As a candidate for President, Donald Trump defied recent norms for presidential candidates with several racially charged statements. Did that rhetoric—and the 2016 campaign more generally—affect voters’ support for Trump in his general-election contest with Hillary Clinton? Given prior research on prejudice and priming, a few research questions loom especially large: did the 2016 campaign activate white citizens’ prejudice? If so, did it particularly activate attitudes toward specific minority groups?
To address those questions, my forthcoming Political Behavior article “The Activation of Prejudice and Presidential Voting” uses a population-based panel survey to examine the predictive power of prejudice and other factors in explaining 2016 support for Trump versus Clinton. CONT.
Dan Hopkins (Penn), Political Behavior