People who were more supportive of police and had higher levels of racial resentment were more likely to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, according to new research published in the journal Criminology. The research indicates that support for police by itself, however, was not associated with voting for Trump.
The authors of the study were interested in examining how the Black Lives Matter movement and Trump’s pro-police rhetoric were connected to actual voting behavior.
“We knew that crime and justice issues had been relevant to politics in the midst of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960, and that politicians of that era had sometimes used them as racist dog whistles — ways of signaling to voters uncomfortable with the changes posed by the civil rights movement but in terms that don’t explicitly invoke race. We were curious as to whether any of these same patterns were playing out in 2016 in the midst of a new civil rights movement,” said study author Kevin M. Drakulich, an assistant professor at Northeastern University.
For their study, the researcher analyzed data from the 2016 American National Election Studies Time Series Survey, a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens. Drakulich and his colleagues focused on the responses given during interviews conducted in the two months following the 2016 general election. A total of 1,059 adults participated in face-to-face interviews and another 2,590 completed online questionnaires.
The survey collected information about political ideology, religious affiliation, voting behavior and several other factors.
The survey used a “thermometer scale” to assess how warmly or coldly the participants felt towards the police in general and the Black Lives Matter movement. To measure perceptions of police bias, the survey asked whether the participants believed that “in general, the police treat Whites better than Blacks, treat Blacks better than Whites, or treat them both the same.”
The survey also included a measure of racial resentment, in which participants were asked whether “Blacks should overcome prejudice and work their way up without ‘special favors,’ whether slavery and discrimination created conditions that remained significant barriers for lower class Blacks, whether Blacks had gotten less than they deserved, and whether inequalities would be solved if Blacks tried harder.”
The perception of Black political threat was assessed by asking the participants if they believed Blacks have too little, just about the right amount, or too much influence in U.S. politics.
After controlling for factors such as ideology, age, education, and evangelical affiliation, the researchers found that support for the Black Lives Matter movement was associated with greater turnout among Democrats in 2016, while support for the police was associated with greater turnout among Republicans.
But feelings of warmth toward the police were not related to vote choice per se, except among those with high racial resentment. In addition, those who both believed that Blacks held too much political power and that the police treated Blacks better than Whites were among the most likely to vote for Trump.
“We found that the movement was relevant to people’s voting behavior in the 2016 election in two completely different ways. First, people who cared about police racial bias and who supported the movement were more likely to turn out to vote and to vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the general election,” Drakulich told PsyPost.
“I’ve found many people I talk to focusing on concerns about the backlash to the movement among racist voters, but it’s important to remember that people also turned out to vote because they were motivated by the issues the movement raised and the movement itself.”
“On the other side, an antipathy toward the movement also motivated voter turnout on the right. It appeared that those who supported the police were more likely to vote for Trump, but that turned out just to be a cover for racist feelings. In fact, support for the police only predicted voting for Trump among those with high levels of racial resentment (those who blame racial inequalities on Black Americans and resent efforts to ameliorate them). We interpret this last finding as evidence of the success of a racist dog whistle strategy.”
But it is unclear whether a similar dynamic will play out again in this year’s presidential election.
“One huge caveat is that we have no idea how this applies to the 2020 election. Right now, it appears that these issues will be relevant to voters once again, but it is difficult to know exactly how that will impact the results of the election. Elections are determined by who votes, who they vote for, and, because of the electoral college system, where you vote,” Drakulich explained.
“We don’t yet know how the pandemic will impact voting, and we don’t know what other issues will be on voters’ minds in November (in the last election at least, we know that both racism and sexism were factors).”
The study, “Race and policing in the 2016 presidential election: Black lives matter, the police, and dog whistle politics“, was authored by Kevin Drakulich, Kevin H. Wozniak, John Hagan, and Devon Johnson.
