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“High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.”
W.E.B. DuBois
1. Introduction
The JREP retrospective on “Race and the American Presidency” offers an opportunity for scholars of race to think through what the public opinion scholarship in the post-Obama era has taught us about the relationship between racial attitudes, racial identities, and white voting preferences at the national level. Although the role of white racial attitudes in shaping political and policy preferences has received extensive attention (e.g., Kinder and Sanders, 1996; Gilens, 1999; Sears et al., 2000; Mendelberg, 2001; Hetherington, 2005), these last two Administrations have introduced new questions about the role of racial attitudes and identities into the study of presidential vote choice. Explanations of white electoral behavior based on racial attitudes have been challenged and supplemented with perspectives centered on white in-group identity, gender, and xenophobia. However, these various explanations have not been tested against each other—this is our main goal in this study.
First, empowered by strong theorizing of the Obama era, and especially seminal works by Kinder and Dale-Riddle (2012) and Tesler and Sears (2010), scholars of racial resentment such as Sides et al. (2019) added to our understanding of white electoral behavior by examining the role of racial prejudice in white voters' support for Trump in the Republican primary and in the general election. Valentino et al. (2018) and Cassese and Holman (2018) added explanations drawn from the literature on gender politics and sexism, while Hopkins (2018) argued for the importance of xenophobia. Moreover, Jardina (2019) reinvigorated a perspective that focuses on the role of white ingroup favoritism as a predictor of white support for Trump. However, these four competing explanations have not been systematically tested against each other in the context of either the Republican primary or the 2016 general election. And so far, we have no insights on how these ingroup and outgroup processes may play out in the context of the 2020 general election.
Our goal in this article is threefold. First, we provide a retrospective account of the theoretical landscape...