Research
Research
Published
Beyond the Trump Presidency: The Racial Underpinnings of White Americans’ Anti-Democratic Beliefs
How closely related are modern anti-democratic beliefs among white Americans, and to what extent are these beliefs shaped by exclusionary racial attitudes? Using data from the Political Unrest Study, the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape, and the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE), we find that support for voting restrictions, opposition to voting expansions, belief in widespread voter fraud, and support for overturning democratic election results load onto a single underlying dimension. While the prevalence of anti-democratic beliefs among white Americans has remained stable over the past decade, these beliefs have become increasingly interconnected. Furthermore, racial attitudes towards out-groups—including racial resentment, anti-immigrant sentiment, and white racial grievance—strongly correlate with anti-democratic beliefs, whereas in-group racial attitudes do not. Analysis of multiple waves of the American National Election Studies (ANES) reveals that racial resentment and white grievance now explain twice as much variation in anti-democratic beliefs as they did in 2012. Experimental evidence also demonstrates that white Americans react negatively to voting expansions when the racial implications of these reforms are made explicit. These findings underscore the growing alignment between anti-democratic beliefs and racial attitudes in contemporary U.S. politics.
Black Lives Matter and the Racialized Support for the January 6th Insurrection
Does support for the January 6th insurrection come mostly from concerned citizens worried over illegal voting, or from racists spurred to action by the highly visible Black Lives Matter protests and Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat? We field a survey experiment aimed at disentangling links between old and new racial grievances, anti-immigrant beliefs, Black activism, and support for the January 6th insurrection. We find that the people most likely to be supportive of the insurrection are whites who hold negative attitudes toward immigrants and subscribe to white replacement theory. Beliefs about the George Floyd protests also explain January 6th support, above and beyond demographics and other racial and political views. These results are validated by the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post- Election Survey. We also conduct a survey vignette experiment and find that anti-BLM rhetoric spread by Trump and right-wing news sources likely soured opinions on the movement and set the stage for widespread insurrection support.
Working Papers
Moving Hurts Turnout: Evidence from North Carolina Voters
Does moving reduce turnout, and do those losses change the composition of the electorate? Estimating the effect of moving is difficult because the circumstances that prompt a move may also affect participation, and voter files identify moves through registration updates, which are themselves tied to voting propensity. I link U.S. Postal Service change-of-address records to North Carolina administrative records and compare 141,456 registered voters, matched on demographics and prior turnout, who move before versus after the November 2024 election. Moving within a county, which does not require establishing a new registration, reduces turnout by 2.6 percentage points. Moving across counties reduces turnout by 5.1 points. In a counterfactual electorate without these losses, applying these estimates to the 264,631 registered voters who moved between the 2022 and 2024 elections implies roughly 9,300 lost votes, but no party, racial, or age group's share of voters changes by more than 0.03 percentage points. Moving lowers participation among the people who move while barely changing the composition of the electorate.