Race matters.
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The study, from three political scientists from around the country, takes a statistical look at a large sample of Obama-Trump switchers. It finds that these voters tended to score highly on measures of racial hostility and xenophobia — and were not especially likely to be suffering economically.
“White voters with racially conservative or anti-immigrant attitudes switched votes to Trump at a higher rate than those with more liberal views on these issues,” the paper’s authors write. “We find little evidence that economic dislocation and marginality were significantly related to vote switching in 2016.”
This new paper fits with a sizeable slate of studies conducted over the past 18 months or so, most of which have come to the same conclusions: There is tremendous evidence that Trump voters were motivated by racial resentment (as well as hostile sexism), and very little evidence that economic stress had anything to do with it.
This isn’t just a matter of historical interest or ideological ax-grinding. Understanding the precise way in which racism affected the 2016 election should shape how we think about the electorate in the run-up to the 2018 midterms. More broadly, it helps us understand the subtleties of America’s primordial divide over race — and why racism will continue to fracture the country politically for the foreseeable future.
