Racial attitudes and emotional responses to the 2016 Republican candidates

Abstract

We argue that both Obama ‘08 and Trump ‘16 benefited from unusually high enthusiasm generated during their respective campaigns, and these emotions conditioned underlying racial attitudes–albeit in different ways–to pave the way to the White House. Racial animosity is usually studied in the context of minority candidates, but in the 2016 election, Donald Trump (a white candidate) frequently made direct attacks on immigrants and foreigners. This study examines how emotions generated during the campaigns and racial resentment, which we consider a preexisting attitude, shaped voter evaluations of the 2016 presidential candidates in the general election and Republican primaries. Drawing on original telephone survey data from the highly salient GOP Iowa caucuses and national opinion data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we find that racial resentment interacted with positive emotions (enthusiasm) to increase support for Trump. The effect of racial attitudes in predicting favorable evaluations of Trump disappeared or diminished to a quarter of its original size when emotional responses to the candidate were measured. The study generalizes a framework about the interactive effect of existing racial attitudes and campaign-generated emotions to apply to both white and minority candidates.