Tag: Landslide

In a place that is more than 80 percent white, Mr. Trump’s Democrats share “pretty powerful feelings about race, foreignness and Islam that lead them to see white people as victims in a country feeling increasingly foreign to many of them,” the study noted. Whether Mr. Trump’s proposed barriers against imports and immigrants found support because of a sense of racial threat or out of distress over the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other countries, ethnic unease is clearly shaping American politics and policy. “No other factor predicted changes in white partisanship during Obama’s presidency as powerfully and as consistently as racial attitudes,” noted John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University. With whites insecure about their hold on power, be it because of China’s rise or increasing racial diversity, their support for globalization has wavered. “For white Americans, the political consequences of racial and global status threat seem to point in similar directions with respect to issue positions: opposition to immigration, rejection of international trade relationships and perceptions of China as a threat to American well-being,” Ms. Mutz wrote. Demographic change does not threaten minorities as it does white Americans. They never held whites’ position of power. Ms. Mutz detects an increase in white Americans’ sense of threat between 2012 and 2016, probably linked to the presence of a black president. Mr. Greenberg’s pollsters visited Macomb County in 2008, too. “I’m sure their racial identity was just as strong in 2008 and 2012, but despite those attitudes they voted for Obama twice.” But though Macomb’s voters may prove that race does not necessarily beat every other card, their evolution suggests that voting based on racial fears is not going to disappear soon.