After eight years of Republicans slamming everything President Obama did and denying him many of the things he wanted to do (like an infrastructure bill), new research suggests that white Americans were more likely to cast a vote in 2016 based on racial biases. In fact, the study based in part on Public Religion Research Institute surveys in 2012 and 2016 shows views on race mattered more than partisanship this cycle, in no small part because of Donald Trump’s campaign. What that means, Michael Tesler argues, is that racial views could realign the electorate, rivaling ideology as “the dominant partisan cleavage in the Age of Trump."
We'll take a look at Tesler's evidence below the fold, but let's get to the heart of his argument first:
Obama’s eight years in the White House made American politics more about race than it had been in modern times. Racial attitudes spilled over into just about everything contrasted or contrasted with his presidency. Party identification, vote choices for Congress, public policy positions, and evaluations of prominent politicians (including Hillary Clinton) were all more divided by racial attitudes than they had been in the pre-Obama era. The heightened salience of race during Obama’s presidency ensured a prominent role for racial attitudes in the 2016 election, regardless of the candidates. [...]
But the most important factor was surely Trump. Obama polarized public opinion by racial attitudes primarily because of who he was, not because of what he said or did. Daniel Gillion’s new book shows that Obama spoke about race less than recent Democratic presidents and was criticized by black leaders and intellectuals for refusing to push for race-specific policies.
In stark contrast, Donald Trump repeatedly went where prior Republican presidential candidates were unwilling to go: making explicit appeals to racial resentment, religious intolerance, and white identity. So much so, in fact, that more than half of Americans consistently said that the term “racist” described Donald Trump in YouGov/Economist surveys conducted during the fall campaign.
Tesler includes several sets of graphs, but below are the ones showing that racial resentment and ethnocentrism among whites were bigger divers of support for Trump in 2016 than they were for Mitt Romney in 2012.
That “Trump effect,” combined with eight years of racialized politics under President Obama, means that racial attitudes are now more closely aligned with white Americans’ partisan preferences than they have been at any time in the history of polling.