Pride or Prejudice? Clarifying the Role of White Racial Identity in Recent Presidential Elections

Abstract

After the 2016 presidential election, a dominant media narrative emerged which claimed that Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory was due to an upsurge in support by working class White voters, largely due to economic anxiety experienced since the 2008 recession. But as survey data from the 2016 election became available, a different story began to emerge. The consensus among social scientists became that racial attitudes were the most important predictors of support for Trump among many White voters in 2016, including those with less than a college education (whose incomes it should be noted may or may not put them in the working class). The literature remains dominated by studies that focus on White hostility toward racial outgroups, but a number of studies have emphasized the importance of Whites’ ingroup attitudes. Trump lost reelection in 2020, but remains popular and most experts anticipate that he will run again in 2024. We therefore need to consider the still-unresolved question of if and how White ingroup identity is relevant to understanding Trump’s electoral success. Yet there are few studies that have actually examined the effects of the full range of ingroup and outgroup attitudes simultaneously. In this paper, we re-evaluate the relative importance of the effect of White Racial Identity (WRI) on vote choice in recent presidential elections. We find that, like indicators of outgroup attitudes, the level of WRI has remained stable over the last several elections and in recent years has actually decreased. We also find that WRI actually has no direct effect on vote choice in recent presidential elections, including the two elections (2016 and 2020) in which Trump ran as the Republican nominee. We find instead that WRI influenced the presidential vote at best indirectly, serving as a platform for expressing White outgroup hostility.