Since officially jumping into the 2020 race less than two weeks ago, former Vice President Joe Biden has reshaped the Democratic primary. His polling numbers have risen from the high 20s to the low 40s since declaring his candidacy two weeks ago. In doing so, Biden has, for the moment, […] Read more »
The Rise of White Identity Politics
Conservatives and moderates are often dismissive of “identity politics,” by which they mean liberal efforts to motivate voter turnout by raising issues of particular concern to women, people of color, and other marginalized groups in American politics. But it is important to remember that the original identity politics play was […] Read more »
Biden Accelerates the Democratic Fight About the White Working Class
White working-class voters’ share of the electorate may be shrinking even faster now than in recent years, new data suggest. But that dynamic shows no signs of dampening the growing debate among Democrats about how heavily the party should focus on recapturing the blue-collar whites who have become the foundation […] Read more »
Studying how law and order issues are framed has helped to uncover 2016’s shy Trump voters
Racial tensions surged back onto the American political agenda during the 2016 election. Following numerous mass protests and sporadic riots sparked by the deaths of people of color at the hands of police officers, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump took opposite positions on the “law and order” issue. Clinton expressed […] Read more »
A New Study Confirms (Again) That Race, Not Economics, Drove Former Democrats To Trump
… “Economic distress is not a significant factor in explaining the shift in Iowa voters from Democrat to Republican between 2008 and 2016,” write Iowa State University sociologists Ann Oberhauser, Daniel Krier, and Abdi Kusow. “The election outcomes do not signify [a revolt] among working-class voters left behind by globalization.” […] Read more »
The Fickle Over the Faithful
… A 2017 study by Johns Hopkins University researchers Stephen L. Morgan and Jiwon Lee, which was published in the Sociological Science journal, found that non-Hispanic white voters totaled 69.3 percent of the electorate in 2016. The percentage of that total who were working class was just 18.6 percent. Conversely, […] Read more »