Thread by @gelliottmorris

Here's my initial answer to the question of why Trump is losing so much ground with non-college whites:

The upshot is that "the president still harps on racial issues, *but voters are less racist and swayed less by sexism than in 2016*"

Short thread:

economist.com/graphic-detail…

I first took 318k interviews from UCLA + Democracy Fund's "Nationscape" poll to measure average levels of racism and sexism over time. Those scales avg Qs like whether voters think slavery still harms black Americans & whether there's racism against whites into a single measure.

I then compared how racism & sexism correlated to support for Trump in 2016 with how they correlate in 2020. It turns out that racism is MORE predictive of support for Trump now — IE that voters are more polarized by racial attitudes — even though RACE itself is less predictive.

This growing disconnect between how *racial attitudes* predict support for Trump or Bide and how self-described *race* do presented to me what at first to be a paradox. If non-col whites are most racist, what explains the shift?

The poll has answers:

According to Nationscape, average levels of racial resentment in the electorate have fallen over the last year. (Pew finds the same). That's both bc 2016 voters have gotten less racist since Trump's election & bc new voters are less racist. True overall & for non-college whites.

This means that there are fewer voters with high degrees of racism for Trump to court before November.

Sexism also plays a big role. In 2016, male discomfort with a female nominee could have cost Clinton the WH. But since Biden is a man, attitudes about gender are less salient v 2016; voters who score highly on the sexism scale are less likely to vote for Trump this time around.

The final piece: since non-college whites are by far the most racist and sexist voters in the electorate, at least by this measure, this means that the shifting roles of each in predicting support for Trump most impacts their votes, rather than for BIPOC voters (esp women).

Here's the chart, and don't forget to read + share the piece!



economist.com/graphic-detail…