The work summarized, published in Socius, of the American Sociological Association, looks at the impact of implicit racial appeals (so-called “dogwhistles”) on white liberals. The counterintuitive finding: they work.
“If the dog-whistle hypothesis is correct, we would expect implicit but not explicit racial appeals to increase the impact of racial resentment on whites’ policy evaluations,” Wetts and Willer wrote.Thus adding additional support to our hypothesis of the growth of tribal/identity group politics, first mentioned here in 2014. It’s nothing Trump started, he merely recognized and took advantage of a preexisting vein of “resentment.”
Their experiment confirmed the hypothesis ― but with an unexpected twist. After the participants read the political statements and were asked how they felt about welfare, the ones with the most negative attitude compared to the control group were self-identified white liberals who’d read the implicit racial appeal and who had scored highly on the racial resentment scale.
They found that “white, racially resentful liberals were particularly likely to switch their vote to Trump” after having previously voted for Obama.
Racially resentful liberals represent about 3 percent of the population, or some 10 million people. And it only took 100,000 votes in three states to seal the Electoral College for Trump in 2016.
