Racism motivated Trump voters. 

By a lot.

By Amber Phillips

Finding of the day: Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism, income inequality A voter casts a ballot in Georgetown, Wis. (Nicki Kohl/Telegraph Herald via AP) Let me be very clear on this one: Just because someone voted for President Trump does not mean they harbor nor tolerate racist attitudes. But political scientists who just finished studying the 2016 electorate as part of the nonpartisan American National Selection Survey found that people who voted for Trump — specifically, white people — were less likely to object to statements like "If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites" than white Hillary Clinton voters. "Since 1988, we’ve never seen such a clear correspondence between vote choice and racial perceptions,"  wrote Ohio State political scientist Thomas Wood, analyzing the survey for The Post's Monkey Cage blog.

The red bubbles and blue bubbles below represent Republican and Democratic voters' reactions, respectively, to the statements in every presidential election since 1988. While Clinton voters significantly backed away from racist sentiments than voters of Democratic presidents in years past, Republicans did not.



The survey found no such trend among voters' preference for authoritarianism nor income inequality, which led Wood to believe that racism motivated Trump voters more than these other factors. Never underestimate the power of racism and bigotry.

Read all the details of this report at   WASHINGTON POST

 ( John Moore/Getty Images)

The message to the country: Racism wins

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In a feature on the racist and anti-immigrant sentiments that fueled support for Trump in the same way they fueled the Brexit decision, Vox’s Zach Beauchamp wrote in January:

Michael Tesler, a professor at the University of California Irvine, took a look at racial resentment scores among Republican primary voters in the past three GOP primaries. In 2008 and 2012, Tesler found, Republican voters who scored higher were less likely to vote for the eventual winner. The more racial bias you harbored, the less likely you were to vote for Mitt Romney or John McCain.

With Trump, the opposite was the case. The more a person saw black people as lazy and undeserving, the more likely they were to vote for the self-proclaimed billionaire. Tesler found similar effects on measures of anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim prejudice.

Photo credit: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

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Multiple other studies have supported Tesler’s findings. An April Pew survey looked at whether Republicans had "warm" or "cold" feelings toward Trump and how they felt about the census projection that the US would be majority nonwhite in 30 years.

It found that 33 percent of Republicans thought this shift would be "bad for the country." These people were also overwhelmingly likely to feel warmly rather than coolly about Trump, by a 63-to-26 margin.

Meanwhile, as  Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox in October, there was no evidence to support the idea that Trump voters were disproportionately poor, and in fact, a major study from Gallup's Jonathan Rothwell showed the opposite: Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people.

If anything, Trump’s win was powered by a not-so-subtle message that these people’s racial resentment was that of the potential president’s too. And all voters had to do to know this was take a look at his track record....Members of fringe groups told the New York Times in the days before his election that he’d emboldened them to work toward their agendas. And when he won, white supremacists predictably delighted in his victory.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

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These huge swaths of white voters were willing to overlook the many ways in which Trump was unqualified, temperamentally unfit, and dangerous and represented a massive threat to American democracy.

The most generous interpretation is that white voters chose him despite his racism, not because of it. But that’s a very difficult case to make, given his massive weaknesses.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

It’s no secret that racism and xenophobia have long been powerful forces in American life, and that the election of Barack Obama didn’t represent the end of that. In fact, racial and political polarization increased in response to the first African-American president, and racist conspiracy theories about Obama’s citizenship were Trump’s way into national politics.

The deep and widespread disdain for Obama and the accompanying willingness on the part of many Americans to believe things that were objectively false — that he was a Muslim and wasn’t a citizen — and to embrace policy positions against their own self-interest looked to many like warning signs about the power of racial anxiety to shape political decision-making.

But how can we say that the white vote for Trump represents racism when in previous elections, Obama won their states? Social science has an answer, and it’s that white voters change their views to become more conservative when their fears of nonwhites are stoked. And it’s not hard to stoke them. As Matthews has written, Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos conducted studies concluding that even casual encounters with racial minorities can cause liberal whites to take on more conservative views. In one of Enos’s experiments, these encounters were between white voters and Spanish-speaking Latino men on commuter trains.

"The results were clear," Enos wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "After coming into contact, for just minutes each day, with two more Latinos than they would otherwise see or interact with, the riders, who were mostly white and liberal, were sharply more opposed to allowing more immigrants into the country and favored returning the children of illegal immigrants to their parents’ home country. It was a stark shift from their pre-experiment interviews, during which they expressed more neutral attitudes."

Trump’s version of the train encounter was his campaign rhetoric, and its message to would-be voters that immigrants, black people, and Muslims were to be feared. It especially stood in contrast to Obama’s delicate, even-handed treatment of issues related to race and identity. As a result, it’s entirely possible that people whose racism hadn’t shaped their political thinking in previous years suddenly found it activated by Trump’s campaign and guiding their votes.

Photo from "Postcards From America" by Mark Power/Magnum Photos

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As this election fades into the distance, explanations for the outcome will become gentler and more opaque. In a reflexive effort to find ways to be hopeful, we’ll spin a collective fairy tale about how a neglected group of white Americans who themselves were victims simply wanted change and used their votes to demand it, opening our eyes to their perspectives.

There will be a push to “understand” them, and this will be presented as the mature and moral thing to do. In the name of coming together, and in an attempt to avoid finger-pointing that many will warn could further divide the nation, we’ll normalize the way they see the world. We’ll twist history and tweak data and adjust our values to frame their outlook as reasonable.

And when that happens — when the deep bigotry that fueled the result is forgotten or explained away — racism will win yet again.