In a recent piece for the Huffington Post, Michael Tesler (author of Post-Racial or Most Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era) analyzes public opinion data that corroborates an account of the 2016 election that looks beyond the white-working class neglect narrative and concentrates instead on the role played by racial prejudice. As he summarizes, “Racially resentful beliefs that African Americans are getting more than they deserve were so strongly linked to support for Trump, in fact, that their impact on both the 2016 Republican Primary and the general election were larger than they had ever been in before.” Read an excerpt from Tesler’s research below, which runs the numbers and frames the context in which they were generated. *** Such different portraits of white and non-white Americans’ grievances have their origins in what social psychologists call “ultimate attribution error.” This error means that when whites struggle, their troubles are generally attributed to situational forces (e.g., outsourcing); but when non-whites struggle, their plight is more often attributed to dispositional traits (i.e., poor work ethic). Consequently, whites are considered “more deserving” than blacks. To quantify this double standard in deservingness we embedded an experiment in a new HuffPost/YouGov survey. We asked half . . .

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A recent piece for the Upshot blog at the New York Times on the pro-rural bias of American electoral institutions made good use of political scientist Frances E. Lee’s research on the history of congressional partisan conflict, the subject of her latest book Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign. In considering the ideological residue from “Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian America” and its “yeoman farmer” ideal, the NYT posits how the ongoing influence of the rural vote triggers our very notion of the kind of person who should be able to hold office. which ultimately shapes just the conflict Lee specializes in: Rural America, even as it laments its economic weakness, retains vastly disproportionate electoral strength. Rural voters were able to nudge Donald J. Trump to power despite Hillary Clinton’s large margins in cities like New York. In a House of Representatives that structurally disadvantages Democrats because of their tight urban clustering, rural voters helped Republicans hold their cushion. In the Senate, the least populous states are now more overrepresented than ever before. And the growing unity of rural Americans as a voting bloc has converted the rural bias in national politics into a potent Republican advantage. “If you’re talking about a political system that skews rural, that’s not . . .

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In a recent piece for Vox, Katherine J. Cramer outlined some of the arguments she makes in The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, which draws upon years of research on Wisconsin’s shifting electorate to analyze the role played by rural consciousness, and the ongoing influence of place-based identities in politics. Here’s part of Cramer’s takeaway: Once I passed out my business cards, handed out tokens of appreciation like Badger football schedules, and turned on my recorder, I asked them, “What are the big concerns of people in this community?” Regardless of geography, people in most of these communities talked about their concerns about health care, jobs, and taxation. But in the rural places and small towns, people expressed a deeply felt sense of not getting their “fair share” — defined in different ways. They felt that they didn’t get a reasonable proportion of decision-making power, believing that the key decisions were made in the major metro areas of Madison and Milwaukee, then decreed out to the rest of the state, with little listening being done to people like them. They also thought that they didn’t get their fair share of tax money. To them, too . . .

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