The usual liberal explanation is that President Donald Trump has reawakened America’s primitive, bigoted side, shifting the Republican Party and America to the right. The usual conservative counterargument is that the left became more extreme in the 2010s, adopting radical views on race and gender, while moderates, while appearing to move to the right, were actually standing still.
But there’s a third possibility: Just as liberals have moved leftward over the past decade on issues of race and sexual orientation, so have conservatives, and while the so-called “Great Awakening” has subsided somewhat since Joe Biden succeeded Trump, the Republican Party may have quietly continued to move leftward on race.
To be clear, I am talking about public opinion here, not public officials or public policy, and there is no arguing that blatant bigots have become much louder in the mid-2010s and have gained more influence in certain circles.
but noisy and More typical It’s not the same thing. paper for Public Opinion QuarterlyUniversity of Pennsylvania political scientists Daniel Hopkins and Samantha Washington reported that anti-black and anti-Hispanic stereotypes declined among both white Democrats and white Republicans from 2007 to 2018. But the declines were much larger among Democrats in these surveys, creating a larger gap even though, on average, both groups are moving in the same direction.
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Ohio State University political scientist Thomas Wood Tried The 2017 survey was conducted to measure the relationship between Americans’ presidential votes and their scores on a scale of “symbolic racism” or “racial resentment,” which Wood described as a way to reveal “the racial attitudes of respondents who know that statements considered racist are socially unacceptable.”
The scale is controversial because some of the statements it asks people to rate, such as “Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve,” can elicit “wrong” answers for reasons unrelated to prejudice or resentment. Surveys have found that significant numbers of African Americans endorse positions that are considered racist, leading some social scientists to phone For giving this scale a meaningless label. At best, it measures whether people attribute racial disparities to structural barriers or to individual shortcomings.
But whether or not people who score high on this scale are racist is a different matter. Lower On the scale are racial liberals.So what did Wood discover?
For Wood, the big takeaway was that in the last 30 years of research, “we’ve never seen such a clear correlation between voting choice and racial identity.” The higher you are on the scale, the more likely you are to vote Republican. But as Musa Al Gharbi pointed out, Criticism Wood’s Works American sociologistBut this ignores the direction the Republican Party is heading. According to Wood’s own data, Al Gharbi found that more white people “supported Trump over Hillary Clinton.”Less racism than those who voted [Mitt] Similar trends are seen among whites who voted for Romney and whites who voted for Clinton. [Barack] Similarly, voters in both parties were becoming more racially liberal, with Obama going further.
Overtly racist and fascist elements of the right – those who carry tiki torches and shout anti-Semitic slogans – may have gained power and prominence in the early days of the Trump administration, but power by minority standards and mainstream acceptance are two very different things. Indeed, Al-Gharbi Claimed During the 2020 election, when voters associated Trump with such rhetoric and behavior, his popularity declined, not increased, including among white Republicans.
Needless to say, many Republicans still tend to favor individualistic over structural explanations for racial disparities. But there are still many differences in their worldviews, including on key issues like race and policing. The Washington Post investigation A survey showed that 53% of Republicans support the protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd. rear Some of the protests turned violent. Around the same time, the Pew Research Center vote A majority of Republicans (40 percent) were shown to support Black Lives Matter.
Perceptions of the George Floyd protests have since become even more polarized along partisan lines, but the initial framing of opinion, which continued even after the street violence began, suggests how much the conventional narrative of the time misses.
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The Trump era also saw the highest levels of tolerance for gays among Republicans at the time. Gallup Annual PollRepublican support for same-sex marriage didn’t reach 40% until 2016, but reached 49% in 2020. It then rose to 55% in the majority and first two years of the Biden administration, before dropping back below 50% in 2023 and 2024, likely as a response to the recent LGBT culture wars. (The current figure is 46%.)
Most of these culture wars are over transgender people, whose political battles are now much more intense than those over gays and lesbians. Many social conservatives have tried to use these conflicts over transgender rights as a wedge to reopen old debates about gay liberation. One way to read the drop in support for same-sex marriage from 55% to 46% is as a measure of how many Republicans have resonated with that message. It remains to be seen whether this drop will last or whether it will just be a temporary setback. But it is noteworthy that even after two years of setbacks, Republican support for same-sex marriage is higher than it was in any year before 2017.
On racial issues, the Republican Party has not backed down at all. Report Using surveys conducted periodically since 2016, the study examines “how attitudes about race and immigration have entrenched and changed since the Trump administration.” On immigration, the authors found that both Democrats and Republicans have shifted to the right since Biden took office. But when asked about “racial resentment” (they avoided using this questionable term), they found that Democrats have become slightly more conservative and Republicans slightly more liberal since Trump left office.
There’s one other change worth noting here: Democrats continue to win a majority of the non-white vote, but their share, even among African-Americans, is declining slightly. This may only be a temporary disturbance, but we may be seeing the beginnings of a longer-term trend comparable to the shift in many “white ethnic” voters to the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s, as Hispanics in particular appear to be more willing to vote Republican.
Culture war structures don’t last forever. Many times, things that were once fiercely fought have faded, like same-sex marriage, or almost completely disappeared, like interracial marriage. Sometimes alliances formed to fight one cultural conflict end up burying the old one, like conservative Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons coming together to fight liberal sexual morality. And even when conflict continues, the composition of each side can change radically. Don’t be surprised if it happens again.
