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      Lost Hope of Lasting Democratic Majority

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      Revisiting an influential book and the notion that demographics are destiny.Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008, when a book titled “The Emerging Democratic Majority” seemed prophetic.Damon Winter/The New York TimesToday we wish a belated and maybe not-so-Happy 20th Birthday to “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” the book that famously argued Democrats would gain an enduring advantage in a multiracial, postindustrial America.There are countless explanations for the rise of Donald Trump and the growing dysfunction of American political life. This book does not necessarily rank at the top of that list. But when historians look back on this era, the book’s effect on American politics might be worth a mention.The thesis that Democrats were on the cusp of a lasting advantage in national politics helped shape the hopes, fears and, ultimately, the conduct of the two major parties — especially once the Obama presidency appeared to confirm the book’s prophecy.It transformed modest Democratic wins into harbingers of perpetual liberal rule. It fueled conservative anxiety about America’s growing racial diversity, even as it encouraged the Republican establishment to reach out to Hispanic voters and pursue immigration reform. The increasingly popular notion that “demographics are destiny” made it easier for the progressive base to argue against moderation and in favor of mobilizing a new coalition of young and nonwhite voters. All of this helped set the stage for the rise of Mr. Trump.This is a lot to attribute to a single book, especially since the book does not really resemble the Obama-era caricature advanced by its supporters. The book does not put forward what became a commonly held view that racial demographic shifts would allow Democrats to win through mobilization, a more leftist politics or without the support of white working-class voters.Instead, the book argued — not persuasively, as we’ll see — that Democrats could build a majority with a (still ill-defined) “centrist” politics of the Clinton-Gore variety, so long as they got “close to an even split” of white working-class voters.“We were clearly overly optimistic about that prospect, to say the least,” said John Judis, one of the authors of the book, of the prospect of such high levels of Democratic support.One easy way to see the divergence between reality and the expectations promoted by the book is to look at its projections for the Electoral College, compared with how the nation actually voted over the next 20 years: More

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      Stacey Abrams Painted as Enemy by Flier in Georgia County With Racist History

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      ATLANTA — After a digital flier featuring the logo of the Republican Party of Forsyth County, Ga., urged residents to rally against Stacey Abrams, alarming and infuriating local Democratic leaders who said its message sounded dangerously evocative of the county’s notoriously racist past, the Forsyth Republican Party announced that it was calling the rally off. Using inflammatory language as if Ms. Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, were an invading enemy, the flier issued a “call to action” encouraging “conservatives and patriots” to “save and protect our neighborhoods.” It emerged this week in response to news that Ms. Abrams would be campaigning alongside other members of the Democratic ticket in the area on Sunday.“The moment is at hand,” the flier read, calling Ms. Abrams and Senator Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Georgia Democrat seeking a full term, “the designers of destructive radicalism and socialism” and warning that they would be “crossing over our county border” and into the county seat, Cumming. It said they would appear at “OUR FoCal Center,” referring to a county arts building.Mr. Warnock is not expected to appear alongside Ms. Abrams, Democratic officials said.Cumming, about 40 miles north of Atlanta, is more than 75 percent white. It owes its racial homogeneity in large part to a violent campaign by Forsyth County’s white residents in 1912 that pushed out thousands of Black residents.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe text of the flier surfaced on Wednesday on a local online conservative news outlet, which said it had spotted it on the Forsyth G.O.P. website, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the flier Friday morning after county Democrats circulated it to journalists.As of midmorning Friday, the flier did not appear on the Forsyth Republican Party’s website or Facebook page.Reached by text message late Friday afternoon and asked four times whether the county party had produced or distributed the flier, Jerry Marinich, the group’s chairman, did not answer. He said only that the party “does not plan on participating in any rally on Sunday.”Late Friday evening, the party issued a statement saying it would no longer hold the rally. “We will always strive to make choices that honor and protect Forsyth County,” it wrote, calling it a “proud and diverse county with conservative values.” It went on, “In the interest of all involved, we will err on the side of caution and withdraw our planned rally.”Instead, according to the statement, members will redirect their efforts to prepare for a campaign event with Gov. Brian Kemp the following day. Ms. Abrams’s campaign declined to comment except to confirm that she would be attending the Forsyth event, though it was not listed on her weekend campaign schedule.Cumming, about 40 miles north of Atlanta, is more than 75 percent white, as is Forsyth as a whole. It owes its racial homogeneity in large part to a violent campaign by Forsyth County’s white residents in 1912 that pushed out thousands of Black residents through intimidation and deadly force.The legacy of that campaign and the racist thinking that gave rise to it persisted as late as 1987, when a group of civil rights activists were attacked while trying to mark the 75th anniversary of Black residents’ initial expulsion from the county.“We strongly condemn the dangerous and embarrassing rhetoric of the Forsyth County, Georgia, Republican Party,” Melissa Clink, chair of the county’s Democratic Party, said in a statement on Friday before the rally was canceled. “Forsyth County’s history of racial cleansing and being a documented sundown town make this line especially incendiary, disgusting and shameful,” she said, using a term for places that discriminate, often severely, against nonwhite residents.The Republican Women of Forsyth County, seeking to avoid condemnation by association, issued a statement Friday underlining its status as a private club independent of the party organization.“We do not condone nor engage in tactics that are intended to intimidate, harass or silence people who hold different political views,” the group said, adding that conservative ideals “are best exemplified when we engage in civil discourse, allowing all sides to be heard.” More

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      How We Think About Politics Changes What We Think About Politics

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      When so many voters — a majority, in fact — say that they prefer consensus to conflict, why does polarization continue to intensify?In a paper that came out in June, “Explanations for Inequality and Partisan Polarization in the U.S., 1980 — 2020,” Elizabeth Suhay and Mark Tenenbaum, political scientists at American University, and Austin Bartola, of Quadrant Strategies, provide insight into why so much discord permeates American politics:Scholars who research polarization have almost exclusively focused on the relationship between Americans’ policy opinions and their partisanship. In this article, we discuss a different type of partisan polarization underappreciated by scholars: “belief polarization,” or disagreements over what people perceive to be true.The concept of belief polarization has been defined in a number of ways.In their May 2021 paper, “Belief polarization in a complex world,” Alan Jern, Kai-min Kevin Chang and Charles Kemp — of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Melbourne — write: “Belief polarization occurs when two people with opposing prior beliefs both strengthen their beliefs after observing the same data.”There is, they continue, “ample evidence that people sustain different beliefs even when faced with the same information, and they interpret that information differently.” They also note that “stark differences in beliefs can arise and endure due to human limitations in interpreting complex information.”Kristoffer Nimark, an economist at Cornell, and Savitar Sundaresan, of Imperial College London, describe belief polarization this way: “The beliefs of ex ante identical agents over time can cluster in two distinct groups at opposite ends of the belief space.”Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse, professors of philosophy at Vanderbilt, argue in their 2019 paper, “How Does Belief Polarization Work”:Part of what makes belief polarization so disconcerting is its ubiquity. It has been extensively studied for more than 50 years and found to be operative within groups of all kinds, formal and informal. Furthermore, belief polarization does not discriminate between different kinds of belief. Like-minded groups polarize regardless of whether they are discussing banal matters of fact, matters of personal taste, or questions about value. What’s more, the phenomenon operates regardless of the explicit point of the group’s discussion. Like-minded groups polarize when they are trying to decide an action that the group will take; and they polarize also when there is no specific decision to be reached. Finally, the phenomenon is prevalent regardless of group members’ nationality, race, gender, religion, economic status, and level of education.Talisse, writing separately, observes:The social environment itself can trigger extremity shifts. These prompts need not be verbal, explicit, or literal; they can be merely implicit signals to group members that some belief is prevalent among them — hats, pins, campaign signs, logos, and gestures are all potential initiators of belief polarization. Further, as corroboration is really a matter of numbers, those with the power to present the appearance of widespread acceptance among a particular social group of some idea thereby have the power to induce extremity shifts among those who identify with that group.Perhaps the most salient recent illustration of belief polarization is the diametrically opposed views of Trump loyalists and of their Democratic adversaries over the legitimacy of the 2020 election: Trump supporters are convinced it was stolen; Democrats and independents are certain that Joe Biden is the legitimate president.Similarly, politicians on the right — and Fox News — are treating the F.B.I. raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago on Monday as a corrupt politicization of federal investigative authority, while liberals — and CNN — counter that the raid demonstrates that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law.Suhay and her colleagues expand the scope of belief polarization to look at the differences between Republicans and Democrats over the causes of inequality:We illustrate large, and increasing, partisan divides in beliefs regarding whether an unequal society, or unequal behavior, is the cause of socioeconomic inequality. Republican politicians and citizens are optimistic about the American dream and pessimistic about poor people’s behavior; Democratic politicians and citizens are pessimistic about the dream and optimistic about poor people’s ability to succeed if given the chance.These patterns, Suhay and her collaborators continue,hold for beliefs about economic inequality along both class and race lines. Variation in societal versus individual blame is consistently associated with views on social welfare, taxation, and affirmative action. We conclude that Americans’ beliefs about the fairness of the economy represent a crucial component of a redistributive versus anti-redistributive ideology that is increasingly associated with the two political parties.Suhay writes:The Democratic Party has long justified its left-leaning economic policies with two central claims: significant economic inequality exists between individuals and social groups, and these great inequalities are unfair because society, not individuals, are to blame for them. The latter proposition is especially important. It is difficult to deny that many harsh inequalities exist in the United States. Exorbitant wealth as well as homelessness are plain to see. However, such inequalities might be tolerated if they are viewed as the outcome of a meritocratic system. Democrats argue instead that “the American dream” — success via hard work — is not a reality for many. Thus, low-income people deserve government assistance.Conversely, Suhay continues, Republicans emphasizeaggregate economic growth and downplay the extent of inequality. Second, Republicans argue that existing inequalities are fair — successful people have achieved success via hard work or ingenuity, and those facing difficult economic circumstances are to blame for them. Third, in response to Democrats’ instinct to use government to combat inequality, Republicans argue government efforts to intervene in business affairs, redistribute wealth, and assist those in need often do more harm than good, depressing the economic output of both firms and individuals. These narratives justify Republicans’ conservative economic agenda by insisting that the status quo is fine: inequality is minimal; inequalities that do exist are “just deserts”; and, even if one wished to help, government intervention in fact undermines individual and aggregate prosperity.Suhay, Tenenbaum and Bartola cite data from American National Election Studies and the Pew Research Center to track the increasing polarization between Republicans and Democrats on various questions, which require respondents to agree or disagree with statements like these: “one of the big problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance”; “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard”; and “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”In 1997, 68 percent of Republican and 43 percent of Democratic survey respondents chose “have it easy,” a 25-point difference. By 2017, 73 percent of Republicans said the poor “have it easy,” while 19 percent of Democrats shared that view, a 54-point difference.In an email, Suhay noted thatmany social scientists today are focused on misinformed and extreme beliefs in the Republican Party, including Republicans’ greater likelihood of rejecting climate science and Covid-19 vaccination and their embrace of Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election.But, Suhay wrote, many of those same scholars “are missing growing extremity on the political left. It may be more benign or even beneficial in some cases, but it is still a phenomenon worth study.” In addition to “a surge of claims on the left that the economy is extremely unequal and that this is because our country does not provide equal opportunity to all of its inhabitants,” there has been a parallel surge among liberals on the issue of “racial justice — in both the economic and criminal justice arena.”A third development on the left, Suhay added, and onewhere we have seen the most rapid change, is around gender identity. Democrats increasingly say society ought to protect the rights of transgender people and the expression of transgender identity because gender fluidity is a natural part of the human condition and trying to curb its expression causes people harm. The popularity of each of these views has surged on the left recently.There is further evidence that even people who are knowledgeable about complex issues are sharply polarized along partisan lines.Nathan Lee at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth, Jason Reifler at the University of Exeter and D.J. Flynn at IE University in Madrid argue in their paper “More Accurate, but No Less Polarized: Comparing the Factual Beliefs of Government Officials and the Public” that while “political elites are consistently more accurately informed than the public,” the “increase in accuracy does not translate into reduced factual belief polarization. These findings demonstrate that a more informed political elite does not necessarily mitigate partisan factual disagreement in policymaking.”Lee, Nyhan, Reifler and Flynn assessed the views of elites through a survey in 2017 of 743 “elected policymakers, legislative staffers, and top administrative positions in local and state government in the United States.” Three-quarters of the sample held elective office. The survey tested belief accuracy by partisanship and elite status on eight issues including health care, the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent, climate change and voter fraud.Their conclusions run counter to assumptions that elites are less polarized than the general public because “they tend to be more knowledgeable, which is associated with greater belief accuracy” and because they “possess domain expertise in politics and public policy that could reduce the influence of cognitive biases.”In fact, Lee and colleagues counter, “belief polarization can be unchanged or widen when belief accuracy increases.”I asked Nyhan about the consequences of the findings and he wrote back by email:The most important contribution of our study is to challenge the assumption that we will disagree less about the facts if we know more. Elites are better informed than the public on average but Democrats and Republicans still are still deeply divided in their beliefs about those facts. In some ways, the conclusion of our study is optimistic — government officials are better informed than the public. That’s what most of us would hope to be true. But the findings do suggest we should avoid thinking that people becoming more informed will make the factual divides in our society go away. Belief polarization is a reality that is not easily overcome.One theme that emerges repeatedly in looking at belief polarization is the role race plays as a central factor:Peter K. Enns and Ashley Jardina, political scientists at Cornell and Duke, make the case in their October 2021 paper, “Complicating the role of White racial attitudes and anti-immigrant sentiment in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” thatMost of the research on the relationship between white racial attitudes and Trump support is part of a tradition that assumes that racial attitudes are fairly stable predispositions that form early in life and then later become important for political reasoning. Implied in this line of research is that politicians or political campaigns do not change levels of prejudice, but they can prime these attitudes, or make them more or less salient and therefore more or less politically relevant.Enns and Jardina write that in contrast to this view, over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign “many whites shifted their survey responses on questions related to race and immigration to align with their support for Trump or Clinton.”To test their argument, the authors used “a unique panel data set from surveys conducted by YouGov of more than 5,000 respondents interviewed at multiple points during the 2016 presidential election campaign.” From that study, they found:The strong link between white attitudes toward Black Americans and Trump support observed in prior studies is likely due as much to white Trump supporters updating their survey responses to report opinions more consistent with Trump’s as it is to Trump drawing support from more racially antagonistic white voters. Similar results emerge with respect to whites’ immigration opinions.They found, for example, that from January 2016 to August 2016, the percentage of Trump supporters voicing strong opposition to Black Lives Matter grew by roughly 15 percentage points.In an email, Enns contended thatregardless of the precise underlying mechanisms (and multiple mechanisms could be at work), the evidence suggests that Trump’s rhetoric had a meaningful effect on the views his supporters expressed about these issues. We are definitely arguing that the attitudes individuals express can be changed by what candidates they support say and do. Although we cannot observe actual beliefs, to the extent that expressing previously unexpressed beliefs has a reinforcing effect, that would also provide evidence of a deepening or potential changing of racial attitudes.The strong association between Trump support and whites’ views on racial issues, Enns and Jardina argue in their paper,was not merely a result of Trump attracting racist whites by way of his own racist rhetoric or a reflection of partisan racial sorting that had already occurred; it was also a result of white Trump supporters changing their views to be more in line with Trump’s over the course of his presidential campaign. In other words, Trump not only attracted whites with more conservative views on race; he also made his white supporters more likely to espouse increasingly extreme views on issues related to immigration and on issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and police killings of African Americans.Andrew M. Engelhardt, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, developed a similar line of analysis in his January 2020 paper, “Racial Attitudes Through a Partisan Lens.”In an email, Engelhardt wrote:Part of the reason White Democrats and White Republicans hold increasingly different views about Black Americans is due to their partisanship. It’s not just that Democrats with negative views became Republicans, or Republicans with more positive views became Democrats. Rather, people are changing their attitudes, and part of this, I argue, is due to how politicians talk about Black Americans. Republicans, for instance, could have internalized Trump’s negative rhetoric, and increasingly held more negative views. Democrats, similarly, hear Trump say these negative things and they move opposite, holding more positive views.In his paper, Engelhardt wrote that undergirding past studies of the role of race in politics and policymakingis an assumption that racial animus feeds political conflict. I turn this conventional wisdom on its head by arguing that political conflict can shape racial attitudes — people’s views and beliefs about groups understood to be racial. Political scientists have failed to examine this possibility, perhaps because racial attitudes are seen as persistent and influential predispositions that form during childhood, long before most Americans become political animals. According to this line of reasoning, individuals use these early formed attitudes to make sense of politics; racial attitudes lead to partisanship.The ever-growing divide between left and right extends well beyond racial issues and attitudes. In his email, Engelhardt wrote that his results are “suggestive of partisanship motivating changes in other orientations which we might presumably see as more stable and core to individuals.” He cited research showing that “partisanship influences religiosity and religious affiliation” and other studies linking “political concerns to changes in racial self-identification.” Engelhardt added that he has “some unpublished results where I find partisanship leads Democrats to hold more positive views of gay men and lesbians, transgender individuals, and feminists, over time, with Republicans holding more negative views of these groups in the same period (data range 2016-2020).”In their January 2022 paper, “The Origins and Consequences of Racialized Schemas about U.S. Parties,” Kirill Zhirkov and Nicholas Valentino, political scientists at the Universities of Virginia and Michigan, make an interesting argument that, in effect, “Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and the increasing linkage between racial attitudes and issue preferences of all sorts.”Zhirkov and Valentino continue:Beginning in the 1970s, Democratic candidates in presidential elections started to attract large shares of nonwhite voters whereas Republicans increasingly relied on votes of racially conservative whites. Over the same period, voters’ positions on seemingly nonracial political issues have gradually become more intertwined with racial resentment.Overall, the two scholars write,the growing racial gap between the Democratic and Republican support bases leads to formation of racialized stereotypes about the two parties. Specifically, a non-trivial share of American electorate currently views the Democratic Party as nonwhite and the Republican Party as white, though in reality whites continue to be a majority of both parties.This “imagined racial coalition of each party,” in the view of Zhirkov and Valentino,carries profound implications for the ongoing discussion in the discipline about affective polarization in American politics: whites feel colder toward the Democratic Party when they imagine its coalition to be more heavily made up on nonwhites and feel warmer toward the Republican Party when they perceive it to be dominated by their racial group. As a consequence, rather than a cause, they may then come to accept a more conservative issue package advocated by the modern Republican Party.Racial attitudes, the authors argue persuasively, “are now important predictors of opinions about electoral fairness, gun control, policing, international trade and health care.”There are, Zhirkov and Valentino note, long-range implications for the future of democracy here:As soon as ethnic parties start to compete for political power, winning — rather than implementing a certain policy — becomes the goal in and of itself due to associated boost in group status and self-esteem of its members. Moreover, comparative evidence suggests that U.S. plurality-based electoral system contributes to politicization of ethnic cleavages rather than mitigates them. Therefore, the racialization of American parties is likely to continue, and the intensity of political conflict in the United States is likely to grow.I asked the authors how they would characterize the importance of race in contemporary American politics. In a jointly written email, they replied that in research to be published in the future, “we show that race is at least as strong, and often stronger, than cleavages such as religion, ideology, and class.”The pessimistic outlook for the prospect of a return to less divisive politics revealed in many of the papers cited here, and the key role of racial conflict in driving polarization, suggest that the ability of the United States to come to terms with its increasingly multiracial, multiethnic population remains in question. This country has been a full-fledged democracy for less than 60 years — since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the changes wrought by three additional revolutions: in civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights. These developments — or upheavals — and especially the reaction to them have tested the viability of our democracy and suggest, at the very least, an uphill climb ahead.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Red and Blue America Will Never Be the Same

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      Donald Trump’s dominance of the political stage for the past seven years galvanized what had been a slow-burning realignment, creating a profound upheaval in the electorate and in both the Democratic and Republican parties.The support Trump received in rural communities and the animosity he provoked among well-educated suburbanites accelerated the ongoing inversion — on measures of income, education and geographic region — of white Democratic and Republican voters. (White voters make up 67 percent of the electorate.)In 2018, according to ProximityOne, a website that analyzes the demographics of congressional districts, Democratic members of Congress represented 74 of the 100 most affluent districts, including 24 of the top 25. Conversely, Republican members of Congress represented 54 of the 100 districts with the lowest household income. The median household income in districts represented by Democrats was $66,829, which is $10,324 more than the median for districts represented by Republicans, at $56,505.The 2018 data stands in contrast to the income pattern a half-century ago. In 1973, Republicans held 63 of the 100 highest-income districts and Democrats held 73 of the 100 lowest-income districts.These trends prompted Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, to comment in an email that the Democratsare mostly the party of the master’s degree — modestly advantaged economically but not exactly elite. On the flip side, the Republicans are the party of the associate degree (a two-year college degree), less educated than the Democrats but not exactly the proletariat.Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U., argued thatpolitics throughout the Western democracies is in recent years in the midst of the most dramatic reconfiguration of the political parties and their bases of support in seventy or so years. Since the New Deal in the United States and WWII in Western Europe, the base of the dominant parties of the left was less affluent, less highly educated voters; the dominant parties of the right drew their primary support from higher income, more highly educated voters.Now, Pildes continued, “we are witnessing the complete inversion of that pattern, and the question is whether this is a temporary or more enduring realignment of the political parties throughout the West.”In his email, Pildes noted that in the 1940sDemocratic candidates received twenty-two points less support from voters in the top ten percent of the income bracket than from those in the bottom ninety percent. By 2012, that gap had dropped to only an eight-point difference and in 2016, voters in the top ten percent had become eight points more likely to vote for Democratic candidates. Similarly, in the 1940s, those with university degrees in the United States were twenty points less likely to vote for Democrats, while in 2000 there was no difference and by 2016, they were thirteen points more likely to vote for Democrats.The ramifications of these developments, which predate Trump’s entry into presidential politics in 2015, “radiate throughout the electoral process in the United States,” Pildes argued:Take the Electoral College: for most of the time from the 1950s until 2016, it was actually biased toward the Democrats. But in 2016, it suddenly became strongly biased toward the Republicans, and 2020 added even more to that bias.At the same time, there are counter-developments more favorable to the left.Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who focuses on redistricting and demographic trends, argued in an email that “the country’s political geography is now less pro-Republican.” While “the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are disadvantaged in redistricting because of their inefficient over-concentration in cities,” he continued, “the Trump era seems to have changed the country’s political geography in ways that are beneficial to Democrats.”Trump, Stephanopoulos continued,modestly reduced the enormous Democratic edge in cities, thus undoing some of this packing of Democratic voters. Trump also did significantly better in rural areas, to the point that some of them are about as red (and so as packed with Republicans) as cities are blue. And Trump bled support in the suburbs, so that the country’s most populous and competitive areas now lean toward the Democrats instead of the Republicans.As a result, Stephanopoulos argued,the U.S. House will likely be close to unbiased in partisan terms in 2022. A group of scholars peg the likely bias at around 3 percent pro-Republican, while Nate Silver’s model, which incorporates additional variables like incumbency and polling, thinks the likely bias will be around 1 percent pro-Democratic.Republicans won 234 seats in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won, by 2 percent, a majority of votes cast in House elections, according to Stephanopoulos, “but Nate Silver now thinks that Republicans will win the national House vote by 5 percent in 2022, yet only pick up the same 234 seats they got in 2012.”Robert M. Stein, a political scientist at Rice University, agrees with Stephanopolous and cites trends in Texas to show the pro-Democratic shift:Consider the Texas Republican Party’s redistricting plan in 2010 and its durability over the last decade. Beginning in 2010 Republicans held a 100 to 50 seat advantage in the Texas House of Representatives. By 2020, this margin had shrunk to 83-67. In each biennial election since 2010, Democrats picked up House seats, mostly in suburban and exurban areas of the state.The shift, Stein continued,was largely driven by the changing demography of the state. Another source of this shift can be laid at the feet of candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The result, at least in Texas, is that some of the most competitive areas (districts) in the state are not the big cities, but exurban and suburban counties including Collin, Denton, Fort Bend and Williamson. Prior to 2016 voters in these counties were trending Republican; now they are leaning Democratic or tossups.Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, cited surveys conducted by the Cooperative Election Study from 2010 to 2020 showing that “one of the most significant shifts we see in our data is increasing Democratic strength in suburbs, especially since the early 2010s.”Schaffner provided data from the study showing that the Democratic share of the two-party vote rose from 54.5 to 63.5 percent in urban areas over the decade and remained low — 35.2 to 36.1 percent — in rural America. The biggest shift, 12.5 points, was in suburban areas, which went from 41.8 percent Democratic in 2010 to 54.3 percent in 2020.Nolan McCarty suggested that these trends may prove beneficial to the Democratic Party:The natural tilt of our single-member district system has shifted away from the Republicans as the rural vote moves toward the Republicans and the suburbs move toward the Democrats. But it is not clear what the aggregate effects of those shifts will be. It should help the House Democrats in November but it is not clear how much.The effects of these shifts on the Senate and Electoral College, McCarty continued, will be slower in the short term but could eventually become significant: “Once such changes push states like Georgia, Texas and North Carolina sufficiently toward the Democrats, they would be the party with the structural advantage in the Electoral College and Senate.”Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford, noted in an email the possibility that very recent changes in suburban voting will hurt the future prospects of the Republican Party:The most noteworthy change to political geography in 2020 was the success of Biden in pivotal suburban areas. In the most recent round of redistricting, when examining proposed districting plans — whether drawn by computer simulations or humans — the number of Democratic-leaning districts in a state was often greater if one added up the votes of Biden and Trump in 2020 than if one used past presidential results, Senate results, gubernatorial results, or some other down-ballot elections.The geographic distribution of Biden votes, Rodden continued, “was more ‘efficient’ for the Democrats than that of other recent Democratic candidates.” But, he cautioned,what is unclear is whether this was a specific reaction to Donald Trump as a candidate in relatively educated suburbs, or a lasting trend in political geography that will outlive the Trump era. The latter is at least plausible, especially in the wake of the Dobbs decision, but it is too early to tell. Even in 2020, a non-trivial number of these suburban Biden voters split their tickets and voted for Republican House candidates.I asked Rodden what it means for statewide elections in contested states if these trends continue. He replied:This really depends on the numbers in each state, but in sun-belt states that are gaining educated and/or minority in-migrants, like Georgia and Arizona, we already have evidence that this was a pretty good trade for statewide Democrats, but in other states where in-migration is limited, like those in the Upper Midwest, this trade might work out better for statewide Republicans.Along similar lines, William Frey, a demographer and a senior fellow at Brookings, emphasized in an email that “Biden won the suburbs in 2020, I believe largely due to his gains among minorities and college whites.” Even if Republicans and Trump made marginal gains among minority voters, the support of these voters for Democrats remained overwhelming.In a 2021 Brookings paper, “Biden’s victory came from the suburbs,” Frey pointed to Georgia, whereDemographic shifts — including brisk growth in the state’s Democratic-leaning Black population, gains in Latino/Hispanic, and Asian Americans voters, and an increase in white college graduates, especially in the Atlanta metropolitan area — served to make the state competitive for Democrats this year.In a separate 2022 paper, “Today’s suburbs are symbolic of America’s rising diversity: A 2020 census portrait,” Frey focuses on the continuing stream of minorities moving into the suburbs. From 1990 to 2020, Frey found, the percentage of Asian Americans living in suburbs grew from 53.4 to 63.1 percent, of Hispanics from 49.5 to 61.4 percent and of African Americans, from 36.6 to 54.3 percent, the largest increase.Has geographic division, pitting a disproportionately rural Republican Party against an urban Democratic Party, added a new dimension to polarization making consensus and cooperation even more difficult?I posed a series of questions to an eclectic group of political scholars.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, replied by email:Rather than claiming that the G.O.P. is becoming the party of the working class, what I see is a long-term trend away from a party system organized along class lines. Knowing that a person is wealthy (or low income) isn’t very predictive of what party that person will prefer. The parties are much better sorted by other factors — region, religion, race — than by social class.This isn’t a new phenomenon, Lee noted, but Trump intensified these divisions: “Trump’s candidacy and presidency accelerated pre-existing trends undercutting the class basis of the parties. For a Republican, Trump had unusual appeal to working-class voters and was unusually alienating to well-off suburbanites.”James Druckman, a political scientist at Northwestern University, draws an interesting distinction: “I do think the perception in the country is that Republicans are working class but not necessarily for economic reasons directly but rather because of diffuse feelings of injustice translated into rhetoric about mistreatment, unfairness and immigrants taking jobs.”At the same time, Druckman contended:Democrats are vulnerable to charges of being the party of the elite for two reasons — one is that a small strain of the party is made up of extreme progressives who offer rhetoric that can be alienating when too wrapped up in politically correct language. Second, the growing anti-intellectualism in parts of the Republican Party reflects the significant degree of education polarization we observe.Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, rejects some recent attempts at classification:Are the Democrats the party of the elites? Yes and no. It is the case that high-income high-education professionals in the last 20 years have moved increasingly to the Democratic Party but these are people most of whom are on the moderate wing of the party. That is to say, they embrace a mildly redistributive agenda on economic issues such as Social Security, universal health care, and support for families with children, and a mildly libertarian social agenda on questions of abortion, family relations, gender relations and ethnic relations.These moderate, mainstream Democrats arefar removed from the more radical, progressive wing and its agenda on identity, diversity, equity, and social transformation. The real driving force of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are occupational strata that are characterized by low- to middle-incomes and high education. These progressive voters primarily work in social and cultural services, in large urban areas.This progressive constituency, Kitschelt argued, isquantitatively more important for the Democratic electorate than the high-education high-income more moderate segment. By embracing the agenda of “defund the police” and cultural transformation of the schools, this progressive constituency puts itself at odds with many lower- and middle-income families across all ethnic groups.Insofar as the Democratic Party adopts the progressive agenda, Kitschelt wrote, it endangers “its electoral rainbow coalition,” noting that both African American and Hispanic families “are highly concerned about improving the police, not dismantling the police” and about “the quality of basic school instruction.”On the Republican side, Kitschelt argues thatthe core element is not “working class” in any conventional sense of the phrase at all: It is low education, but relatively high-income people. These voters are overwhelmingly white, and many are of the evangelical religious conviction. In occupational terms, they are concentrated in small business, both owners and core employees, in sectors such as construction, crafts, real estate, small retail, personal services and agriculture.Kitschelt continued: “Many of these citizens tend to live in suburban and rural areas. They are the true spearhead of Republican activism, and especially of the Trumpist persuasion.”Pildes addressed these issues in his October 2021 paper, “Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West.”“The domination of the parties of the left by the more highly educated,” he wrote, “in combination with these cultural conflicts and policy differences, are an important element in the shift of the less educated, less affluent voters away from the parties of the left.”Pildes cites American National Elections Studies data on white voters in the 2016 election showing that Trump won among all income categories of whites making less than $175,000, while Hillary Clinton won only among whites who made in excess of $175,000.Pildes contended that defections from the Democratic Party among conservative and moderate minority voters pose a significant threat to the long-term viability of the party:Democratic support plunged from 49 percent to 27 percent among Hispanic conservatives between 2012 and 2020 and from 69 percent to 65 percent among Hispanic moderates. These changes suggest that ideology, rather than identity, is beginning to provide more of a voting basis among some Hispanics. If a marginally greater number of working-class Latino or Black voters start to vote the way that white working-class voters do, the ability of the Democratic Party to win national elections will be severely weakened.Bart Bonikowski, a professor of sociology and politics at N.Y.U., noted in an email that “the claim that the Republicans are becoming a party of the ‘working class’ is mistaken.” Not only are a majority of working class African Americans and Hispanics Democratic, but, “more accurately, the Republicans have become a party of disaffected white voters, many of whom hold resentments against ethnoracial minorities and a waning commitment to liberal democratic values.” Given “the built-in biases of the Electoral College and Senate — along with gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement — states with larger shares of noncollege whites will continue to exert outsized influence on U.S. politics, persistently disadvantaging Democrats even when their candidates and policies are broadly popular.”Robert Saldin, a political scientist at the University of Montana, argued by email that “Geographic polarization, or the urban-rural divide, is arguably the most defining feature of American politics.” Over the past 20 years, he continued, “the Democratic Party has hemorrhaged support in the countryside. They’ve got a five-alarm fire in rural America, but much of the party’s elite doesn’t even see the smoke.”For the Democrats, in Saldin’s view,trading the countryside for the cities has come at a political cost even if the party routinely wins many more total votes than the G.O.P. nationally. That’s because geography plays an outsized role in our political system, particularly in the Electoral College and the Senate.Consider the Dakotas, Saldin wrote:It wasn’t that long ago that their congressional delegations were packed with Democrats, but that’s inconceivable now. And to the extent that the same thing is happening in other low-population states, this presents a real problem for Democrats in the Senate.Saldin suggested:Here’s another way of conceptualizing it. Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming have less than 2 percent of the national population, but their ten senators have the same collective power in the Senate as those representing the five most populous states, California, Texas, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania. If a party managed a clean sweep in those five big-box states in flyover country, that would comprise 20 percent of what you need for a Senate majority before you even look at the other 98 percent of the country. The G.O.P. is now very close to accomplishing that feat, with Montana’s Jon Tester the last Senate Democrat standing in those states.Barring an extraordinary economic turnaround or still more explosive disclosures of criminal malfeasance by Trump, these demographic trends may have a modest effect on the outcome on Election Day in November. They do, however, suggest that the balance of political power is more fluid than widely recognized. It should undermine the confidence of those predicting victory for either the left or the right in 2024.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Americans Are Hungry for Change, So Get Ready for More Turmoil

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      I’d like you to consider the possibility that the political changes that have rocked this country over the past six years will be nothing compared with the changes that will rock it over the next six. I’d like you to consider the possibility that we’re in some sort of prerevolutionary period — the kind of moment that often gives birth to something shocking and new.Look at the conditions all around us:First, Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the way things are going. Only 13 percent of voters say the country is on the right track, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll published this week.Second, Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the leaders of both parties. Joe Biden has a 33 percent job approval rating among registered voters. About half of Republican voters want to move on from Donald Trump and find a new presidential candidate for 2024.Third, inflation is soaring. Throughout history, inflationary periods have often been linked to political instability. As the economist Lionel Robbins wrote about Weimar Germany, inflation “destroyed the wealth of the more solid elements in German society; and it left behind a moral and economic disequilibrium, apt breeding ground for the disasters which have followed.”Fourth, the generational turnover is coming. The boomer gerontocracy that now dominates power is bound to retire, leaving a vacuum for something new.Fifth, Americans are detaching from the two political parties. Far more Americans consider themselves independents than consider themselves either Democrats or Republicans, and independents may be growing more distinct. And there’s some research that suggests independents are increasingly not just closeted members of the two main parties but also hold different beliefs, which put them between parties. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe a third party is needed.Sixth, disgust with the current system is high. A majority of American voters believe that our system of government does not work, and 58 percent believe that our democracy needs major reforms or a complete overhaul. Nearly half of young adult voters believe voting does not affect how the government operates.If these conditions persist, the 2024 presidential primaries could be wild. Sure, conventional candidates like the Republican Ron DeSantis or the Democrat Gavin Newsom may run for the nominations. But if the hunger for change is as strong as it is now, the climate will favor unconventional outsiders, the further outside the better. These sorts of oddball or unexpected candidates could set off a series of swings and disequilibriums that will make the existing party systems unstable.Furthermore, if ever there was a moment ripe for a Ross Perot-like third candidate in the 2024 general election, this is that moment. There are efforts underway to prepare the way for a third candidate, and in this environment an outsider, with no ties to the status quo, who runs against the establishment and on the idea that we need to fundamentally fix the system — well, that person could wind up winning the presidency.These conditions have already shaken up the stereotypes we used to use to think about politics. We used to think of the Democrats as the party of the economically disadvantaged. But college-educated metropolitan voters continue to flock to it and reshape it more and more each year. In the Times/Siena poll of registered voters, white college graduates wanted Democrats to control Congress by 57 to 36 percent. For the first time in the survey’s history, Democrats had a larger share of support among white college graduates than among nonwhite voters. These white voters are often motivated by social policy issues like abortion rights and gun regulation.The Republicans used to be the party of business, but now they are emerging as a multiracial working-class party. In the Times/Siena poll, Hispanic voters were nearly evenly split about whether they favored Republicans or Democrats in the midterms. That may be overstating how much Hispanics have shifted, but it does seem as if the Republicans are genuinely becoming a working-class white-brown coalition. These voters care about the economy, the economy and the economy.In other words, we now have an establishment progressive party and an anti-establishment conservative party. This isn’t normal.If I were a cynical political operative who wanted to construct a presidential candidate perfectly suited for this moment, I’d start by making this candidate culturally conservative. I’d want the candidate to show by dress, speech and style that he or she is not part of the coastal educated establishment. I’d want the candidate to connect with middle- and working-class voters on values and to be full-throatedly patriotic.Then I’d make the candidate economically center-left. I’d want to fuse the economic anxieties of the working-class Republicans with the economic anxieties of the Bernie Sanders young into one big riled populist package. College debt forgiveness. An aggressive home-building project to bring down prices. Whatever it took.Then I’d have that candidate deliver one nonpartisan message: Everything is broken. Then he or she would offer a slew of institutional reforms to match the comprehensive institutional reforms the Progressive movement offered more than a century ago.I guess I’m looking for a sort of modern Theodore Roosevelt. But heck, I don’t know. What’s coming down the pike is probably so unforeseeable that I don’t even have categories for it yet.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The MAGA Formula Is Getting Darker and Darker

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      The chilling amalgam of Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiratorial zeal — from QAnon to the “stolen” 2020 election — has attracted a substantial constituency in the United States, thanks in large part to the efforts of Donald Trump and his advisers. By some estimates, adherents of these overlapping movements make up as much as a quarter or even a third of the electorate. Whatever the scale, they are determined to restore what they see as the original racial and religious foundation of America.“While these elements are not new,” Robert Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote by email, “Donald Trump wove them together and brought them out into the open. Indeed, the MAGA formula — the stoking of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment while making nativist appeals to the Christian right — could accurately be described as a white Christian nationalist strategy from the beginning.”I asked Katherine Stewart, the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” how much Christian nationalism and the great replacement theory intersect. “The answer is complex,” Stewart said. “There is definitely a wing of the Christian nationalist movement that overlaps with the Great Replacement theory and demographic paranoia in general.”At the same time, however, she continued, “there are other wings of the movement that depend less on explicitly racialized thinking and whose concerns are centered more on religious and cultural paranoia. Christian nationalism is making significant inroads among some Latino communities, for example, and there the argument is not that a preferred racial group is being replaced but that a preferred religious and cultural value system (with supposed economic implications) is under threat.”Instead of Christian nationalism, Stewart prefers the use of “religious nationalism,” which she describes asa reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the “right” religion in recovering that lost greatness. This mind-set always involves a narrative of unjust persecution at the hands of alien or “un-American” groups. The specific targets may shift. Some focus their fears on the “homosexual agenda”; others target Americans of color or nonwhite immigrant groups; still others identify the menace with religious minorities such as Muslims, Jews and secular “elites,” or perceived threats against gender hierarchy and sexual order. And of course, many take an all-of-the-above approach.According to some scholars, there are two versions of Christian nationalism, one more threatening to the social order than the other.Ruth Braunstein, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of the 2021 paper “The ‘Right’ History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America,” wrote by email that Christian nationalism can be describedas adherence to a mythical vision of the United States as a “Christian nation” that must be protected and preserved. This mythology has two dimensions: it offers an account of American history that frames the country’s founding as sacred and rooted in Christian (or Judeo-Christian) values; and it defines a “real” or “good” American today as someone committed to these same values.Within that context, Braunstein continued:We can see how the great replacement theory overlaps with Christian nationalism. Both view some specific population as “real” Americans, whether that is defined explicitly as white Christians or in the more vague and coded language of “real” or “native born” or “legacy” Americans. And both frame demographic change as threats to both that population and to the country’s essential character. Finally, although not all flavors of Christian nationalism include a conspiratorial element, some versions share with replacement theory an imagined cabal of nefarious elites — often Jews, communists/socialists, or globalists — who are intentionally promoting racial and/or religious diversity in order to diminish white Christian power.Braunstein distinguishes between two variants of Christian nationalism. One she calls “white Christian nationalism” and the other “colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism.”The first, according to Braunstein, “explicitly fuses whiteness, Christianity, and Americanness,” leading to the conclusion that “white Christians alone embody the values on which a healthy democracy rests; and as such, white Christians alone are suited to hold positions of social influence and political power.”In contrast, she continued, colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalismeither ignores race or uses colorblind language to describe ideal Americanness. This has become the predominant form of Christian nationalism among mainstream conservatives. And for many conservatives, like members of the Tea Party that I studied for several years, the invocation of colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism is intended to distinguish them from groups on the racist right.Why have Christian nationalism and replacement theory moved so quickly to center stage? Robert Jones of P.R.R.I. suggested it was “twin shocks to the system” delivered during the first two decades of this century: “the election and re-election of our first Black president and the sea change of no longer being a majority-white Christian nation.” Both of these developments, Jones wrote,happened simultaneously between 2008 and 2016. White Christians went from 54 percent to 47 percent in that period, down to 44 percent today. This set the stage for Trump and the emergence of full-throated white Christian nationalism. Trump exchanged the dog whistle for the megaphone.Racial and ethnic resentment has grown far beyond the political fringes, Jones argued, citing levels of agreement in P.R.R.I. polling with the statement “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Among all voters, according to Jones, 29 percent believe that immigrants are invading our country; among Republicans, it’s 60 percent; among Democrats, 11 percent; among QAnon believers, 65 percent; among white evangelicals, 50 percent; and among white non-college voters, as pollsters put it, 43 percent.Not only that, Jones notes:White Americans who agree that “God has granted America a special role in human history” (a softer measure of Christian nationalism) are more than twice as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (28 percent vs. 11 percent). And White Americans who agree that “God intended America to be a promised land for European Christians” (a harder measure of Christian nationalism) are four times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (43 percent vs. 10 percent). And white Americans who believe that “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic values” are more than five times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (45 percent vs. 8 percent).In their January 2022 paper, “Christian Nationalism and Political Violence: Victimhood, Racial Identity, Conspiracy, and Support for the Capitol Attacks,” Miles T. Armaly of the University of Mississippi and David T. Buckley and Adam M. Enders, both of the University of Louisville, argue: “Religious ideologies like Christian nationalism should be associated with support for violence, conditional on several individual characteristics that can be inflamed by elite cues.” Those characteristics are “perceived victimhood, reinforcing racial and religious identities, and support for conspiratorial information sources.”“It’s unlikely that a single orientation or one belief was promoting the type of violent action we witnessed in Buffalo or the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Enders wrote by email. “It’s a toxic blend of extremist orientations, such as Christian nationalism, racism, some expressions of populism and conspiracism, for example, that edges individuals closer to supporting violence.”Enders went on:Christian nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, are all about identity conflict — who is morally virtuous and more deserving, who’s “normal” and even what it means to be an American. Each of these orientations is also characterized by an extreme disdain or fear of the “other.” One might look to Christianity for deeper ties between the orientations, but I think the reality is that conspiracy-minded individuals, like the accused Buffalo shooter, can find connections between anything. He saw America as a white, heterosexual, Christian country that was becoming less white, heterosexual, and Christian, thereby threatening (his perception of) the American way of life, which was his way of life. But, racism, sexism, etc. do not have any inherent connection to a desire to build a Christian nation-state.In a separate paper, Enders wrote that he and other scholars have found thatconspiracy theories, of which great replacement theory is an example, are oftentimes undergirded by antisocial personality traits, such as the dark triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) and a predisposition toward conflict. If you combine all of these dispositions and traits and dial them up to 10, that’s when you’re most likely to find support for violence, which is correlated with (but not determinative of) behavioral violence.Armaly wrote by email that “between 25-32 percent of white Americans support some Christian nationalist ideas. We use six questions to assess the degree to which one supports Christian nationalist ideals,” including agreement or disagreement with “the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” and “the success of the United States is part of God’s plan.” Around 32 percent of respondents endorse at least four statements, Armaly wrote, “and 25 percent endorse at least five statements.”Armaly noted that of “the major predictors of support for violence — perceived victimhood, attachment to one’s whiteness, racial animus toward blacks, support for authoritarianism, support for populism, and past or current military service — all, save for military service, are present in the accused Buffalo shooter’s written statement.Buckley wrote by email that6 percent of whites, 11.5 percent of white evangelicals, and 17.7 percent of white weekly church goers fall into the joint top quartile of justification of violence, Christian nationalist beliefs, perceived victimhood, white identity, and support for QAnon. That would represent millions of individuals. It also represents a far greater share of the white American population than surveys find when testing Muslim-American support for terrorism.Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiracy preoccupation overlap, although each has unique characteristics.On May 9, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released an illuminating study, “Immigration Attitudes and Conspiratorial Thinkers,” based on 4,173 interviews with adults age 18 and over, which breaks down some of the components of hard-line thinking on the right.The A.P. and NORC created two categories, “high conspiratorial thinkers” and “low conspiratorial thinkers,” based on agreement or disagreement with four statements:1) events are the product of plots executed in secret, 2) events are directed by a small group of powerful people, 3) (those people) are unknown to voters and 4) (they) control the outcome of big events like wars, recessions, and elections. The top 25 percent were placed in the high conspiracy category and the remaining 75 percent in the low conspiracy category.Comparison of the two categories of conspiratorial thinkers revealed sharp differences, according to the report:Seven times as many high conspiratorial thinkers agree that our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places (85 percent vs. 11 percent) and that big events like wars and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people working in secret (89 percent vs. 13 percent) than their low conspiratorial counterparts. High conspiratorial thinkers believe the people who run the country are not known to the voters at triple the rate of the rest of the general population (94 percent vs. 31 percent), and they are about twice as likely to agree that a few people will always run the country (96 percent vs. 48 percent).Among those ranked high in conspiratorial thinking, 42 percent agreed that there is a group of people trying to replace native-born Americans and that native-born Americans are losing economic, political and cultural influence to immigrants, compared with 8 percent of low conspiracy thinkers.In the case of white replacement theory, the report asked two questions: “There is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views” (agree or disagree), and “How concerned are you that native-born Americans are losing their economic, political, and cultural influence in this country because of the growing population of immigrants?”The survey found significant patterns in cable news choice among those whobelieve in both the questions measuring Replacement Theory. Belief in Replacement Theory is much higher among OANN/Newsmax viewers (45 percent) and Fox News viewers (31 percent) than it is among CNN (13 percent) or MSNBC viewers (11 percent).Who are the people who fall into the high conspiracy theory category? “Nearly 6 in 10 white high conspiratorial thinkers identify as Republicans,” the report says, “and more than half voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.” Based on the racial resentment scale, the survey found that 55 percent of white high conspiratorial thinkers score in the top 25th percentile of racial resentment, compared with 21 percent of white low conspiratorial thinkers.Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma who has written extensively about Christian nationalism with Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University, observed in an email that “there is tremendous overlap between Christian nationalism and The Great Replacement theory.”Perry and Whitehead have found:White Americans who affirm Christian nationalist views are quite concerned with whites losing their majority status in the United States. They are also very concerned with low birthrates and believe that we need to return to a day when Americans had more babies. This is related to their fears of immigration and cultural change. White Christian nationalism is also powerfully related with views that true patriots may need to resort to physical violence to save the nation, because they believe the current situation has become so dire.Whitehead elaborated in his own email:Racism is intimately intertwined with white Christian nationalism, and so the great replacement theory is a part of that intersection. We find in study after study that when white Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalism — an ethno-religious political ideology that advocates a close fusion between a particular expression of Christianity and American civic life — they are more likely to (1) fear a time in the future where whites are no longer the majority, (2) oppose interracial marriage, (3) oppose transracial adoption, (4) assume Black Americans are biologically inferior, (5) believe police violence toward Black Americans is warranted, and (6) show more tolerance for “old-fashioned racists” compared to other stigmatized groups.Joseph Baker, a sociologist at East Tennessee State University who together with Perry and Whitehead wrote the paper “Keep America Christian (and White): Christian Nationalism, Fear of Ethnoracial Outsiders, and Intention to Vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election,” noted:Christian nationalist views and xenophobia are very highly correlated with one another. Specifically, when Americans score highly on a comprehensive measure of xenophobia that includes perceptions of racial, economic, criminal, and cultural threat from immigrants, they nearly always also scored highly on a measure of Christian nationalism.Baker cited a statement issued in the summer of 2019 by James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, after Dobson visited the Mexican American border.Dobson’s statement:I can only report that without an overhaul of the law and the allocation of resources, millions of illegal immigrants will continue flooding to this great land from around the world. Many of them have no marketable skills. They are illiterate and unhealthy. Some are violent criminals. Their numbers will soon overwhelm the culture as we have known it, and it could bankrupt the nation. America has been a wonderfully generous and caring country since its founding. That is our Christian nature. But in this instance, we have met a worldwide wave of poverty that will take us down if we don’t deal with it. And it won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen.Estimates of the number of Christian nationalists in this country vary widely. Baker wrote that “using a multi-item measure of whether people want to see Christianity privileged in political and public spheres, a good estimate is that about 20 percent of Americans are Christian nationalists, and another 25 percent or so are at least sympathetic to some aspects of these views.”Despite these high numbers, Baker argues, the percentage of Christian nationalists is declining as a proportion of the overall population, “along with white Protestantism more generally,” which may increase the likelihood of violent protests.The decline, Baker wrote,is helping to fuel the renewed fervor with which we are witnessing efforts to impose Christian nationalism. Because these views are necessarily rooted in perceptions of cultural threat, declining numbers further stoke the persecution complex that motivates Christian nationalism. So Christian nationalism’s numeric decline and cultural resurgence are, ironically, directly connected.This “cultural resurgence” and the political clout that comes with it will do nothing to diminish their ambition to restore an imagined past, by any means necessary.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Politics of Fear Show No Sign of Abating

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      “The story of the 21st century is less a story about exponential population growth than it is a story about differential growth — marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries,” Jennifer Sciubba, a professor of international studies at Rhodes College, writes in her new book, “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World.”In some regions, Sciubba continues,Population pressures are blowing the top off of a pot already boiling with poor governance, civil war and environmental destruction. At best, there’s only dim hope for a peaceful future. When the pot boils over, countries across the globe feel the effects in the form of refugees and terrorist extremism.The resulting turmoil is empowering the ethnonationalist right — propelling Viktor Orban’s re-election to a fourth term on April 3 in Hungary and Marine Le Pen’s 41.5 percent showing in the April 24 French presidential election. In the United States, immigration has become a primary driver of the polarization between Republican and Democratic voters, crucial to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his continuing lead in the polls for the 2024 presidential nomination.As far back as 2006, David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford, described what he called a “third demographic transition” in “Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries”:A third demographic transition is underway in Europe and the United States. The ancestry of some national populations is being radically and permanently altered by high levels of immigration of persons from remote geographic origins or with distinctive ethnic and racial ancestry, in combination with persistent sub-replacement fertility and accelerated levels of emigration of the domestic population.Low fertility and high immigration, according to Coleman, “are significant because they are changing the composition of national populations and thereby the culture, physical appearance, social experiences and self-perceived identity of the inhabitants.”The British demographer Paul Morland, in an interview this year with the BBC, addressed the race issue head on in describing politically volatile population trends:The huge expansion in white populations we previously took for granted is now retreating, and historically majority-white countries are becoming much more diverse. Mass migration into Europe and America has changed the face of those continents, and identities will surely continue to shift in these nations over time. Toward the middle of the current century, the percentage of the U.S. population that belongs to minority groups is expected to be more than 50 percent, and that will surely have an impact. If you look at the ethnic makeup of Trump voters and his slim electoral victory, it’s clear he would not have been elected if America was less white.At the same time, Morland noted,Africa is about to have a huge population explosion — by 2100, there are very likely to be six or seven times as many Africans as Europeans. We’re in the middle of a massive shift in the global balance. The world is set to become much more African, and it will be very interesting to see how that will affect things.In his 2019 book, “The Human Tide,” Morland wrote: “If the biggest global news story of the last 40 years has been China’s economic growth, the biggest news story of the next 40 years will be Africa’s population growth.” It’s striking, Morland continues, “to realize that in the continent as a whole in 1950 there were far less than half as many people as there were in Europe. Today, Africa’s population is around a third larger than Europe’s and by 2100 it is likely to have quadrupled again, while Europe’s will have shrunk.”A graphic in Sciubba’s book illustrates the emergence of below-replacement fertility rates in Europe and North America — rates that have led to what my Times colleague Charles Blow has described as “white extinction anxiety.”Immigration, of course, does not engender only political responses. The psychological reaction to immigration — to the influx of new and unfamiliar populations — varies widely across the electorate.In a 2012 paper, “Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes,” Spassena P. Koleva, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, Peter H. Ditto and Jonathan Haidt argued thatindividuals who view illegal immigrants as weakening the U.S. economy (the socially conservative position) might also fear that immigrants will bring in dangerous and polluting foreign elements (Purity) and subvert American traditions and order (Authority).In an email to me, Ditto took this concept a step further:For some people immigration is conceived as akin to contamination, as allowing impure foreign elements into a sacred and pure “American” body politic — and those apprehensions about contamination drive their resistance to immigration — perhaps legal as much as illegal.But, Ditto cautioned, “this should not be taken to mean that these people view immigrants in a dehumanized way (as some kind of vermin) — that would be taking it too far. It is much more implicit than that — just a general valuation of purity and discomfort with contamination.”Along related lines, in 2014, Randy Thornhill, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and Corey Fincher, of the Face Research Lab at the University of Glasgow, published “Democracy and Other Governmental Systems.” They develop a germ-related stress theory that in many respects complements Ditto’s emphasis on the crucial role of purity. “The psychological dimension of xenophobia, ethnocentrism, traditionalism, and authoritarianism,” Thornhill and Fincher contend, joins these features to pathogen-linked threat.Conversely, Thornhill and Fincher argue, “individualism (hence, liberalism), democracy, anti-authoritarianism, and women’s rights and freedom” are found more commonly in countries with relatively low health-related hazard.In an earlier paper, Fincher and Thornhill argued:In contemporary societies, collectivists and individualists differ significantly in their view of the social structure of the society in which they reside. Collectivists emphasize the boundary between in-group and out-group and are distrusting of and unwilling to contact out-group members; individualists make less distinction between in- and out-groups, and are more trusting of and show more willingness to contact out-groups.While it remains the subject of intense debate in academic circles, this line of argument has been gaining adherents.I asked Lene Aaroe, a professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark, about growing opposition to immigration, and she wrote back, first citing “two of the classical explanations” that underscore “concerns over cultural integration and competition over economic resources, respectively, as major drivers of attitudes on immigration.”She noted that in addition to these classical explanations there is “a growing line of research that emphasizes that psychological motivations for disease avoidance shape opposition to immigration. I have contributed actively to this line of work.”Aaroe described the premise of her research:That over human evolutionary history pathogens and infections have constituted a central threat to our species. In addition to the physiological immune system which fights infections once they have entered the body, our species has therefore evolved psychological motivations to help us avoid coming into contact with infections in the first place. These psychological mechanisms are typically referred to as the so-called behavioral immune system.These psychological mechanisms, according to Aaroe, “operate automatically at the unconscious level. They work through emotions of disgust and fear of disease and motivate people to respond with avoidance and distance-taking in the face of potential infection risk.” Aaroe noted that the fear of disease is often a misperception not based on reality but on a psychological trait prompting prejudicial judgments.In modern diverse and multicultural societies, Aaroe continued, “facial birthmarks, physical disabilities, or something as innocent as differences in skin color and ethnicity are subconsciously misinterpreted as cues of potential infection risk with skepticism and distance-taking as outcomes.”People vary in the sensitivity of their behavioral immune systems, Aaroe wrote, so “some are more prone to experience disgust in situations that involve potential infection risk (e.g. drinking from another person’s water bottle). Our cross-national research conducted in the United States and Denmark” — “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions: Why and How Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Underlie Opposition to Immigration” and “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Partisan Preferences in Modern Democracies: Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Voting for Socially Conservative Parties” — “supports” the idea that “these individuals are also more likely to be skeptical toward immigration and to identify and vote for social conservative political parties that prioritize social conformity, order, and exclusionary policies toward out-groups and unfamiliar others.”Let’s take a look at some of the consequences of the line of reasoning developed by Ditto, Thornhill and Aaroe. Someone with an elevated fear of pathogens, who has more or less unconsciously translated that fear into opposition to immigration, may view liberals who want to open the nation’s doors as a threat to his or her health and, at the extreme, to his or her life.If this logic holds true, we have entered a new moral universe.Morteza Dehghani, a professor of psychology and computer science at the University of Southern California, emailed that he and his colleagues have found that “extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice against marginalized groups could be understood as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people’s moral values and perceptions of moral violations.”In a 2021 paper, “Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice,” Joe Hoover, Mohammad Atari, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Brendan Kennedy, Gwenyth Portillo-Wightman, Leigh Yeh and Dehghani concluded:Across five studies, ranging from geospatial analysis of 3,108 U.S. counties to social psychological experiments with over 2,200 participants, we found evidence that group-level moral concerns (i.e., loyalty, authority, and purity) are predictive of extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice even after controlling for county-level confounders, such as political ideology.The moral legitimization of violence is the focus of Alan Fiske, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A., and Tage Shakti Rai, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, in their 2014 book, “Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships.”They write that violence isconsidered to be the essence of evil: it is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.Fiske and Rai argue that people “are morally motivated to do violence to create, conduct, protect, redress, terminate or mourn social relationships with the victim or with others. We call our theory virtuous violence theory.”Political conflict, scholars have found, can move into the zone of morally justified violence when elected officials and candidates focus their campaigns on grievance. As Ditto put it by email:When groups interact with each other, exchange things, this creates the potential for feelings of grievance to develop — they screwed us in some way. Once you feel that a group has wronged you or your group, then you are in moral territory.In a February 2021 paper, “Populism and the Social Psychology of Grievance,” Ditto and Cristian G. Rodriguez, a professor of psychology at the Universidad de los Andes, in Chile, write: “Populist political movements seek to gain power by leveraging feelings of grievance, a sense that ‘the people’ have been treated unfairly by ‘the elite.’” Evoking past grievance, they write, “has two clear collateral costs: it can be used to justify undemocratic means to gain political power, and its evocation risks initiating a self-escalating cycle of inter-factional political conflict.”As conflicts escalate, so do the perils of grievance politics:Feelings of grievance can lead people to feel licensed to abandon previous moral and procedural constraints. Although sometimes these constraints feel arguably bendable, abandoning other moral rules, such as adherence to democratic political tactics or prohibitions against violence, can be substantially more problematic. Research on highly contentious and moralized political environments has found them to foster an increased willingness to condone undemocratic means to achieve desired political ends, up to and including violence. In the U.S., partisan anger is associated with tolerance of cheating, lying and voter suppression as acceptable political tactics.I asked Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, how partisanship can become moralized, legitimating opposition and even violence. He replied:Politics plays a tremendous role in this. It is politicians who give action to latent attitudes and can organize collective action or even harness the power of the state. For example, Trump supporters might have had a latent tendency to be opposed to immigration but when Trump comes along and tells them that we need to “build a wall,” this made them think that immigration must really be a problem and, so, this latent tendency is activated. Then, when the state gets involved in building this wall and aggressively enforcing immigration, it brings power and action to these tendencies.Hostility to immigration, Enos wrote,seems to be tightly related to a person’s larger worldview, so that a person that tends to be right-wing will also tend to have hostility to immigration and a person who is left-wing will tend to be more open. Scholars don’t agree on how to characterize the differences between these worldviews, but notice that much of the language used to describe the differences has implications for acceptance of immigrants — for example, people on the right are described as seeing the world as ‘threatening’ or having a ‘closed’ worldview.Peter Howley, a professor of behavioral economics at Leeds University, shared Enos’s view of the crucial role of closed- and open-mindedness. “Openness is strongly correlated with immigration attitudes,” he wrote in an email, “and our own research demonstrates how openness strongly moderates the relationship between inflows of migrants into one’s local area and the self-reported well-being of existing residents.”This openness, Howley continued,captures the degree to which people are attracted by novel stimuli and entails a preference for variety and new experiences. For people comparatively low on openness, demographic change and all it entails from exposure to new cuisine, music and amenities may be a daunting prospect, but for people with high scores on openness, demographic change offers the potential for exciting new experiences.The political scientists Christopher D. Johnston of Duke and Howard G. Lavine and Christopher M. Federico, both of the University of Minnesota, write in their book “Open Versus Closed”:As partisan conflict has been extended to cultural and lifestyle issues, engaged citizens have organized themselves into parties by personality, a process we refer to as “dispositional sorting.” In particular, those with “closed” personality traits have moved into the Republican column over the past few decades, and those with “open” traits have become Democrats. More generally, open citizens now take their economic policy cues from trusted elites on the cultural left, while closed citizens adopt the positions of those on the cultural right.The conflicts within this country reflect in miniature the global tensions of the 21st century. Sciubba puts the predicament in context in her introduction to a new collection of essays, “A Research Agenda for Political Demography.”At one extreme:In high- and middle-income countries, the most recent transition is to extremely low fertility and low mortality, leading to a shift in the composition of various age groups — far more elderly than youth and declining proportions of those in the middle ages. For the world’s most developed countries, national goals of economic growth of 2 percent or more are mismatched with shrinking populations — the idea of infinitely expanding economies is rubbing up against demographic reality. In some states with low fertility, immigration is eroding the advantages of longtime ethnic majorities and political tensions are high. Rising support for anti-immigrant far-right parties and populists, particularly in the U.S.A. and Europe, are demonstrations of the connection between demographics and politics.At the other extreme:In lower-income countries, fertility remains high, but declining mortality means that these populations are growing exponentially — a different transformation. Population density is increasing as the amount of available land stays constant and the number of people who inhabit it grows two- or threefold. Climate change is accelerating strains on the land itself, and economic forces like globalization are restructuring economies, often toward production for export, rather than for subsistence. Economic crises too often turn into civil conflict, which then pushes populations into new communities and across borders, and creates a new set of problems for both senders and receivers.By this reasoning, the prospect, globally, is for worsening conflict between rich and poor countries and between the rich and the poor within countries. In many respects, politics is about organizing fear. Democracies break down and republics dissolve when fear is used too often as a motivating tool, a partisan weapon. The issue now is whether the political system can begin to organize our fear of one another in a constructive fashion that resolves rather than exacerbates conflicts.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Status Anxiety Is Blowing Wind Into Trump’s Sails

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      What is the role of status discontent in the emergence of right-wing populism? If it does play a key role, does it matter more where someone stands at any given moment or whether someone is moving up the ladder or down?In the struggle for status, Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University, Denmark and the lead author of “Beyond Populism: The Psychology of Status-Seeking and Extreme Political Discontent,” argues thatEducation has emerged as a clear cleavage in addition to more traditional indicators of social class. The highly educated fare better in a more globalized world that puts a premium on human capital. Since the 1980s the highly educated left in the U.S. and elsewhere have been forging alliances with minority groups (e.g., racial, ethnic and sexual minorities), who also have been increasing their status in society. This, in turn, pushes those with lower education or those who feel challenged by the new emerging groups towards the right.It is hardly a secret that the white working class has struggled in recent decades — and clearly many factors play a role — but what happens to those without the skills and abilities needed to move up the education ladder to a position of prestige in an increasingly competitive world?Petersen’s answer: They have become populism’s frontline troops.Over the past six decades, according to Petersen, there has been a realignment of the parties in respect to their position as pro-establishment or anti-establishment: “In the 1960s and 1970s the left was associated with an anti-systemic stance but this position is now more aligned with the right-wing.”Those trapped in a downward spiral undergo a devastating experience.Lea Hartwich, a social psychologist at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrueck University in Germany wrote in an email:Those falling behind face a serious threat to their self-worth and well-being: Not only are the societal markers of personal worth and status becoming unattainable but, according to the dominant cultural narrative of individual responsibility, this is supposedly the result of their own lack of hard work or merit.Instead of focusing on the economic system and its elites, Hartwich continued,Right-wing populists usually identify what they call liberal elites in culture, politics and the media as the “enemies of the people.” Combined with the rejection of marginalized groups like immigrants, this creates targets to blame for dissatisfaction with one’s personal situation or the state of society as a whole while leaving a highly unequal economic system intact. Right-wing populists’ focus on the so-called culture wars, the narrative that one’s culture is under attack from liberal elites, is very effective because culture can be an important source of identity and self-worth for people. It is also effective in organizing political conflicts along cultural, rather than economic lines.In a January 2021 paper — “Neoliberalism can reduce well-being by promoting a sense of social disconnection, competition, and loneliness” — Hartwich, Julia C. Becker, also of Osnabrueck, and S. Alexander Haslam of Queensland University found that “exposure to neoliberal ideology,” which they describe as the belief that “economies and societies should be organized along the principles of the free market,” results in “loneliness and, through this, decreases well-being. We found that exposure to neoliberal ideology increased loneliness and decreased well-being by reducing people’s sense of connection to others and by increasing perceptions of being in competition with others.”Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, described the political consequences of white status decline in her 2018 paper, “Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote.”“Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups,” Mutz wrote. “Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.”Mutz found that:Change in financial well-being had little impact on candidate preference. Instead, changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority-minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status.In fact, status decline and economic decline, which have fueled the increasing conservatism of the Republican Party, are closely linked both psychologically and politically.Gordon Hanson, a professor of urban policy at Harvard and the author of “Economic and Political Consequences of Trade-Induced Manufacturing Decline,” emailed me that before the 2016 election, the assumption was that “the political consequences of regionally concentrated manufacturing job loss” would be that “left-leaning politicians” would be “the primary beneficiaries.” Trump’s victory “dramatically altered our thinking on the matter.”Instead, Hanson continued, “large scale job loss led to greater tribalism (as represented by the populist nationalism of Trump and his acolytes) rather than greater support for redistribution (as represented by your run-of-the-mill Democrat).” There was, in fact, “precedence for this outcome,” he wrote, citing a 2013 paper, “Political Extremism in the 1920s and 1930s: Do German Lessons Generalize?” by Alan de Bromhead, Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke, economists at Queen’s University Belfast, Berkeley and N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi.The three economists wrote:Consistent with German experience, we find a link between right-wing political extremism and economic conditions, as captured by the change in G.D.P. Importantly, however, what mattered for right-wing anti-system party support was not just deterioration in economic conditions lasting a year or two, but economic conditions over the longer run.Many of the U.S. counties that moved toward Trump in 2016 and 2020 experienced long-run adverse economic conditions that began with the 2000 entry of China into the World Trade Organization, setbacks that continue to plague those regions decades later.Hanson and his co-authors, David Autor and David Dorn, economists at M.I.T. and the University of Zurich, found in their October 2021 paper “On the Persistence of the China Shock” thatLocal labor markets more exposed to import competition from China suffered larger declines in manufacturing jobs, employment-population ratios, and personal income per capita. These effects persist for nearly two decades beyond the intensification of the trade shock after 2001, and almost a decade beyond the shock reaching peak intensity.They go on:Even using higher-end estimates of the consumer benefits of rising trade with China, a substantial fraction of commuting zones appears to have suffered absolute declines in average real incomes.In their oft-cited 2020 paper, “Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure,” Autor, Dorn, Hanson and Kaveh Majlesi, an economist at Monash University, found that in majority white regions, adverse economic developments resulting from trade imports produced a sharp shift to the right.Autor and his co-authors describe “an ideological realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election.” More specifically, “trade-impacted commuting zones or districts saw an increasing market share for the Fox News Channel, stronger ideological polarization in campaign contributions and a relative rise in the likelihood of electing a Republican to Congress.”Counties with a majority white population “became more likely to elect a G.O.P. conservative, while trade-exposed counties with an initial majority-minority population became more likely to elect a liberal Democrat,” Autor and his colleagues write.They continue:In presidential elections, counties with greater trade exposure shifted toward the Republican candidate. These results broadly support an emerging political economy literature that connects adverse economic shocks to sharp ideological realignments that cleave along racial and ethnic lines and induce discrete shifts in political preferences and economic policy.The trade-induced shift to the right has deeper roots dating back to at least the early 1990s.In “Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA,” Jiwon Choi and Ilyana Kuziemko, both of Princeton, Ebonya Washington of Yale and Gavin Wright of Stanford make the case that the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 played a crucial role in pushing working class whites out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party:We demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to NAFTA suffered large and persistent employment losses relative to other counties. These losses begin in the mid-1990s and are only modestly offset by transfer programs. While exposed counties historically voted Democratic, in the mid-1990s they turn away from the party of the president (Bill Clinton) who ushered in the agreement and by 2000 vote majority Republican in House elections.The trade agreement with Mexico and Canada “led to lasting, negative effects on Democratic identification among regions and demographic groups that were once loyal to the party,” Choi and her co-authors write.Before enactment, the Republican share of the vote in NAFTA-exposed counties was 38 percent, well below the national average, but “by 1998, these once-solidly Democratic counties voted as or more Republican in House elections as the rest of the country,” according to Choi and her colleagues.Before NAFTA, the authors write, Democratic Party support for protectionist policies had been the glue binding millions of white working-class voters to the party, overcoming the appeal of the Republican Party on racial and cultural issues. Democratic support for the free trade agreement effectively broke that bond: “For many white Democrats in the 1980s, economic issues such as trade policy were key to their party loyalty because on social issues such as guns, affirmative action and abortion they sided with the G.O.P.”The consequences of trade shocks have been devastating both to whole regions and to the individuals living in them.Katheryn Russ — co-author along with Katherine Eriksson and Minfei Xu, economists at the University of California-Davis, Jay C. Shambaugh, an economist at George Washington University of the 2020 paper “Trade Shocks and the Shifting Landscape of U.S. Manufacturing” — wrote in an email that trade induced economic downturns “affect entire communities, as places with the lowest fractions of high-school or college-educated workers are finding themselves falling with increasing persistence into the set of counties with the highest unemployment rates.”Even worse, these counties “do not bounce back out with the same frequency that counties with the highest fraction of high-school and college-educated workers do. So we aren’t just talking about a phenomenon that may influence the self-perceived status of individual workers, but of entire communities.”Russ cited a separate 2017 study, “Trade Shocks and the Provision of Local Public Goods” by Leo Feler and Mine Z. Senses, economists at U.C.LA. and Johns Hopkins, which finds that “increased competition from Chinese imports negatively affects local finances and the provision of public services across US localities.”Specifically, “a $1,000 increase in Chinese imports per worker results in a relative decline in per capita expenditures on public welfare, 7.7 percent, on public transport, 2.4 percent, on public housing, 6.8 percent, and on public education, 0.9 percent.”These shortfalls emerge just as demand increases, Feler and Senses write: “The demand for local public goods such as education, public safety, and public welfare is increasing more in trade-affected localities when resources for these services are declining or remaining constant.”For example,Public safety expenditures remain constant at a time when local poverty and unemployment rates are rising, resulting in higher property crime rates by 3.5 percent. Similarly, a relative decline in education spending coincides with an increase in the demand for education as students respond to a deterioration in employment prospects for low-skilled workers by remaining in school longer.As if that were not enough,In localities that are more exposed to trade shocks, we also document an increase in the share of poor and low-income households, which tend to rely more on government services such as public housing and public transportation, both of which experience spending cuts.Eroded social standing, the loss of quality jobs, falling income and cultural marginalization have turned non-college white Americans into an ideal recruiting pool for Donald Trump — and stimulated the adoption of more authoritarian, anti-immigrant and anti-democratic policies.Rui Costa Lopes, a research fellow at the University of Lisbon, emailed in response to my inquiry about the roots of right-wing populism: “As we’re talking more about those who suffer from relative deprivation, status insecurity or powerlessness, then we’re talking more about the phenomenon of ‘politics of resentment’ and there is a link between those types of resentment and adhesion to right populist movements.”Lopes continued: “Recent research shows that the link between relative deprivation, status insecurity or powerlessness and political populist ideas (such as Euroscepticism) occurs through cultural (anti-immigrant) and political (anti-establishment) blame attributions.”“The promise of economic well-being achieved through meritocratic means lies at the very heart of Western liberal economies,” write three authors — Elena Cristina Mitrea of the University of Sibiu in Romania, Monika Mühlböck and Julia Warmuth, of the University of Vienna — in “Extreme Pessimists? Expected Socioeconomic Downward Mobility and the Political Attitudes of Young Adults.” In reality, “the experience of upward mobility has become less common, while the fear of downward mobility is no longer confined to the lower bound of the social strata, but pervades the whole society.”Status anxiety has become a driving force, Mitrea and her colleagues note: “It is not so much current economic standing, but rather anxiety concerning future socioeconomic decline and déclassement, that influences electoral behavior.”“Socially disadvantaged and economically insecure citizens are more susceptible to the appeals of the radical right,” Mitrea, Mühlböck and Warmuth observe, citing data showing “that far-right parties were able to increase their vote share by 30 percent in the aftermath of financial crises.Economic insecurity translates into support for the far-right through feelings of relative deprivation, which arise from negative comparisons drawn between actual economic well-being and one’s expectations or a social reference group. Coping with such feelings increases the likelihood of rejecting political elites and nurturing anti-foreign sentiments.The concentration of despair in the United States among low-income whites without college degrees compared with their Black and Hispanic counterparts is striking.Carol Graham, a Brookings senior fellow, and Sergio Pinto, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, document this divide in “The Geography of Desperation in America: Labor Force Participation, Mobility Trends, Place, and Well-being,” a paper presented at a 2019 conference sponsored by the Boston Federal Reserve:Poor blacks are by far the most optimistic group compared to poor whites: they are 0.9 points higher on the 0-10 scale (0.43 standard deviations). Poor blacks are also 14 percentage points (0.28 standard deviations) less likely to report stress the previous day, half as likely as poor whites to report stress in the previous day, while poor Hispanics fall somewhere in the middle.Graham and Pinto measured poll respondents’ sense of purpose, sense of community and their financial and social well-being and found “that blacks and Hispanics typically score higher than whites,” noting that “these findings highlight the remarkable levels of resilience among blacks living in precarious circumstances compared to their white counterparts.”Graham and Pinto write:The deepest desperation is among cohorts in the white working class who previously had privileged access to jobs (and places) that guaranteed stable, middle-class lives. Rather ironically, African Americans and Hispanics — the cohorts that historically faced high levels of discrimination — retain higher levels of well-being, especially hope for the future.The data suggest that a large segment of the white, non-college population lives day-by-day in a cauldron of dissatisfaction, a phenomenon that stands apart from the American tradition.This discontent drew many disaffected Americans to Donald Trump, and Trump’s defeat in 2020 has produced millions of still more disaffected voters who support his claim that the election was stolen.Michael Bang Petersen puts it this way:We know that humans essentially have two routes to acquire status: prestige and dominance. Prestige is earned respect from having skills that are useful to others. Dominance is status gained from intimidation and fear. Individuals who are high in the pursuit of dominance play a central role in political destabilization. They are more likely to commit political violence, to engage in hateful online interactions and to be motivated to share misinformation.That this is dangerous does not need repeating.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More