The Yuge Effect of Racist Resentment on Support for Donald Trump and…Attitudes about Automobile Fuel Efficiency Requirements?

Recent political science research has used a relatively new measure of racist attitudes—referred to as racist resentment, among other labels—to support inferences about racist attitudes and vote choice in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Analysis of data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study indicated that this racist resentment measure predicted vote choice for Donald Trump but also nontrivially predicted phenomena that theoretically have little-to-no racial content such as attitudes about environmental policies. These results suggest that the racist resentment measure captures too much nonracial content to be useful for estimating the association of racism with outcome variables.