White Voters Research Articles

Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields: The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

Article Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields: The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics was published on December 1, 2021 in the journal The Forum (volume 19, issue 4).

Black Women & Women's Suffrage: Understanding the Perception of the Nineteenth Amendment Through the Pages of the Chicago Defender

Susan B. Anthony once famously stated, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.” The racism of many early suffragettes has been well documented and discussed; Black suffragettes and other suffragettes of color were, at best, relegated to the margins of the movement and, at worst, scorned and turned away by white suffragettes. Moreover, part of white suffragettes’ strategy for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was based on racist appeals to white men; white suffragettes claimed that passage of the Nineteenth Amendment would help keep white voters in the majority and, ultimately, would help uphold white supremacy. Against this backdrop, Black women—and much of the Black community more generally—still supported and fought for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Recent legal and historical scholars have been dedicated to studying the often-overlooked and instrumental role that Black women played in the Suffrage Movement and Black enfranchisement. This Article seeks to look at the coverage by Black—largely male—journalists at the Chicago Defender in the ten years preceding and proceeding the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In doing so, this Article hopes to better understand the ways that some Black community members understood and viewed the Nineteenth Amendment and how that perception changed. Although in hindsight we understand that the Nineteenth Amendment was not the liberating feat for Black women that it was for white women, what does Black journalistic coverage in the period immediately before and after its passage tell us about the perception of the Nineteenth Amendment and Black women’s enfranchisement at the time? The methodology of this research differs from those used in other historical research regarding Black women’s suffrage. Many historians have focused on understanding Black women’s suffrage through studying individual women’s stories: In her groundbreaking and well-received book Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, legal historian Martha Jones says that “by recounting the lives of some of the many Black women who engaged in political fights, the picture of a whole comes into view.” These histories rely on a large variety of historical documents left behind by, and about, individual suffragists and events to gain an understanding of “the picture of a whole.” This Article takes a different approach: it looks deeply at only one set of primary documents—articles printed in the Chicago Defender— to better understand the changes and patterns in community perception revealed through journalistic coverage. This is not counter to the important work of these other historians, who have helped recover the overlooked stories of suffragists of color. Instead, this Article seeks to further our understanding of these stories through a different medium.

Trumpian populism: legitimizing chaos and right-wing nationalism as a political strategy

Since 2015, Donald Trump has impacted American politics and the international system with his incendiary rhetoric. During his campaign and administration, Trump broke with convention in his communication style. Trump rose to power by championing white, conservative Christians, using a highly nationalistic narrative, maintaining a populist ideology, and drawing support from least privileged sectors in rural areas. The 45th president was able to mobilize the impoverished white vote, but also different sectors of the most affluent classes by implementing favorable fiscal policies benefiting the richest sector of the population. In this article, we explore the creation of Trumpian populism as a concept originated by this political leader and his influence on the American electorate. We use storytelling to examine how Trump has successfully polarized the United States’ political arena, and undoubtedly, cast a shadow on the legitimacy of the electoral system.

Undermining the party: anti-black attitudes, presidential vote choice, and split-ticket voting among white voters

ABSTRACT American politics has entered, what Michael Tesler calls, a “most racial period,” causing racial attitudes to be increasingly salient. This shift provides an opportunity to examine the consequences to white Americans’ political behavior when their racial attitudes are easily activated. In this paper, we examine the influence of racial attitudes on (1) white Americans’ presidential vote choice and (2) how racial attitudes, in this period, may undercut the influence of partisanship on vote choice. We use data from the American National Election Studies Time Series Survey conducted from 2004 to 2020 to explore these questions. First, we find that anti-Black attitudes increasingly predict white vote choice. Next, we find that during this period, racially resentful, white Democrats became less likely to vote for the Democrat. This was not the same for white Republicans who, regardless of their racial attitudes, did not shift to the Democratic party. Finally, we find that white Republicans appear to hunker down and become significantly less likely to split their vote as they express more anti-Black attitudes. White Democrats become significantly more likely to jump ship as they endorse more anti-Black attitudes, revealing that racial attitudes were influential enough to overcome party loyalties during this period.

Voting Intersections: Race, Class, and Participation in Presidential Elections in the United States 2008–2016

Intersectional analyses are increasingly common in sociology; however, analyses of voting tend to focus on only race, class, or gender, using the others as control variables. We assess whether and how race, class, and gender intersect to produce distinct patterns of voter engagement in presidential elections 2008–2016. Per existing research, we find income strongly predicts White voting. However, the class gap in voting is not statistically significant among Black voters. In contrast to common characterizations of Black people as politically disengaged, lower income Black citizens are more likely to vote than their White counterparts. Moreover, the lowest earning Black women vote at dramatically higher rates than any other race-gender combination in this income group. These findings call into question the perceived universality of the income gap in voting and widespread claims that more resources directly facilitate voting. They also have implications for our understanding of political participation, social inequality, and democratic citizenship.

Religion as Political Tribalism

Abstract Is religion a form of political tribalism? Conventional wisdom suggests it is. Discussion of religion and American politics generally focuses on the “God Gap”—the tendency for religious Americans to vote Republican, while the non-religious vote Democratic. However, there is also reason to argue that religion cannot be reduced to political tribalism. The God Gap is found mostly among white voters; among people of color, religiosity is a far weaker predictor of the vote. Even among white voters, the size of the God Gap varies across different religious traditions. Furthermore, there is more nuance to the non-religious population than suggested by the standard account of the God Gap. When the analysis includes the full scope of the American religious landscape, religion is not as “tribal” as conventional wisdom suggests.

Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields. The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.

A<scp>ngie</scp> M<scp>axwell</scp> and T<scp>odd</scp> S<scp>hields</scp>. <i>The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics</i>.

“What Are We?”: Latino Politics, Identity, and Memory in the 1983 Chicago Mayoral Election

The 1983 Chicago mayoral election, which polarized Black and white voters, left the nascent Latino electorate in an uncertain position. A reevaluation of this election clarifies the impact of Black mayoral candidate Harold Washington, whose candidacy laid bare significant political divisions and anti-Black sentiment among Latinos as they grappled with their relationship to whiteness. Divisions aside, Washington's effort to court the Latino vote helped legitimate a monolithic, panethnic label in Chicago politics, as evidenced by organizational records, campaign advertising, electoral data, and bilingual media coverage. Reframing the 1983 election as a dual process of race making and panethnic labeling bridges scholarship on Black mayors, Latino politics, and urban history, and questions an enduring political memory of 1983 that has obscured both Latino anti-Blackness and the fragility of Latino unity.

A History of Early Drug Sentences in California

The early history of drug sentences in California provides a quintessential example of structural racism in law. The demands of white voters to escalate penalties for drug crimes followed a pattern of collective myth making and value signaling that insisted opiates, cocaine, and cannabis were extremely dangerous, led to other crime, and prevalently were used and sold by immigrants and other despised groups. Public pressure for more severe punishment seemed to peak twice, in the 1920s and 1950s, in response to exaggerated threats such as “dope peddlers” targeting children and profitable “dope rings” controlled by subversive foreigners. Amplified by a self-seeking, robust news media and a multitude of fraternal, civic, and religious organizations, the frightful construction of illicit drugs seemed to demand a simple and uncompromising response: to punish drug users harder by increasing terms of incarceration. But white voters always understood that drug laws targeted immigrants and communities of color, and law enforcers used extreme penalties as leverage to pursue corrupt and racist prerogatives unrelated to reducing drug use. Drug penalties in California were developed over many decades with almost extreme levels of participation by antidrug activists and law enforcers. Appearing somehow scientific, the resulting arrays of penalties implied that the cruelest sentences were reserved for the truly blameworthy, when in fact they were reserved for the marginalized. Moreover, several legal conventions born of these penalty structures—mandatory minimums, the distinction between user and seller, punishment of addiction itself, and presumptions arising from drug quantities—still exacerbate the oppressive nature of drug statutes.

Complicating the Role of White Racial Attitudes and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

Some scholars argue that Donald Trump's electoral college victory in 2016 was predicated on his ability to attract racially hostile white voters. Others argue that the increased relationship between whites' racial attitudes and presidential vote choice in 2016 was because racial attitudes and partisanship had become even more aligned following the presidency of Barack Obama. Building on research that shows voters tend to update their policy positions to align with their preferred candidates, we propose a third mechanism that helps account for the strong relationship between whites' racial attitudes and vote choice in 2016. We hypothesize that over the course of the presidential campaign, many whites shifted their survey responses on questions related to race and immigration to align with their support for Trump or Clinton. To test this argument, we use a unique panel dataset from surveys conducted by YouGov of more than 5,000 respondents interviewed at multiple points during the 2016 presidential election campaign. We find that the strong link between white attitudes toward Black Americans and Trump support observed in prior studies is likely due as much to white Trump supporters updating their survey responses to report opinions more consistent with Trump's, as it is to Trump drawing support from more racially antagonistic white voters. Similar results emerge with respect to whites' immigration opinions. These findings complicate our understanding of the 2016 election by offering direct evidence that Trump's campaign benefited from and catalyzed racial divisions. The results also hold implications for how we study election and campaign effects and the stability of race and immigration attitudes.

The intersection of race and party: voter perceptions and candidate selection in U.S. Senate elections

ABSTRACT Previous literature suggests that Democratic candidates of color receive less support than white Democrats on Election Day. It has been suggested that this reduced support is due to voters’ ideological perceptions of people of color being more liberal than whites, which translates into perceptions of candidates. However, these studies are frequently limited to white voters’ perceptions of Democratic candidates of color, and the full relationship linking race/ethnicity, to ideological placement, to vote choice has rarely been tested. In the current study, we examine how both the race/ethnicity and party affiliation of Senate candidates shape perceptions of their ideology and vote choice among people of all race and ethnicities. Using the 2006–2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find support for our hypothesis that Black Democrats are generally perceived as more liberal than white Democrats. These perceptions have real consequences, resulting in fewer votes. Conversely, Black Republican candidates are perceived to be just as conservative—and Hispanic Republicans even more conservative—than white Republican candidates. Findings suggest that the link between race/ethnicity, perceptions of ideology, and electoral success vary according to the race/ethnicity and party of candidates.

Sexism as a political force: The impact of gender‐based attitudes on the presidential elections of 2012 and 2016

AbstractObjectiveThis article examines the effect of gender attitudes on the voting behavior of whites in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections.MethodsLogistic regression models are used to analyze data from the 2012 and 2016 waves of the American National Election Study.ResultsSexist orientations had a greater impact on how Americans, and white Americans in particular, voted in 2016 than in 2012. Attitudes toward gender roles and feminism affected the voting behavior of white men and white women in a highly similar fashion in 2016 but had a greater effect on the voting behavior of college—as opposed to noncollege‐educated whites.ConclusionMany observers have argued that the mobilization of sexist voters over the course of the 2016 campaign helped carry Trump to victory. The results of this analysis indicate that, in regard to many key voting blocs, the activation of sexism cost Trump at least as many votes as he gained as due to the countermobilization of nonsexist white voters, particularly those with college degrees. The strength of the nonsexist backlash suggests a need to reassess the received wisdom that sexism among white voters played to Trump's advantage in the 2016 election.

Who Votes Without Identification? Using Individual‐Level Administrative Data to Measure the Burden of Strict Voter Identification Laws

Legal disputes over laws that require certain forms of identification (ID) to vote mostly focus on the burden placed on people who do not possess ID. We contend that this singular focus ignores the burden imposed on people who do possess ID, but nonetheless cannot access it when voting. To measure this alternative conception of burden, we focus on Michigan, which allows anyone who lacks access to ID to vote after signing an affidavit. A sample of affidavits filed in the 2016 presidential election from a random set of precincts reveals that about 0.45 percent of voters lacked access to ID. Consistent with our broader conception of the burden of voter ID laws, nearly all voters who filed an affidavit were previously issued a still‐active state ID. Importantly, we show minority voters were about five times more likely to lack access to ID than white voters. We also present survey evidence suggesting that people who live in states where voters are asked to show ID, as in Michigan, are more likely to incorrectly believe that access to ID is required to vote than are people who live in states that do not ask voters to show ID.

Trumpocalypse and the Historical Limits of Higher Education Policy: Making the Case for Study/Struggle

This essay highlights the limits of liberal reform policies designed to increase access to higher education for minoritized and marginalized groups. First, we discuss Trump’s higher education agenda, focusing on his antipathy toward these populations and his commitment to White supremacy. We then focus on affirmative action in college admissions as an exemplar of a liberal racial equity policy, sketching its history, which illustrates its anemic effect, and White countermobilization against change that existed long before Trump. Next, we detail Trump’s efforts to eliminate this policy, which is part of the same populist, ethno-nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Black ideological campaign that has galvanized White voters across time. Ultimately, we argue that unbridled power won’t yield to liberal reforms. As such, we shift our focus to how higher education might be reimagined as a site of transformation, offering a series of provocations for a new horizon of racial equity in universities and society.

White pain

ABSTRACT President Trump’s 2016 electoral victory prompted a series of journalist inquiries into the pain of white Rust Belt voters. Imploring readers to heed their cries for help, profiles of “Trump Country” suggested that declining physical health and economic anxiety explained Trump’s success more so than racism and xenophobia. This essay argues that the rhetoric of white working-class pain reproduces what Franz Fanon called a historical-racial schema: a corporeal grid of intelligibility that prefigures how racialized subjects perceive their bodily sensations and movements in relation to others. Building on critical race scholarship on personhood, I contend that public pain is rhetorically constructed along a racialized continuum from fully actualized (white) humanity to (black) insensate flesh. As a result, profiles of the white body-in-pain implicitly register as uniquely worthy of public sympathy, particularly when juxtaposed to the black working class whose flesh bears the marks of historical racial violence.

Review: Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan

Review: <i>Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics</i>, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan

Aversive racism at the ballot box: a field experiment on the effects of race and negative information in local elections

ABSTRACT Research on the response of white voters to African American candidates has produced decidedly mixed results. I argue that methodological limitations are a major source of this perplexing array of findings and that a field experiment may help shed more light on the topic than is possible in laboratory experiments, surveys, or in post-election data analysis. Here, a field experiment embedded in two low salience school board elections in Columbus, Ohio produced a striking pattern consistent with the thrust of aversive racism research. To wit, simply being sent a mailing showing the race of a white or African American candidate had little effect on white voters. However, after being sent a mailing showing a candidate’s race and negative information about the candidate, white voters punished African American candidates more severely than white candidates with the same record. In short, people seemed to cast race-based votes only in circumstances in which they could deny race was a factor in their decision.

Gone For Good: Deindustrialization, White Voter Backlash, and US Presidential Voting

Globalization and automation have contributed to deindustrialization and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, yielding important electoral implications across advanced democracies. Coupling insights from economic voting and social identity theory, we consider how different groups in society may construe manufacturing job losses in contrasting ways. We argue that deindustrialization threatens dominant group status, leading some white voters in affected localities to favor candidates they believe will address economic distress and defend racial hierarchy. Examining three US presidential elections, we find white voters were more likely to vote for Republican challengers where manufacturing layoffs were high, whereas Black voters in hard-hit localities were more likely to vote for Democrats. In survey data, white respondents, in contrast to people of color, associated local manufacturing job losses with obstacles to individual upward mobility and with broader American economic decline. Group-based identities help explain divergent political reactions to common economic shocks.

Historical Mob Violence and the 2016 Presidential Election

As a 2016 presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump invoked racially charged rhetoric to galvanize conservative white voters who felt left behind in the “new economy.” In this article, we ask whether Trump’s ability to attract electoral support in that way was linked to local histories of racist mob violence. We use county-level data on threatened and completed lynchings of Black people to predict support for Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary and general election across eleven southern states. We find that fewer voters cast their ballots for Trump in counties that had suppressed a comparatively larger share of potentially lethal episodes of racist mob violence. Supplementary analyses suggest that counties’ histories of violence are also related to their electoral support for Republican presidential candidates more broadly. We posit that this correlation points to the durable effects of racist violence on local cultures and the imprint of community histories on the social environment.

A swing vote from the ethnic backstage: The role of German American isolationist tradition for Trump's 2016 victory

We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.