In a politically charged environment, racial inflammatory remarks by elites may have unexpected consequences. This article examines how the 2016 Trump campaign's use of explicit racial language influenced prejudiced citizens in the United States.
Panel data beginning before Trump’s candidacy (collected in 2011) are used to assess whether animus toward groups aligned with the Democratic Party predicted later political choices. Measures focus on sentiments toward Democratic-linked minority groups and on partisan identities recorded prior to Trump’s emergence.
This study asks whether preferences about who should decide abortion policy — the federal government or individual states — changed the way Americans translated support for reproductive health care into votes in the 2024 US presidential election. Using a novel set of survey questions about abortion generally, access to the abortion pill (mifepristone), and locus-of-authority preferences, the authors test whether those locus preferences conditioned vote choice for Donald Trump. They report only partial support for the expectation that state-versus-federal authority preferences meaningfully alter electoral responses on reproductive issues.
Using the 2016 American National Election Study, the authors examine how Americans’ perceptions of immigrant threat and the strength of their American identity jointly relate to vote choice in the 2016 presidential election. Grounded in social identity theory, the paper tests whether perceptions of immigrant threat are more likely to translate into support for Donald Trump among those with stronger American identity, and conversely whether American identity’s effects on vote choice are activated by threat perceptions. With survey data from ANES, the authors report that immigrant-threat perceptions and American identity magnify each other’s effects: threat perceptions have larger associations with support for Trump among respondents with stronger American identity, and American identity has stronger associations with vote choice when respondents perceive greater immigrant threat.
A set of survey experiments tested whether information about the COVID-19 crisis changed citizens' support for Trump in 2020. Treatments presented respondents with evidence about the unprecedented economic downturn and with information about the U.S. public health record under the Trump administration to assess effects on electoral support.
Does supporting President Trump signal distinctive foreign policy views? We analyze this possibility.