The conversations about Barack Obama’s racial identity, and their political ramifications for the candidate, have shifted since 2000, when he lost the Democratic primary campaign to represent Illinois’ First District in the U.S. House of Representatives, writes Timothy Stewart-Winter, a doctoral candidate in American history at the University of Chicago.

Back then, Mr. Obama struggled to appeal to members of the black community, many of whom voiced concerns that he was not enough like them, in part because of his background in education, according to Mr. Stewart-Winter’s article.

“Shortly before the primary, black progressive journalist Salim Muwakkil noted in the Chicago Tribune that Obama was ‘perhaps the least favorite son,’ observing that ‘his Harvard education and crisp elocution mark him as insufficiently “black,”’” Mr. Stewart-Winter recounted in his article, which appeared on the Web site RealClearPolitics. The article also noted that Mr. Obama’s experience as a law professor at the University of Chicago further alienated him from some black communities, who perceived him to be raising a lot of his money from “white liberals.”

When he lost that primary campaign to Bobby Rush, the incumbent and a onetime chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, Mr. Obama had won the white vote (which made up close to one-third of the electorate) but lost the black vote.

Now, as a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama still generally tends to poll better among college-educated voters than those who have not attended college. But he has often received close to 90 percent of black voters’ support in Democratic primaries, Mr. Stewart-Winter notes.

So perhaps the question of Mr. Obama’s education background and professorial experience is no longer factoring as heavily into voters’ perceptions about their views of his racial identity — and questions of whether he is “black enough” or “not too black” to be able to win an election — now that it is eight years later and the campaign is being waged on a national scale.

Mr. Stewart-Winter notes that today even Mr. Rush has come around to support Mr. Obama and, “in a remarkable reversal of the rhetoric of eight years ago,” said that for his constituents Mr. Obama represents a “favorite son.”