It was this idea to connect it more to government policy. The other thing we started doing as a discipline in the 80s and 90s as explicit racism was declining in American society, we started asking questions that focused on what we called "racial resentment." And so racial views were not about characteristics or individual traits of black people or immigrants or what have you, but rather about how much they deserve benefits, if they should work harder and not blame society for their troubles, if they're being discriminated against. People who hold those racist views would also be more likely to think negative views about things like the economy when weren't true objectively. And it was much more likely to be true of Republicans than Democrats. So they had kind of gone away or dissipated after the 1960s to the 2000s, but with the election of Obama, we started to see explicit, old-fashioned racism reemerge in American politics and become politically salient. We've seen those kinds of measures rise since Obama's election in America. So people are returning to old-fashioned racism. If you compare the way they rate white people on those questions with the way they rate the other groups, that's how I get a sense of what I would call negative racial stereotypes––what we would call old-fashioned or explicit racism. In these polls that I looked at, if you asked how well the word "violent" describes Muslims as a group, Trump supporters were much more likely to say it described them extremely well. We asked people, "Do you think black people are more violent than white people?" or, "Do you think 'lazy,' 'violent,' or 'unintelligent' describes black people or white people or Latinos?" We ask those kinds of things. When we studied this, we looked back at the history, and you can see the decline. I think in the post–civil rights era, it became harder because it became clear that there's a very strong consensus in our country that racist views are not good and not allowed. Well, how do you determine who's a racist based on polling? What percentage of people had those views? The people that supported Donald Trump, their views on negative racial stereotypes toward blacks, negative views of Muslims, and negative views of immigrants was just off the charts. That was stuff I started analyzing in the spring during the primary. Jason McDaniel: I do think that based on the analysis I've done and based on some analysis more recently, there's no doubt that Trump supporters are more motivated by racially resentful views and negative racial views than Hillary Clinton supporters or previous Republican candidates. VICE: In your research, were you able to conclude that half of Trump supporters are racists? Was Clinton right? He explained the results of a recent study he conducted about the correlation of what people in the field call "racial resentment" and support for Donald Trump, and he told me that Clinton's original comments weren't far off. In an attempt to answer at least some of those questions, I called up Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University. But how many fall into that latter camp? Is Clinton's basket size that far off? How do you count racists in America, anyway? It's clear that though many, many Trump supporters are fine, hardworking Americans, there are also some who are outright racist shitbags. Trump has responded by denouncing Clinton's "low opinion" of Americans, and Clinton did apologize for saying "half," though she stood behind most of the substance of her speech. And unfortunately there are people like that. Then, during a Friday speech, she went further, saying that half of her opponents supporters should be in a "basket of deplorables." She went on: "The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic-you name it. At the end of August, she gave a speech dedicated to denouncing the "alt right"-a loosely associated set of white people who love Trump and embrace white-nationalist views that most Republicans would reject. In that context, it's pretty startling how much time Hillary Clinton has spent lately calling Donald Trump's supporters racist.
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