This coming November, a great deal depends on whether white Democrats are becoming more liberal while white Republicans are simultaneously becoming more conservative.
If white Republicans and white Democrats are moving in opposite directions, as much current research suggests, Trump will retain a constituency receptive — perhaps even more receptive than it was in 2016 — to his racially divisive tactics.
In his 2019 paper, “White People’s Racial Attitudes are Changing to Match Partisanship,” Andrew Engelhardt, a political scientist at Brown, shows a dramatic increase in partisan racial polarization from 2016 to 2018.
The accompanying charts show the percentage of white Democrats in the most racially liberal category growing from 10 percent in 2016 to 15 percent in 2018, the leading edge of a general turn to the left among party members. The percentage of white Republicans in the most racially conservative cohort, in contrast, grew from 14 percent to 21 percent, a tilt to the right with a potentially substantial impact.
“The data show a profound shift in whites’ evaluations of black Americans in just a two-year period,” Engelhardt wrote.
On a scale from zero to 100, ranking levels of racial resentment, the mean for white Democrats fell from 43 to 34. For white Republicans, the mean rose from 71 to 76.
In a more recent paper, “Observational Equivalence in Explaining Attitude Change: Have White Racial Attitudes Genuinely Changed?” Engelhardt answers in the affirmative the question posed in his title.
Poll data, he writes, supports “seeing changes in white racial attitudes as genuine. The decline in Democrats’ racial resentment levels between 2012 and 2016 appears sincere, not cheap talk.” And, Engelhardt contends, there will be significant political and policymaking consequences:
This result means that white Democrats’ political decision-making may increasingly reflect sincere belief-change with them increasingly supporting policies addressing racial inequality and candidates championing the same.
In an email, Engelhardt wrote that
while attitudes people report in surveys may show change that appears genuine, other dimensions of prejudice have not changed — for instance, what is broadly known as implicit bias.
There is a different, perhaps more distant, possibility, however: that everyone is getting more racially liberal, that many white Republicans are, in fact, tracking along with white Democrats and becoming not more conservative, but more liberal. If that’s the case, Trump’s polarizing strategies would be likely to encounter more resistance.
Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Samantha Washington, a researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, challenge the argument that racial polarization in the United States is increasing. They contend that on matters of race, the views of both groups — white Democrats and white Republicans — are liberalizing.
In their paper — “The Rise of Trump, the Fall of Prejudice? Tracking White Americans’ Racial Attitudes 2008-2018 via a Panel Survey” — Hopkins and Washington use a measure of prejudice that is significantly different from the one used by Engelhardt.
Hopkins explained in an email why he and Engelhardt differ in their assessment of white Republicans. In his study, Engelhardt uses responses to the battery of what are known as “racial resentment” questions. Hopkins argued that these questions tend to push Republicans in a conservative direction because some directly relate to a separate issue, the role of government, including questions asking whether the government should intervene to help minorities.
According to Hopkins, some Republicans will oppose intervention on the basis of ideological “small government” principle, not racism, nonetheless raising their racial resentment score.
Hopkins and Washington write that they used a separate measure designed to capture
white respondents’ beliefs in stereotypes. Specifically, our panelists were repeatedly asked to rate Blacks, Hispanics/Latinos, and Whites on two stereotype scales, work ethic and trustworthiness.
The advantage in this approach, they argue, is that
The use of in-group stereotypes helps address concerns about social desirability biases, as people can rate an out-group positively while also rating their own group more positively.
As the accompanying graphic shows, Hopkins and Washington found bipartisan declines in anti-black and anti-Hispanic prejudice.
There is a third analysis that stands apart from those of both Engelhardt and Hopkins and Washington: that the growing racial liberalism of white Democrats is more about claiming a moral posture than deeply felt conviction.
Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford, challenged the sincerity of white Democrats’ growing racial liberalism in an April 21 Twitter thread:
“The white left” can sometimes look more “progressive” than black folks because the white left has the luxury of approaching questions that bear on marginalized people’s lives with a kind of reckless abandon that many others don’t have.
In addition, Jefferson wrote:
Black folks don’t feel the same motivation to save face or protect some egalitarian image of the self that white liberals are struggling with. So black folks can be honest about these questions in ways that white liberals can’t cause they’re too busy worrying about wokeness scores.
In an email, Jefferson wrote the he is
worried what we’re actually observing is perhaps the consequence of social desirability concerns. There is lots of evidence that individuals are susceptible to these kinds of image concerns, so before we conclude that we are witnessing some great awokening, we should design tests of what white liberal do when the rubber hits the road and they’ve got to trade off their privilege for just outcomes on behalf of black folks and other marginalized groups.
Jefferson said that so far,
I haven’t seen great evidence that this racial liberalism maintains in contexts such as these, so I remain rather skeptical that we are in a period where black people can trust that white liberals have embraced a liberatory politics.
Many white liberals are indeed likely to be more circumspect when it comes to acting on their beliefs. In June 2018, Ryan Enos, a Harvard political scientist, described the situation this way:
Looking across the world and even across states and cities within the United States, most of us would rather not live with some of the social, economic, and political consequences of diversity.
The study of racial attitudes has expanded significantly since the election of President Trump.
Deborah J. Schildkraut, a political scientist at Tufts and author of the 2019 paper “The Political Meaning of Whiteness for Liberals and Conservatives,” has looked at the partisan significance of “white identity.” She writes:
It is easy to see why whiteness has become more salient and potent for those on the ideological right, and indeed saying that one’s identity as white is important is correlated with being conservative.
Among the factors contributing to the growing consciousness of a white identity among conservatives, she writes, are
the election of the nation’s first black president; the media narrative of changing demographics that threaten the majority status of whites; increasing partisan divides over immigration — with President Trump in particular warning of droves of criminals, Mexican or Muslim, seeking to invade the country; and a pervasive sense of being left behind by elites who care mainly about themselves and about urban (i.e. “diverse”) communities.
But, Schildkraut asks, “What about whites on the ideological left? Are they still operating in a world where whiteness is not salient?”
There are major hurdles preventing white liberals from developing a conscious white identity, she writes. These include a concern that for some liberals white identity is associated with the idea of “white superiority.” Or, conversely, the liberal fear that such an identity threatens, as Schildkraut puts it, “the view that one’s own accomplishments are deserved, and it can threaten a positive self-image when people see themselves as members of oppressor groups.”
Schildkraut conducted a series of surveys to gauge liberal and conservative racial identity among whites. She found that just over 40 percent of conservatives said that their white identity was “very” or “extremely” important to them. A smaller percentage (23 percent) of white liberals saw their racial identity as similarly important.
There were also vastly different perceptions of the level of discrimination against blacks and whites between white liberals and conservatives:
44 percent of white liberals said there is no discrimination against whites and 28 percent said there is a great deal of discrimination against blacks, while only 2 percent of conservatives said there is no discrimination against whites and only 8 percent said there is a great deal of discrimination against blacks.
For the moment, however, Schildkraut concludes, “a politically-relevant whiteness seems lacking for liberals.”
Brian Schaffner, a colleague of Schildkraut’s in the Tufts political science department, pointed out in an email that although Democrats are moving to the left, the challenge is how to measure the depth of the feelings that accompany this movement:
The difficult part is separating changes in actual prejudice from changes in how much prejudice people are expressing. That is, are white Democrats giving less racist responses to survey questions now because they are actually less racist, or is it because they understand that norms within their party and social circles are shifting?
The best test of the depth and sincerity of changing racial attitudes, in Schaffner’s view, is to look “for longer term movement. I think if attitudes are really changing, that it is likely to happen methodically over time.”
From this vantage point, Schaffner writes,
I do tend to largely believe Andrew Engelhardt’s findings that white Democrats are becoming less racist over time. Even if some of that is simply just that these individuals are hiding their prejudice more than they used to, the fact that they are doing it consistently over time is probably part of a larger process that actually reduces the prejudice itself.
Schaffner argued that even if whites are “just be more motivated to hide their prejudice than they used to be,” that does not rule out a real shift to the left:
If a person thinks something terrible about a group but understands that they cannot say it out loud, then that person is acknowledging that what they think is not widely accepted. And conceding that one’s views are not mainstream is an important step toward changing those views. So at some point the line between a real reduction in prejudice and simply being more reluctant to express prejudice externally is impossible to distinguish.
Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgia State, supports Engelhardt’s thesis that genuine racial liberalism is growing among white Democrats.
I’m with Andrew on this one. In addition to the findings of his measurement analysis, I’d argue that the social desirability bias account would require that these pressures be a) unreasonably strong, and b) consistent or pervasive across dozens of different measures of racial (and immigration) attitudes. I find this unrealistic.
Goldberg expressly ruled out “any notion that these trends originated in the Trump election or the 2016 campaign.”
“They unequivocally did not,” he wrote, citing poll data showing the upward trend began between 2012 and 2014. “While these trends have escalated under Trump, he didn’t trigger them.”
There are strong indications that the shifts — especially those found by Hopkins and Washington — could have a marked effect on the 2020 election. From the fall of 2008 to January 2020, they tracked a measure of white belief in their racial superiority over African-Americans. They did so by asking all whites — Republicans, Democrats, Independents — to rank their own race on measures of trustworthiness and work ethic and then in a different section of the survey to rank blacks on the same scales of trustworthiness and work ethic.
In 2008, whites saw themselves as harder working and more trustworthy that African-Americans by 8.67 points. By October 2016, this had changed only slightly, to 8.1 points.
Immediately after Trump’s election, however, the ostensible advantage whites had imputed to themselves shrank, to 7.47 points in November-December 2016.
Once Trump was in office — with the racist march in Charlottesville and the president’s hostile comments about black-majority cities and minority legislators in the headlines — white perceptions of racial superiority declined even further, according to the Hopkins-Washington data.
Just before the midterm elections in 2018, when a Democratic wave gave the party control of the House, the difference between whites’ ranking of their own race and of black Americans fell to 5.38 points.
In January, the advantage whites imputed to themselves shrank again, to 2.35 points, by far the lowest level in the 12 years of polling.
If, as Hopkins and Washington find, whites are abandoning the relatively high levels of prejudice of 2016 in meaningful numbers, and if this decline contributed to Democratic victories in 2018, Trump will face a steeper climb in capitalizing on racial resentment than he did four years ago.
Hopkins followed up by email:
Overall, I do think these results indicate that the share of white Americans who would rally to a general election campaign because of its explicit appeals to racial prejudice is smaller than many political strategists suppose.
The drop since Trump took office in what had been a fairly consistent sense of white racial superiority, according to Hopkins and Washington, would suggest that Trump’s ongoing racial appeals may have crossed a line, potentially endangering his re-election.
Has the exploitation of racial anxiety reached the end of its politically useful life? No. Nor will it fade from American history anytime soon, if it ever does. But the very fact that more and more people now question whether Trump’s re-election is assured provides a ray of hope.
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