Pre-election polls show Black voters moving toward Donald Trump in 2024, even though he is now running against Kamala Harris. And Trump did gain a bit of margin among Black voters in 2020 compared to 2016, though he still loses nine out of ten. Should Democrats fear more attrition among Black voters this year or is it just a mirage from bad polling? Christopher Towler finds that Democrats made a lot of gains among Black voters this year by switching from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris. He says the gender divide may grow this year, but he thinks Black voters will come home to the Democrats. But Idan Franco finds that some Black voters support Trump because of their racial attitudes, not in spite of them. In other research, he finds similar trends among Hispanic voters, where immigration attitudes make some more likely to support Trump.
Guest: Christopher Towler, Sacramento State University; Idan Franco, Tel Aviv University
Study: Black Voter Project; “Trump’s African Americans?”
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Are Black voters moving to Trump? This week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossman. Pre-election polls show Black voters moving toward Donald Trump in 2024, even though he’s now running against Kamala Harris. And Trump did gain a bit of margin among Black voters in 2020 compared to 2016, though he still loses nine out of 10. Should Democrats fear more attrition among Black voters this year, or is it just a mirage from bad polling? And what can we learn from his gains in 2020?
This week, I talked to Christopher Towler of Sacramento State University who runs the Black Voter Project, a large-scale panel survey of Black voters. He says Democrats made a lot of gains among Black voters by switching from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, and he says the gender divide may grow this year, but he thinks Black voters will come home to Democrats.
I also talked to Idan Franco of Tel Aviv University about his politics groups and identities article with Udi Sommer, Trump’s African-Americans. He finds that some Black voters support Trump because of their racial attitudes, not in spite of them. In other research, he finds similar trends among Hispanic voters, where immigration attitudes make some more likely to support Trump.
This is one of the most important unknowns of 2024 and the future of American politics. So I invite you to join me for two instructive conversations. Let’s start with Christopher Towler.
So you are fielding a large panel study of Black voters in 2024, and you just released wave two. What are the big findings so far?
Christopher Towler: Thanks for asking. This has been a pretty incredible project that we’re actually right in the middle of. So we got funding this year to collect a really unique and special set of data where we are collecting data from the same people at four different waves during this election cycle. And as you mentioned, we just finished collecting wave two in August and are now talking about those results.
We ended up having pretty much starting with wave one in April. We were then able to contact over 50%. We ended up with close to 1,200 recontact responses in wave two. And we’re planning on going back into the field to collect wave three in October right before the election and then collect a final post-election wave, a wave four of the survey following the election.
And so, one thing that really, really comes out of this is that there was tremendous change in attitudes and behavior in the Black community when looking at differences in the same people in April compared to August.
When we look at first support for the presidential nominee that switched from Biden to Harris, and again, sort of the uniqueness of the data allows us to really delve into this because you don’t have that happen. It’s only a few times in American history where the presidential nominee has switched in the middle of the campaign. And so, to have data around this moment is really incredible.
And what we found is that support for Harris, both favorability and Black people wanting to vote for the Democratic nominee jumped up a great deal. There was a tremendous increase in favorability. We saw a 19% increase amongst those that were favorable of Harris in April compared to in August. And so, almost a 20% jump in people who were very favorable of Harris since she became the nominee.
And then we also saw a vote share jump, about a 10% vote share jump from Biden to Harris, where back in April, about 62% of Black voters said they were going to vote for Biden. That jumped up to about 72% for Harris, and it’s even higher, 84% if you just look at likely voters. And so, right off the bat, we saw wild differences in Black support for Harris, both favorability and vote share when it came to over that time period where she became the nominee.
Another interesting finding was having to do with those certain to vote or likely voters. And we saw a jump in likely voters here, almost a 10% jump, where back in April, 58% of our sample said that they were certain to vote. This is again, compared to sort of 2020 numbers a bit lower than the average, lower in 2020, about 62, 62 and half percent of Black voters voted. And so, this likely voter situation in April was a little bit behind 2020 numbers.
Looking at August with Harris on the ticket, that number jumped to 67%. And so, now we have 67% of Black voters with Harris at the top of the ticket saying that they are certain to vote. Again, tremendous change in this short period of time just switching from Biden to Harris at the top of the ticket.
I think that there’s also changes in the way Black people view the Democratic Party. And one of the questions that we asked on both waves had to do with how Black people see the Democratic Party as welcoming to them, more or less do they think the Democratic Party is welcoming to Black people. We saw that in April, about 28% of Black people saw the Democratic Party as extremely welcoming and that jumped up to 36%, almost a 10% again jump when it came to the same question in August.
So just again, switching the top of the ticket, putting Harris up there, a Black woman not only changed people’s attitudes and behavior towards voting for president and the nominees, but changed their attitudes towards the entire party itself. Made the party seem more welcoming during this campaign cycle.
And then, I think lastly, a really cool finding coming out of the two waves of the survey has to do with looking at what’s predicting these changes from wave one to wave two. And so, a lot of what I’ve talked about so far has to do with the what’s happened since we’ve gone from Biden to Harris at the top of the ticket, but we’re also able to model why. And so, we’re able to look at what factors from wave one actually predict these changes in wave two. And not surprisingly, when looking at vote choice, whether you were going to vote for Biden is one of the strongest predictors of whether or not you’re going to vote for Harris. But in addition to that, we also find abortion being really, really powerful in determining whether or not a Black voter decides to vote for Harris that wasn’t going to vote for Biden in the previous wave.
So someone who said, I’m not sure if I’m going to vote for Harris or I’m not going to vote for Harris in April, that then says they’re going to vote for Harris in August. The idea that abortion bans are a threat to the Black community plays a powerful role, is a very significant predictor of this shift.
When looking at participation, and we actually were able to model whether or not someone moved from not participating to certain to participate from April to August, here we see the threat of MAGA or attitudes towards the MAGA movement play an extremely important role as well, where those who saw MAGA as threatening, who saw the threat of Trump as increasing were more likely to say they were going to participate once Harris became the nominee. And so, they see something in Harris. They see some element of Harris’s candidacy as fighting against Trump differently than they did for Biden at the top of the ticket.
Matt Grossmann: So who is it that’s moving? Is this disproportionately younger voters, women? Is it kind of across the community or is there a subset that made this jump?
Christopher Towler: Yeah, there’s definitely subsets here. I think the interesting fact is there’s jumps across the community and so across all demographic groups. And so this becomes really important because oftentimes Black voters are talked about sort of as a homogenous block.
Digging into this data, you’re able to see some of the differences within the subgroups in the Black community itself, such that when looking at support for Harris, whether favorability or vote choice, we see both Black men and women jump, but there’s a far more significant jump in those who will vote for Harris amongst Black women when she took over the ticket.
We also see significant jumps amongst those who are less educated, so those with just a high school education or less, as well as independents. So the independents, Black Americans who identified as independent, the percentage that was likely to vote for Harris increased tremendously, almost again, sort of a 10 to 15 point jump here compared to when Biden was on the ticket.
And then, lastly, again, abortion comes into play. We’ve seen that when it comes to supporting Harris compared to Biden, those who are strongly opposed to the Dobbs decision, so those who were strongly opposed to the overturning of Roe V. Wade were more likely to vote or a larger proportion said that they were going to vote for Harris than they did for Biden back in April.
We saw similar trends when it came to likelihood to vote or voter turnout such that again, those with a high school degree or less were far more likely to turn out. A far larger percentage was likely to turn out with Harris on the ticket than with Biden. We see the same trend with independents. And then not surprisingly in this case, someone’s racial identity comes into play, where African-Americans who had a strong Black identity or say that they strongly hold a racial identity were more likely to vote, or a far larger percentage was likely to vote with Harris at the top of the ticket than Biden.
And so, there are some things coming into play here that really speak to the nuances of the Black community and the complexities within the Black electorate.
Matt Grossmann: So I know we can’t fully do the counterfactual, but it seems like Biden would’ve won over some of these voters as we got closer to election day. And there were certainly people arguing that before the transition that the lower levels of Black support and polls for Biden was kind of a mirage at the start. So to what extent are these really voters who were brought on by the change in candidate versus kind of getting closer to the election?
Christopher Towler: Yeah, that’s a good point. And I think there is some sort of sentiment here that the debate played a role in sort of disillusionment with Biden at the top of the ticket, and that does play out with Black voters.
Within our data, a significant portion of Black voters said that the debate did affect, dramatically affect their opinion of Biden to the point where they wanted to see a new person at the top of the ticket. They highly supported Harris. I think though we can’t totally write off Harris as a nominee for some of this new engagement simply because of the fact that two things really come into play here. One, Black identity and two, abortion, things that you notice that are noticeably attached to Harris as a candidate and as her identity. First is being a woman and second is being Black that Biden didn’t have. And so, when we look at the data and we see that abortion is driving more support for Harris than it did for Biden, and Black identity is doing the same, especially when it comes to turnout and likelihood to vote, I think there’s absolutely something to be said for putting Harris at the top of the ticket when it comes to understanding changes in the Black community from April to August over this period of time when they switched the nominees.
Matt Grossmann: So in 2020, most analyses suggest that Democrats lost a little bit of Black support relative to 2016, maybe about three percentage points of margin. Obviously, it’s down from the high point of the Obama elections, but even comparing Hillary Clinton to Joe Biden and even when Joe Biden was gaining some white support. So what have we learned since then about the best explanations for that? Or do you view it as just sort of a small change that may not be meaningful?
Christopher Towler: Yeah, I’d stick with the latter here. I view this mostly as a small change that will be insignificant and pretty unmeaningful when it’s all said and done, when we look at the final election results.
I think back in April, as our data suggests, there was a higher proportion of Black voters who were not supporting Biden and were not necessarily attached to the Democratic Party. We did have Black support for Trump at about 14.5%. So it was higher than sort of the historical average of 10 to 12% in the last few election cycles, but nowhere near this 20 to 25% that was coming out and we’re still seeing in some of these Beltway polls that have really small Black samples that I’d imagine are not very representative of the Black community at large. And so, again, from the start, I think this story has been overblown and I think that’s some of what we were seeing in 2020 as well, is that the good data, when we look at these Pew data sets that have really large Black samples that are far more representative and a better depiction of the Black community, Black support for Harris is right up there. Or I’m sorry, Black support for Biden in 2020 was right up there with everyone else from years past. And I think we’re starting to see that again now with Harris at the top of the ticket. Black support is definitely coalescing around her. Trump’s support for us in our sample dropped even more with Harris at the top of the ticket from about 14.5% to 13%. And again, 12% among likely voters.
And so something, I think, that’s coming out of this is that as the election gets closer and closer and polls are more focused on picking out who’s actually going to vote, we’re going to start to see support for Harris growing stronger and stronger and Black support for Trump tapering off. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Black support for Trump drops to these single digit numbers when the election closes, simply because a large portion of people who have been identifying as Trump supporters over this election cycle are unlikely voters, are people who are not necessarily very excited to vote.
You’re always going to have that small block of Black Republicans that’s going to turn out for the GOP candidate no matter who it is. But that additional percent of Black Trump support that’s coming, not from this Black Republican segment, is coming from people who are less politically informed, less inclined to vote, and don’t have a strong voter history, who I’d imagine are less likely to turn out when it’s all said and done, especially considering it’s going to take a really strong ground game to get people out to vote, especially Black people who are not politically engaged. And so while you might get people on surveys, more people on surveys saying, “Yeah, I’d vote for Trump,” are they really people who are going to be mobilized? Especially by a Trump campaign that hasn’t showed much intention here to get out on the ground and mobilize Black voters at all.
Matt Grossmann: So we’ll count you as a skeptic, but current polls compared to 2020 do show Democrats losing Black vote share at a time when they don’t show that among white voters. And so let’s say you’re wrong, and we wake up on the morning after the election and we see that the main voting block that moved relative to 2020 was Black voters actually moving slightly towards the Republicans, but enough to make a difference. How will we explain that?
Christopher Towler: I think from what I’ve seen in survey research and most importantly focus groups, and talking to especially low propensity Black voters, this is where we’re seeing most of the support for the GOP coming from within the Black community. Again, aside from Black Republicans, it’s from independent, low propensity Black voters who haven’t made up their mind, who are on the fence, and might ingest one or two of these GOP talking points. And so there’s been a pretty successful misinformation campaign and campaign to put a few snippets of why the GOP is good for Black voters out there. Oftentimes snippets of information that is not backed in any history or truth whatsoever that have been picked up. And so a lot of sentiment around anti-immigration reform or anti-immigration policy, deportations has shown up in some of the focus groups we’ve done. Sentiment around the stimulus package and small payouts for people has shown up.
But again, when pressed on these issues, when asked more information about these issues, the talking points fall off because that’s all they are is talking points. And so these are mostly things that are picked up amongst, again, low propensity Black voters who are not high information, who are not highly sophisticated when it comes to politics. And so if, for some reason, we do see large shifts, I would chalk it up mostly to a successful disinformation campaign and propaganda that’s gotten out there.
And you can’t write off patriarchy as well. A large part of this increased support, if you will, for Trump amongst Black supporters is coming from Black men, particularly younger Black men who are more susceptible to talking points that require an internalization of oftentimes racism and sexism in ways that cause them to support GOP policies or look towards conservative rhetoric more so than progressives might otherwise do so. I still believe that when it’s all said and done, we’re going to be right around the historical averages when it comes to support for Trump within the Black community, and maybe above historical average, maybe closer to Obama levels when it comes to Black support for Harris.
Matt Grossmann: But Black voters are more ideologically diverse and issue position diverse than their partisan voting patterns suggest. What is your current read of our explanations for the very high level of Democratic support, despite that ideological diversity and even among voters who maybe do agree with Republicans on things that would make white voters with an equivalent set of issue positions vote for the right?
Christopher Towler: So I think this comes to mind when I think of the nuances within the Black community and understanding the complexities of the decisions Black voters make when deciding to vote. A lot of times we look at who people voted for and that becomes their political identity. When understanding the Black community, you have to look at the why just as much as the who to understand what’s really going on here. And much of what’s been taking place ever since the Obama administration has really been a sense of protection when it comes to voting. And the ideological spectrum within the Black community is very vast, where you have ideas of liberalism, maybe even some ideas of neoliberalism. You have ideas of nationalism, you have ideas of feminism, all driving votes in a particular way. But they most often tend to be driven towards the Democratic Party because there is a clear understanding that the Republican Party, at this time in history, is working to remove rights and to turn against policies and progressive issues that seem to have benefited the Black community for generations.
And so when you look at things such as removing or undoing affirmative action, trying to ban books, trying to eliminate DEI programs, and then you could even get into more specific law enforcement policy around granting police immunity or using the military to control protests, these are all policies that much of the Black community sees as detrimental to a lot of the progress that’s been made, especially since the civil rights movement, a lot of the progress that many were hoping would be institutionalized or instilled as normal in America under the Obama administration. And so seeing Trump come to power and the MAGA movement embody sort of a complete reversal of this norm in a complete push against these policies seen as progress for the Black community is one reason why, even if you don’t have very enthusiastic support for the Democrats, you’re still going to see mostly Black support for the Democrats in an attempt to protect these gains that are seemingly on the precipice of loss.
Matt Grossmann: What about on the mobilization side? To what extent does the threat of Donald Trump specifically still mobilize Black voters? And what about the opportunity to elect a Black woman president?
Christopher Towler: I think it’s both. We’re finding in our research that the threat is still there and the threat is still an important factor when understanding mobilization, again, especially with low propensity voters, voters who might be looking at the potential Harris administration in the wake of the Obama administration with a bit more skepticism. Wondering, we didn’t come out of the Obama years with as much sort of Black specific policy or policy directed towards the Black community as we might’ve seen. So we’re not sure if Harris is going to deliver any differently than Obama did. And so that’s where threat really still comes into play. And again, voters, especially low propensity voters, if they turn out, it’s often a decision that’s made in a protective sense just as much as a advancing stance, looking for some actual policy progress.
Harris’s identity though, in being this historical candidate, potentially the first Black woman to be in the White House, is resonating with a lot of voters though. And I think there’s an opportunity for her to do both. I don’t think it has to be one or the other. But I think she absolutely cannot pick one over the other and be successful across the electorate. She has to continue to, on the one hand, identify with the historical moment that her candidacy represents, while, on the other hand, continue to press the issue that Trump will mean regression of rights, will mean a turning away from the progressive direction that the country has been taking that led to the election of President Obama.
Matt Grossmann: So among white voters, age is generally associated with more likelihood of conservatism and Republican voting. But among Black voters, it seems that Republicans see the most potential inroads among younger voters. So why is that?
Christopher Towler: This is a really interesting finding, and we are seeing in our data the same thing, that the Democratic attachment is now strongest amongst the eldest group, the eldest cohorts within the Black community. Without having any real empirical evidence of this, though, anecdotally, I often attribute this to the fact that younger generations are now at least one, if not two generations removed from the civil rights movement, where they are not directly connected to the movement and they might not even have a parent who’s directly connected to the movement at this point in time as well. They might have to have looked towards grandparents or even great-grandparents to find that direct connection to the civil rights movement. And the connection with the Black community and the Democratic Party is intimately tied to those civil rights gains, to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and the push of the Democratic Party for civil rights progress throughout the 1960s and ’70s, and into the ’80s towards the turn of the century.
And so as that sort of bond, that generational bond is being broken between younger Black people and the civil rights legacy, they’re more likely to identify as independent than to actually have this same strong attachment to a Democratic Party through this legacy of civil rights. And so I think that that means two things.
One, it means that there is maybe some more inroads amongst Republicans, but again, they have to do it in a way that actually mobilizes people as well. You can’t just throw talking points out there and have people maybe pick up on them and then expect them to act on those.
But it also means that the Democratic Party is going to have to do additional work as well. They’re going to have to step in. And as we’re seeing, the Harris campaign is going to have to find new ways to appeal to young Black voters that’s not necessarily couched in this framework of the Democratic Party being the party of civil rights. Young Black voters are looking towards issues that affect their lives daily when it comes to racial identity or issues that they see as really intimate to the Black community. They’re looking towards things such as reparations. They’re looking towards things such as policing and police reform, criminal justice reform, things that they experience or that their friends experience day in and day out. And so the Harris administration is going to have to make a statement on these issues and have a strong direction on these issues if they want to draw that same type of civil rights legacy to the Democratic Party that previous generations had through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
And so there’s going to have to be new strategies evolved, new campaign tactics put out there, to gather these young Black voters if they want to have this same sort of generational attachment to the Democratic Party that we’ve seen for so many years.
Matt Grossmann: How much does direct candidate outreach to Black voters matter and group targeted messaging? Is it seen as pandering or representation? And how are the Democrats doing this year?
Christopher Towler: Direct outreach still matters tremendously. We’ve seen, in the past, some of the most successful campaigns to mobilize voters have to do with being on the ground. I love the idea of bus tours.
Have to do with being on the ground. I love the idea of bus tours, getting out there and talking to people. The reason Georgia turned blue in 2020 is because of the direct voter outreach that had been taking place on the ground there for the last six to seven years, right? Pushing to get, first, people registered to vote, and then voting, trying to bring Abrams to the governor’s office, and then eventually getting Warnock elected to the Senate in 2022. And so direct voter outreach matters tremendously. I think speaking to past research, research has shown that the best way to get someone who is apathetic or disengaged in politics back into politics is to have a conversation with them, to speak with them face to face and let them discuss the politics and policies with you. We’ve already seen a tremendous disconnect between social media and sort of online ads and mobilization with actually getting people out to vote.
We saw this not only with electoral politics, but with social movements and protest movements where a lot of people might click on something or like something online, but very few of those people are actually then getting off their butts and going out and joining the protest or going out and voting in the polls, right? There is a disconnect between what people are doing in their lives online and social media and getting out there. And so you still absolutely have to have this face-to-face contact, especially if you’re trying to get low propensity people to buy into politics and to get out there and vote. And so I think you have to couple this with the correct message, with the correct ideas that appeal to the black community when it comes to getting them thinking that politics should matter or that politics can affect their individual lives. And over time, hopefully you can engage enough of the black community so that you have a significant and enduring increase in voter turnout, in voter engagement, in ways that have a lasting effect, and it’s not just sort of a one-off election type of thing.
That’s the ultimate goal here, is to have continuous and consistent voter engagement in ways that then shift the way that black voters can affect the electorate, right? Some of these elections are so close that if you can get just a few percent more of black voters to the polls, even a half percent in certain cases, just a couple hundred thousand more voters, in some cases even tens of thousands more voters. That can change the way some of these states look in the electoral college. And so it’s all going to matter, but you can’t give up on face-to-face mobilization or this ground game just because social media is now sort of front and center in a lot of the way we think and talk about politics.
Matt Grossmann: But what can we learn from last time? Eden Franco looked at a few black voters who did switch sides in 2020 to find out why. Let’s start with the key findings and takeaways from your recent work on black support for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. What did you find?
Idan Franco: So first of all, I have to say that it’s a collaborative project with Professor Udi Sommer in the Sommer Research team in TAU, Tel Aviv University. And actually in this paper, we asked also that black voters voted in increased numbers for Trump in 2020 compared to 2016. And obviously when we read the news stories that dealt with this question in the days after the 2020 elections and all of the exit polls that came out, etc. Most of the accounts or the theories or arguments concentrated on two potential answers. One was that it was ideology, and the other was that it was about economic perceptions. People that viewed their or the nation’s economic situation better obviously voted for the incumbent, who was Trump in this case. But common to both accounts was that it was despite who Trump is and not because of who he is. In other words, it meant that all of the racially resentful rhetoric, even racist remarks that Trump did, that Trump made, sorry, throughout his tenure and even before was of little… It negatively impacted its chances among minority voters, specifically with the African-Americans.
But other indicators or other motives tilt the scale in favor of voting for him. So what we show in this paper is that it was not despite who Trump is, but because of who he is, and specifically because of his racially resentful rhetoric. We used the battery of questions that is commonly termed and called the racial resentment battery of questions that was first introduced in 1996 by Kindle and Sanders, and we try to see if there is a correlation between the more African-Americans are racially resentful based on the responses to this battery of questions. We used data from the cooperative congressional election study, CCES, of 2016, 2020, et cetera, and we saw that the more racially resentful African-Americans are… Obviously it’s already tested and researched among white Americans, but surprisingly also among African-Americans, the more they were racially resentful based on these battery of questions, five indicators on the questionnaire, the more likely they were to vote for Trump.
Matt Grossmann: So yeah, what does it mean for black voters to be high in racial resentment? I know it physically means that they answered these questions at a higher rate, but as you discussed, there’s a lot of controversy about that, and it’s not clear that they mean the same things or that they would react similarly. So what is going on there?
Idan Franco: Of course it may imply that they have different understanding of racial reality or interracial relations or reality in America than the majority of black America. One of the striking findings of exit polls coming from the 2020 election was that in the Midwest, and specifically in Minnesota, for example, which is the own state of George Floyd, one third of black Americans voted for Trump according to exit polls. So it means that black Americans, especially when they lived through racially charged reality, for example, in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of… Sorry, not shooting, but the tragic death of George Floyd, when they live through this reality, this racially charged reality, they have to confront just like Latinos about immigration that we are going to talk about a little later. They confront identity related questions about themselves, whether they fully align themselves or agree with the majority’s understanding of racial relations in America.
Matt Grossmann: So let me give you two alternative interpretations that I think are also consistent with your results and you can tell me why you’ve selected yours. So one is that a lot of black Americans have conservative views overall, and for many of them, their views on racial issues or their racial attachments to the Democratic party compensate for that and they still vote democratic. So it’s only the people who have those conservative views but don’t have a strong racial view reason to attach to the Democratic party who are actually willing to vote for Trump. A second potentially related interpretation is that some people, because of their basic agreement with the Republican party or the Democratic Party, supported Trump, and they then felt willing to take on his views on racial issues to resolve the dissonance between their support for Trump and their race.
Idan Franco: Okay. So of course the ideological alternative or account, ideology concentrated account is a very strong competing account to ours. We do not say, by the way, that it’s not also about ideology. Of course we show in our article that the more African-Americans they are more conservative combined with racially resentful perception and outlook, they are more likely to vote for Trump, of course. But we also argue that it’s not only and not mainly about ideology. I will give you some example that can give support to this claim. First of all, in Georgia… We compare between Georgia and Florida. We take it as a case in point. In Georgia, where Trump lost after winning in 2016, he lost in 2020, 25% of the people identified as conservative are Blacks, whereas in Florida, of the people identified as conservatives, 14, merely 14% are Black. So it means that only based on ideology, Trump had more chances to win Georgia. I mean, if we look only at the black community than Florida. By the way, the same goes with Latinos, where we compare between Florida and Arizona. Maybe we will touch upon it afterwards.
This is the first thing. African-Americans are traditionally more conservative than the general American public. We also included in the paper regression results for 2012, the data from 2012 and from 2016. So with Trump, it worked better, if we can say that, if we can put it that way. The racial resentment battery of questions worked better with Trump than it walked with Romney, and Romney is arguably more conservative than Trump. So outcome, if it’s only about ideology or mainly about ideology outcome, then Romney, that is arguably more conservative in social issues, for example, did not do better with the African Americans in 2012 than Trump did. Of course, Barack Obama played a key role in 2008 and 2012, but even prior to the Obama era, we did not see the same effect of ideology. Gap candidates that were conservative, more conservative than Trump, did not do better among black Americans. And of course not. If we look at the polls or numbers that we look these days, even after President Biden dropped out of the race.
Matt Grossmann: And just real quick, the reverse causality alternative explanation. So the voters that… Because there is evidence that voters who voted for Trump in panel studies then changed their attitudes on these kinds of issues as well as, I’m not saying it eliminates all of the effect, but what about that alternative that these are just black voters who decided to vote for Trump and so they have to parrot his rhetoric?
Idan Franco: Yeah. So since we have not included something that is specific about that, we do not talk about causality, I would not like to give you a decided answer. It’s just about, it could be a… My understanding of what I’m seeing as a political scientist, which is that perhaps Trump had some effect on regarding changing the minds of some black voters as well as other voters generally about certain issues because it is very charismatic. It is another issue for political scientists to explore the questions regarding the role that politicians and strong leaders can feel in changing public views. But I don’t think that he alone could change people’s mind in such a broad scope.
Matt Grossmann: So you’ve also published on the movement of Latino voters towards Trump in 2020 with a somewhat analogous explanation. So talk about what you found and what the differences were, particularly because at least in 2020, the movement was larger among Latinos.
Idan Franco: At the core, let’s put it that way. At the core, the phenomena, the particular phenomena that we see also with regard to the Latino constituency in American politics is the same as we saw with regard to black Americans in 2020, which is that it’s not only ideology and neither economic perceptions that could explain increased support for Trump in 2020, but identity related issues like with regard to African-Americans where identity related issues meant racial resentment or racial life among Latinos, it means, of course, immigration related issues. And what we find in our paper is that it was not despite Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric in policy, et cetera, building the world.
We all know what it means, but it was because of his anti-immigration posture and in the past, in the paper we talked about that in the past there were some walks that dealt with anti-immigration sentiment among Latinos. But then back then, for example, de la Garza from Columbia that passed away a few years ago, published about that and other scholars. But then they talked about how economic hardship could explain that. We on the other hand, show that it was a better economic perceptions that served as a enabling context because we show that the better Latinos viewed their economic status and the nation’s economic status, the more pronounced was the effect of anti-immigration sentiment on their voting for Trump. This is our main findings from this paper.
Matt Grossmann: So let me try again on the alternative explanation for this one, because I do think that it has the same basic structure, which is that what I would argue is that black and Latino voters both need to be more conservative than equivalent white voters in order to vote for Donald Trump. And because there are other things that normally hold them to vote for the Democratic Party. So you are emphasizing racial resentment and anti-immigration attitudes predicting Trump’s support. But obviously equally we could emphasize that very high levels of belief in structural racism or very pro-immigration views move Latino and black voters towards Biden, towards the democratic candidates. And so if you have a voter who is mostly conservative, you have two voters who are mostly conservative and one who votes for Trump and one who votes for Biden, and you say the difference between them is their opinions on these issues, should you conclude that it was those issues or should you conclude that it was their general perspective? But for some voters, these issues held them back and led them to still vote democratic despite their conservative positions.
Idan Franco: The way the methodology that we use to find these results, we obviously included ideology and perception of economic conditions and other indicators, and we saw that we found that Latinos, even if they are conservative but lower on their anti-immigration sentiments in the index variable that we created, they would not vote for Trump. So I understand that the point that you are making is about the causality and that if Trump made them more anti-immigration that they were before. I already answer this question about the African-Americans, but I would say again, but I would say again some very important things. We referenced in the paper to other theories, recent theories from recent years, for example, Efrén Pérez who is one of the prominent scholars about the Latino political behavior from 2015, who wrote about how in times of a social ferment perhaps is not in these exact words, but the idea was that in times when immigration is talked about is a very important issue in the election campaign.
For example, in 2016 and in 2020, unlike 2012 and 2008, when economic issues were more important based on statistics from peer research, we cite those findings in these times, exact times, Latinos, as I said about African-Americans and other, the same goes with the Asian-Americans during COVID that we are also writing about this project. During these times, minority voters, in this case, Latinos has themselves, whether you align with the in-group or exit, okay, this is a term that Efrén Pérez uses. There are other theories that talk about it. So in other words, we see globally a rise in right-wing populism, extreme right populism.
And in Germany, in France, and in Austria and other countries, we see the same phenomena of immigrants or minority group members with immigrant background voting for anti-immigrant candidates and parties. But the difference, and we also talk about it in the paper more broadly, the difference between those cases to the case of Latino in the US, at least in the scholarly world in the last two decades, Latino group identity is closely related to the issue of immigration. Which means that when it’s not a coincidence that Trump, who is a candidate, that his most important agenda is about immigration, that won’t increase support from Latinos and is going to based on polls right now these days, is going to win more support from Latinos.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like these discussion, you should check out these episodes next I’ll linked on our website. Racial stereotypes in voting for Obama and Trump. Will Trump anger motivate black turnout? Why are black conservatives still Democrats? How black voters choose candidates, and what research on black women candidates means for Kamala Harris? Thanks to Christopher Taller and Aiden Franco for joining me, please check out the Black Voter Project and Trumps’ African Americans and listen in next time.