In the 2016 presidential race, we hear a lot about anger. Voters are angry about the economy, about race, about the “establishment.” But knowing what voters are angry about doesn’t necessarily tell us why they are angry. There may be logical reasons, but there may also be a more basic, […] Read more »
A Simple Model for Predicting Hillary Clinton’s Vote in the March 15 Democratic Primaries
A simple model based on two predictors — the racial composition of the Democratic primary electorate and a dummy variable for region — explain over 90% of the variance in Hillary Clinton’s vote share in this year’s Democratic primaries through March 8. The results of a regression analysis of Clinton’s […] Read more »
Why Donald Trump Has Done Worse in Mostly White States
Donald Trump has tended to fare worst in states that are mostly white. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t had great success in appealing to white Republican primary voters — there’s no doubt of that — only that he generally does better in states that have higher percentages of nonwhites, particularly […] Read more »
New poll shows Trump supporters more likely to fear a majority-minority U.S.
… Support for Trump is highest among whites who express ethnocentric viewpoints, score high on measures of authoritarianism, identify strongly as white, and who express negative views of racial minorities. Now a new poll that we conducted adds another dimension. In particular, we directly measured Americans’ fear of the demographic […] Read more »
How political science helps explain the rise of Trump: the role of white identity and grievances
This is the second of three posts describing how political science helps explain the success of Donald Trump. In the first post, we discussed the research showing that most voters are not ideologues, and, in particular, that many Republicans have liberal positions about government spending. This gives a heterodox candidate […] Read more »
Voting restrictions stir anger, mobilize more Democrats to polls
In recent years, many states have passed laws that make it more difficult for people to register and vote. But while these laws may be disenfranchising some minority voters—many of whom support the Democratic Party—they also may be having the unintended consequence of angering many voters, mobilizing them to go […] Read more »