Arkansas campaign ad sparks conservative backlash for portraying lazy
welfare recipient as white
[October 07, 2026]
By LAURA TURBAY and TERRY TANG
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — A new video from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee
Sanders was standard issue Republican messaging for promoting her
state's stricter rules for people on Medicaid. No more could able-bodied
people lounge around while receiving taxpayer-funded healthcare, she
said — they needed to work.
But the decision to portray an unemployed moocher as a young, white,
cheeseball-chomping gamer named Brad upset some conservative
commentators last week. Five decades after Ronald Reagan popularized the
“welfare queen” trope about people living luxuriously while not working,
they wanted to know why the video wasn't featuring a Black woman
instead.
“Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the
villain,” posted Matt Walsh, a conservative writer. “Even though that
would actually be an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand.”
Sean Davis, co-founder of the Federalist website, wrote that “our
government has systematically discriminated against white men for
decades now, and yet now has the audacity to dishonestly mock young
white men as welfare queens.”
Never mind that the video was about Medicaid, not welfare, or that most
Medicaid recipients in Arkansas are white. The outrage was a reminder of
how old tropes are “chronically accessible” images in some voters’
minds, said Ange-Marie Hancock, author of “The Politics of Disgust and
the Public Identity of the ‘Welfare Queen.’”
She thinks the Arkansas video was supposed to appeal to older voters
living with unemployed adult children. But conservatives could only
focus on race, Hancock said, because the idea of a Black welfare abuser
has worked for them for decades.
“The longer race and gendered history really points to ideas that
African Americans are lazy, they don’t do the right thing,” she said.
The debate that streaked across social media was the latest example of
how conservatives have recently wrestled with racist views. Last month,
a Texas political candidate named Bo French posted a picture of nonwhite
students cheering at a University of Texas football game, saying “the
problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” Some
Republicans denounced French's post, while it was embraced by those who
fear the country's changing demographics.
Sanders, who is running for reelection this year, “stands by the ad,”
said Jordan Powell, her campaign manager.
“We should never confiscate money from hard-working Arkansans to give it
away to those who simply choose not to work at all,” Powell told The
Associated Press in an emailed statement.
Origins of the ‘welfare queen’ trope in American politics
The “welfare queen” trope is often used to advance restrictions on
public assistance programs.
While unsuccessfully running for president in 1976, Reagan complained
about a woman in Chicago who was using “80 names, 30 addresses, 12
Social Security cards” to game the system. The story was embellished,
but Reagan worked to reshape public assistance programs after winning
the White House in 1980.
Allison Butler, author of “The Judgment of Gender: How Women are
Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture," said the debate perpetuated a
powerful myth that women of color were siphoning government assistance.
“When you deconstructed that narrative and actually tried to find the
source of it ... there was no woman of color who wouldn’t get a job and
had multiple televisions and a Mercedes-Benz,” Butler said.
Barry Jefferson, president of the NAACP Arkansas State Conference, has
condemned the Sanders ad for reducing low-income people to a stereotype
where poverty is seen as a flaw. It ignores the complexities that make
it harder for low-income people, regardless of race, to support
themselves, he said.
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This image from a video released by the Sarah Huckabee Sanders
campaign on Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, shows an actor portraying a
unemployed young man playing a video game. (Sarah Huckabee Sanders
via AP)
“We shouldn’t betray anyone because they are asking for help and
they don’t meet your standards,” Jefferson said.
Breaking down the demographics of Medicaid
Created in 1965 as a joint federal and state health insurance
program, Medicaid offers free or low-cost medical coverage to people
with limited income, including the elderly, children or adults with
disabilities who cannot work. Nearly 66 million people were enrolled
in Medicaid as of June, according to the Medicaid.gov website.
Over 38% of beneficiaries between the ages of 0-64 are white,
according to 2024 data from research organization KFF. Nearly 19%
are Black.
More work requirements for some Medicaid beneficiaries kicked in
across the U.S. this year under President Donald Trump's big 2025
tax cut and policy law. A handful of Republican-led states,
including Arkansas, are going beyond what the law calls for to
prevent fraud, including demanding more documentation if someone is
too medically frail to work.
In July, Sanders soft-launched mandating that healthy people ages 19
to 64 find work, volunteer or attend school at least 80 hours per
month to stay in the Arkansas Health and Opportunity for Me Medicaid
program, or ARHOME.
Robert Coon, managing partner at Impact Management Group, a
political consulting and public-opinion firm with an Arkansas
office, said that welfare work requirement policy is generally
favored in Arkansas.
But suggestions the person in the ad should be Black are “overtly
racist” and “inaccurate,” Coon said.
About 60% of ARHOME recipients are white and around 18% are Black,
according to recent data from the state Department of Human
Services.
Why Black people often experience need at a higher rate
Right-wing rhetoric about Black Americans and public assistance
often ignores how generations of structural racism have produced
economic disparities that contribute to their disproportionate
participation in these programs.
Fewer Black people than white people overall use social service
programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program, or food stamps. But at roughly 13% of the U.S. population,
Black people make up the largest overrepresentation of any racial
group. They are 18.5% and 25%, respectively, of Medicaid and SNAP
recipients.
Those statistics reflect an extremely difficult road for poor Black
communities looking to rise out of poverty and build generational
wealth.
Arkansas Democratic congressional candidate Chris Jones, who is
Black, grew up in a family relying on food stamps. A welfare
recipient is not “looking for a way out of work,” but “for a way
forward,” he told AP in a statement.
The bigger question, Jones said, is not race but “why so many people
who are working hard still struggle to afford groceries, housing,
health care and the basic necessities of life."
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Tang reported from Phoenix.
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