White anxiety, and a president ready to face it

Written by Emily Badger and Nate Cohn

Two forces convulsing US politics met at President Donald Trump's rally in North Carolina this week: white voters worry about their position in an increasingly diverse country and a determined politician to stir up these concerns.

Investigations show that some whites are afraid of losing their status in America, and those who share these opinions are increasingly aligned with the Republican Party. These voters perceive anti-white discrimination. More and more people are saying that the nation risks losing its identity because of its openness to foreigners. And many are worried about what it will mean when non-Hispanic whites lose majority status, as demographic forecasts suggest, around 2045. A large, if not a majority, proportion of white voters and a majority of Republicans, say that this change will threaten US Customs. and values ​​- a perspective they say makes them anxious or even angry.

But according to political scientists, without a politician the size of the president who was exploiting him with such force, this persistent feeling of loss of white status would probably not be such a fuel in American politics.

"It really takes a Trump to ignite," said Michael Tesler, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine. "These beliefs that whites are discriminated against, that undeserving minorities get more than they deserve and that hard-working whites get less than they deserve – are still there."

"But what Trump really does is that he maps them to politics. This is where they become explosive. "

Research is beginning to suggest that white voters who have long been politically motivated by their views on other groups may be starting to think that their own group is an explicit identity. In this sense, they seem for the first time in the Trump era to think of themselves in a way that reflects the way minorities have long thought about group identity.

It was not easy to think that American politics would end up here in 2019, with voters chanting to send a member of the US Congress born abroad to Africa. A different politician at the top of the Republican Party – one focused, for example, on tax cuts rather than on immigrants – might have left these white racial concerns more dormant or less clearly related to partisanship.

This means that this moment should not simply be understood as a brutal reaction against the country's first black president, political scientists said. It is also an answer to the first president of the modern era to make explicit calls to white racial anxieties at the center of his campaigns.

"Suddenly, those people who had no way of expressing these attitudes are now being asked to express them," said Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA political scientist and occasional Upshot collaborator, and co-editor. author of a book with Tesler and John Sides on the role of racial identity in the 2016 election. "Trump is a huge element in what is happening. It is insufficient, but it is necessary. Voters are not enough but they are necessary. "

The evidence that racial attitudes now play an important role in the choice of voting among white voters is overwhelming. It has been reproduced, study after study, in almost every major political science survey conducted over the past ten years.

If you wanted to know if the white voters of Barack Obama would support Trump in 2016, you'd better know their demographics and their answers to race questions than to know their political ideology, for example, if they considered themselves same as conservatives. You had better know their attitudes about race than know if they were worried about their economic situation, whether they had a university degree, their age or their gender.

Many white Americans have long defended what political scientists call conservative racial conceptions, such as believing that African Americans struggle to move forward because they do not work enough, rather than because of discrimination or discrimination. of the legacy of slavery.

But these attitudes were often latent in electoral politics. According to a Tesler study more than a decade ago, the majority of less educated white voters did not perceive a major racial difference between the two parties. And most campaigns did not openly try to dissuade them from this notion.

Now, some white voters, especially the less educated, see a greater difference between the two parties on race issues. They saw Trump as a lot more conservative when it comes to immigration. They thought that Hillary Clinton was much more likely than Trump to support more help to African Americans. They thought of John Kerry and Obama too, but not so much.

More than anything else, the growing salience of the breed helps explain which white voters voted for Trump in 2016 and which ones did not. It even helps to understand why white voters without diplomas turned to Trump, but not white voters with diplomas.

White voters began to see parties from a more racialized angle with the election of Obama in 2008. The Obama presidency has allowed many white voters, traditionally democratic and often less educated, to become aware of the Democratic Party alliance with black voters; he implicitly questioned whether the party was intended for them.

Trump, in turn, explained more explicitly that he was leading the party defending White's status. The most curious thing is not how voters reacted to this, said Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, but elites and commentators of the Republican Party have also quickly changed their discourse on racial and ethnic diversity .

"For me, the mystery is how quickly what appeared to be a set of well-established standards has collapsed," Hopkins said. "How do you go from a Republican party after 2012, which was very active in courting Latino voters, to a Republican party in 2016, which doubled calls to white voters?"

In this environment, polls show that a significant number of white voters feel they are victims of discrimination. They seem to fear that employers and schools give preference to non-white candidates.

They do not understand why cultural norms encourage non-white racial groups, but not whites, to openly identify and celebrate their race. They might even regret that there is no "white history" month, which 29% of whites say they support.

To the extent that these opinions arouse the anger of some white voters, this reaction is a powerful force in politics.

"Much of the research on the role of emotions in politics shows that anger is a particularly effective emotion to keep people off the field and put them on the political arena," said Davin Phoenix, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. 39, University of California at Irvine.

And anger is more effectively mobilized among white voters than other groups, he said, highlighting the cultural stigma in America against the public expressions of anger expressed by African Americans and other minorities, and even by the first black president. Trump's badertion that four minority women members of Congress should leave America rather than criticize the fact that she is also a version of this idea.