before early analyses are released, and more definitive findings typically take two years. But based on his research of Clinton’s and Obama’s campaigns, he has a few observations.

Harris, Tokeshi says, is taking a page from Obama’s playbook. Both made symbolic overtures to Black voters like campaigning in Black churches and highlighting parts of their biographies that resonate with Black voters. Like Obama, Harris has also been hesitant to appear too radical—and even attempting to reach conservative voters by supporting increased border security spending and highlighting her gun ownership. Clinton, meanwhile, had a long history of making feminism a core part of her political persona and spoke often about implicit bias, police brutality, and undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

“I am pretty sure that when the dust settles, we will see that anti-Black animus will be a significant predictor of opposition to Harris,” Tokeshi says. “We have a lot of evidence showing that this happens whenever a Black candidate runs for high office in the U.S., and there’s strong evidence that this happens to Democratic presidential candidates, white or Black, since Obama ran for president. The big question is how big that effect will be.”

Kim Catley is a freelance writer based in Richmond, Va. She previously worked for the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University and is now a contributor to a number of university magazines. Photograph courtesy of the Democratic National Committee.