… White backlash against rising racial tensions and urban violence in the 1960s was considered a boon to the Republican Party in general and to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign to restore law and order in particular. Trump echoed those earlier campaigns in calling for “law and order” after the […] Read more »
The Evangelicals and the Great Trump Hope
… For white evangelical Protestants, Mr. Trump’s general vow to “make America great again” means something specific. Mr. Trump stepped into the spotlight just as the curtain was coming down on the era of white Protestant dominance. Mr. Trump’s ascendancy has turned the 2016 election into a referendum on the […] Read more »
Public Opinion Context: Americans, Race and Police
The deaths of five police officers in Dallas, along with the recent deaths of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota at the hands of police, highlighted — again — the importance of understanding attitudes of the American public, including blacks and whites, toward the police and criminal justice system. […] Read more »
Is political polarization making racial tensions worse?
We take for granted the fact that America’s racial divide overlaps with our political one. … Race and partisanship are so sufficiently intertwined at this point that it can be hard to determine the effect one has on the other. Are attitudes about Black Lives Matter split by party because […] Read more »
How Falling Behind the Joneses Fueled the Rise of Trump
… Trump’s white working class supporters — who provide somewhere between 58 and 62 percent of his votes, according to data from NBC and ABC polls — have suffered a stunning loss of relative status over the past 40 years. Their wages have stagnated or declined; the ascendance of minorities […] Read more »
Clinton Targets College-Educated Whites in Bid for Swing States
Hillary Clinton’s path to the White House relies on reassembling the winning Obama coalition of minority voters and women, but her campaign is vying for a demographic long out of reach for Democrats—college-educated whites—that could reshape the map of U.S. swing states this year. For decades, white voters with at […] Read more »