Politics & White Identity

In my last post, I touched on how the media was largely responsible for the shock of Donald Trump’s surprise presidential win by failing to accurately report on the 2016 election. Today, I am going to discuss the emergence of “white identity” as a factor in his success.

While Trump’s win is due to combination of many peculiar forces, among these conditions is the large number of white voters who recognize race as an important component of their self-identity. A survey in January 2016 indicates that 20% percent of Whites describe their racial identity as “extremely important”,16% describe it as “very important”, and another 25% said it is “moderately important”. 81% of Whites who rated race as extremely important chose Trump in the Republican primary over the other socially-conservative candidates.

Below is an interesting graphic that ties together the varying intensity of White racial identity and support for Trump in the Republican primary.

Trump was able to secure this base by being most sympathetic to their concerns of a changing America and ultimately won because of it. What are some of the concerns of this segment of voters? According to the survey, they include:

·      White discrimination.

·      Whites losing jobs to non-Whites.

·      the importance of whites working together to change laws that are unfair to whites.

Obviously, this list is not comprehensive, but political scientists who analyzed the survey data found that, “both white racial identity and beliefs that whites are treated unfairly [were] powerful predictors of support for Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.” This is a big change from a decade ago when other political scientists discounted white racial identity as “not politically salient”. Times have surely changed.

What are your thoughts? Do you believe the unwavering support of this segment of voters is all that is needed get Donald Trump re-elected in 2020 despite missteps he has made with other groups of Americans?