The idea of “staying woke” became an important refrain among Black Lives Matter activists after a spate of police killings of Black men, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. These debates over “wokeness” are the latest in a long history of Republican efforts to win over white Democratic swing voters with racially conservative attitudes that political scientists call “racial resentment.” Democrats have often tried to maintain support from these whites by staying silent on racial issues.

But my research shows that racial resentment among white Democrats is at all-time low and by failing to take stronger positions on racial justice—out of concern they could alienate moderate whites – the party is missing a historic political opportunity.

Since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats have taken gradually more progressive positions on racial justice issues, social welfare programs, and immigration policies than Republicans. As a result, majorities of racial and ethnic minorities have increasingly supported the Democratic Party and self-identified non-Hispanic white voters have steadily allied with the Republican Party. According to data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), in 1968, 52 percent of white Americans identified as Democrats and 37 percent as Republicans; by 2020 those values had reversed: 53 percent of white voters were Republicans, while only 37 percent of white voters aligned with the Democratic Party.

By comparison, 80 percent of Black Americans and nearly 60 percent of Hispanic Americans currently identify as Democrats.

But even as the party’s non-white voter base grows, Democrats have continued to express concerns about losing white voters because of racial positions. In 2017, a former Bill Clinton pollster blamed identity politics for weakening the party’s electoral chances. Earlier this year, racial justice activists like Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, chided President Biden for omitting racial justice issues in his State of the Union Address, even as he addressed his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

My research suggests, however, that when Democrats stay silent on race to appease white moderates, they are making a tactical error. It’s a lose-lose situation for Democrats who are soft on racial justice because Republicans will still attack them for being too liberal. In Arizona, Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia, and elsewhere, Republican candidates aligned with former President Donald Trump continue to take aim at Democratic positions on identity politics, regardless of Democrats’ reluctance to raise the issue. Additionally, when Democrats avoid racial issues, they fail to address the needs of their large, and growing, constituency base of people of color and risk alienating their own base of support.

Social scientists such as Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders introduced the concept of white “racial resentment” to describe the more subtle forms of racial prejudice that emerged after the civil rights movement. Instead of extreme beliefs about biological inferiority and preferences for segregation, racial resentment addresses a more covert type of racism that is expressed in the language of personal responsibility and denial of racial discrimination.

Researchers measure this form of prejudice primarily through survey research. Respondents are asked questions about perceptions of work ethic and personal responsibility. For example, respondents are asked how strongly they agree with statements like, “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Black people should do the same without special favors.” And: “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Black people to work their way out of the lower class.” Individuals who deny the consequences of racial discrimination and blame Black people’s poor work ethic for racial disparities receive a higher “resentment score.”

Using data from the ANES, which has routinely measured whites’ levels of racial resentment since the 1980s, Duke University graduate student Trent Ollerenshaw and I analyzed how white Americans’ levels of racial prejudice have changed over time. Our findings showed that racial resentment among white Democrats is at an all-time low.

This suggests that Democrats have an historic opportunity to advance more racially progressive policies. By leveraging burgeoning white progressivism on race, Democrats may also serve the interests of—and thereby, attract—another crucial constituency: people of color, whose support for the Democratic Party appears to have eroded somewhat in recent years.

We find that during the 1980s and 1990s, white Democrats had only slightly lower levels of racial resentment than white Republicans, and both were more politically conservative than now. The two groups began drifting apart in the early 2000s, a trend that accelerated at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2008 and became a gulf by 2016. By 2020, the two parties were further apart than ever. While white Democrats’ resentment scores declined dramatically, white Republicans’ racial resentment scores in 2020 had not changed much since 1986, the same year Howard Beach race riots in Queens, New York, killed a Black man and the state of Arizona rescinded the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

There are two likely explanations for this trend: More racially prejudiced white Democrats have left the party in recent years, or they have substantially changed their views. Multiple surveys of the same individuals between 2011 and 2020 provide evidence for the latter explanation: they show that whites who remained Democrats have expressed less racial resentment over time.

The next critical question for political researchers and Democratic strategists is: Does declining racial resentment among white Democrats suggest there is greater support for specific policy solutions?

Our analysis shows that many white survey respondents in 1980s and 1990s opposed policies that are perceived to benefit Black people, disproportionately, such as affirmative action and welfare spending increases.

During the Obama era, however, white Democrats’ support for these policies increased substantially. A 2020 poll by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute revealed that more than 73 percent of white Democrats supported affirmative action policies in college admissions and more than 66 percent supported them in hiring practices. More white Democrats support affirmative action now than ever before.

Our analysis suggests that the Democratic Party’s reluctance to take stronger positions on racial justice due to concerns about racially resentful whites is a lost opportunity. There is empirical evidence that Democrats could see gains if they embrace the progressivism of their core constituencies: racially liberal white voters and people of color.

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In other words, for the originators of the concept, in-group leaders who condemn and punish out-groups are the authoritarian’s highest ideal. Since 1950, however, social scientists have tended to doubt that aggressiveness really matters. Under the influence of that doubt, the nation’s principal attitude surveys—the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies—have traditionally sought evidence of authoritarian submissiveness, but not aggressiveness.

Until now.

In 2016, at our request, the American National Election Studies (ANES) included two statements expressing aggressively authoritarian attitudes that respondents were asked to either agree or disagree with. These strongly worded statements, which were pioneered a generation ago by psychologist Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, evoked equally strong responses.

The first statement was unambiguous: “Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the ‘rotten apples’ who are ruining everything.” The second test statement was similar: “What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path.”

Our analysis of the ANES data shows that voters who pulled the lever for Donald Trump in 2016 loved these statements. Only a few other ANES items divided Trump voters from Clinton voters as significantly and reliably—mainly, statements expressing resentment towards women, minorities, immigrants, and Muslims. And population variables (age, gender, education, marital status, and income) proved comparatively insignificant. Voters who wanted domineering leaders to crush evil and get rid of rotten apples supported Trump at every age and stage, at every level of education and income. These voters wanted to win the culture wars, and their “submissiveness,” we think, is better understood as fealty to a culture warlord.

Altemeyer foresaw this possibility. In 1994, he worried aloud that if the public was as avid about “crushing evil” as his students were, “tens of millions of North Americans” would want to give aggressive leaders free rein to crush evil, without worrying too much about minority rights. Now, nearly 25 years later, this fear seems amply justified. Yet many social scientists remain skeptical about the political relevance of aggressiveness.

By now this skepticism is very familiar. In 1958, so many psychologists were redefining authoritarianism as “acquiescence” that Richard Christie, who just two years earlier had co-authored a guide to the literature on authoritarianism, felt the need to object: “… most of us who have ventured outside the ivied halls,” Christie insisted, with his co-authors Joan Havel and Bernard Seidenberg, “have known individuals who emphatically” volunteer the very same ideas that appear in statements tapping authoritarian aggression. And rather than being placidly “acquiescent,” Christie adds, they angrily reject liberal pieties and denounce “anyone making such statements [as] a fool if not a traitor.”

In 2016, 17 candidates sought the Republican presidential nomination. The one who triumphed was the one who sounded most like Christie’s angry interlocutors and Altemeyer’s belligerent students—the candidate, that is, who most fervently promised to eliminate evil and evil-doers. In November 2016, 63 million people voted for that candidate.

If we hope to resist authoritarianism, we must understand it. And that remains a challenge. Even now, many people believe that aggressiveness is just a sign of ignorance or fear, which can be allayed by reasoned argument. They think that many Trump voters winced when they went to the polls—that they voted for a domineering leader not to crush out-groups, but simply to shake things up, hoping for the best.

Our data suggest otherwise. Although 26.9 percent of Trump voters did not call themselves his “strong” supporters, they closely resembled his strong partisans in nearly every attitude. Both groups voiced resentment toward what they see as overbearing women, undeserving minorities, and intrusive immigrants. And they also vented bitterness about what they saw as the excessive inclusiveness of authority figures like Obama who tolerated (or, they thought, favored) the very evils they wanted to see crushed.

Not every Trump voter held these opinions. But most did. And that suggests the need for deeper insight.

Before 2012, the ANES had studied authoritarianism in the full sense, with a focus on both aggression and submission, only twice—in 1952 and 1956. In the ensuing six decades, while many smaller surveys have yielded valuable insights, reliable and representative findings about authoritarianism in the wider public have been scarce. So the lessons we can draw from our 2016 items finally take us a step in the right direction, and offer a starting point for further inquiry.

What should we study next? We learned, in our analysis of the 2012 election results, that prejudice is strongly associated with authoritarian aggression and modestly associated with submission (as measured by survey statements about children). In 2016 we learned, as well, that Trump voting is strongly associated with authoritarian aggression and prejudice, and that Trump’s most zealous partisans are likely to say that white people are the victims of reverse discrimination. But many things still remain obscure.

20 years have passed, for example, since we learned that authoritarianism comes in several flavors, including two relatively rare but extreme forms. People with “Wild Card” tendencies are so antagonistic to tolerant authorities that they sound like anarchist rebels—except that they rebel in favor of harsher authority. And we learned from political psychologists Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius that some people with prejudiced and authoritarian attitudes regard themselves, not as defenders of conventional morality, but as cynical, self-aggrandizing winners in a world of also-rans.

The latter finding has often been replicated, not least in 2012, when the ANES, at our urging, included four statements testing the sentiments that Pratto-Sidanius discovered. But those statements were omitted from the 2016 survey, and Wild Card attitudes have not yet been tested in any major survey. So many questions remain unanswered, despite recent progress.

Richard Christie intuited long ago that the intolerant are often belligerent as well—and belligerence, as recent research has shown, spurs actions that differ fundamentally from actions driven by fear. We misunderstand that at our peril.

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