White Anxiety, and a president ready to face it

Mr. Trump, in turn, explained more explicitly that he was leading the party defending the status of white. 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 could even regret that there is no "white history" month, which 29% of whites claim to 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 any other group, he said, highlighting the cultural stigma in America against the public expressions of anger expressed by African Americans and others. minorities, and even by the first black president. Mr. Trump's statement that four minority women members of Congress should leave America rather than criticize the fact that it is also a version of this idea.