White Supremacist and Racist Opinion in America 1940s–2018: A New Look at the Data

Since the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama the United States has seen a significant increase in white supremacist and overtly racist attitudes. The rise of the Tea Party in 2009 and numerous other Alt-right conservative movements seemed to foreshadow the election of a presidential candidate like Donald Trump. During his presidency, Donald Trump was arguably the first openly white supremacist and racist president since Woodrow Wilson. He referred to Black Americans as lazy, and Mexicans as rapists and spewed anti-Asian rhetoric throughout his speeches. This paper examines how white supremacist and racist attitudes have changed over time. Using the American National Elections Survey (ANES) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) survey data from the 1940s through 2018, we descriptively show the salience of white racist attitudes and their effect on the 2016 presidential election.