Why Donald Trump Has Done Worse in Mostly White States

The New York Times:

Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration language lands with force for people who fear the browning of America. Within three or four decades, several reports have indicated, non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up a majority of the United States population. The social psychology researchers Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, working at Northwestern, studied whether people could become more politically conservative if they felt a threat to their status in the racial pecking order.

In their paper, they wrote that their experiments “provide striking evidence that perceived group-status threat, triggered by exposure to the majority-minority shift, increases whites’ endorsement of conservative political ideology and policy positions.”

What could change this feeling of anxiety and resentment? “In both experiments,” they wrote, “the addition of a simple paragraph stating that whites are likely to remain at the top of the future racial hierarchy in a majority-minority America eliminated the conservative shift.”

Read the whole story: The New York Times