Religious, Anti-Immigrant, Ideological, and Conflicted Conservatives: Understanding Variation Within the Multi-Racial Right

• In Event: Measuring Politics

Abstract

Donald Trump's 2024 popular vote victory presents sociologists with a formidable paradox: why do voters denigrated by Trump’s racist rhetoric and undermined by his nativist policies nonetheless support him? Given the nascent stage of research on the multi-racial right, this paper intervenes with an exploratory quantitative design that draws on fixed-effects OLS regression and latent class analysis of panel data from the American National Election Study (2016–2020–2024) and the Cooperative Election Study (2020–2022–2024). Our research yields two substantive findings. First, immigration attitudes, particularly baseline support for border enforcement, emerge as the strongest and most consistent predictor of movement to the Republican party, even when controlling for racial resentment, economic variables, religiosity, and gender attitudes across both panels. Second, using latent class analysis to characterize the heterogeneity among people of color who identify as Republican or express support for Trump, we identify four distinct classes: religious conservatives (~29%), anti-immigrant conservatives (~41%), conflicted conservatives (~12%), and ideological conservatives (~21%). Each class reflects meaningfully different configurations of attitudinal, demographic, and ideological variables, demonstrating that the non-white Republican coalition is far from monolithic. Taken together, these findings help explain the collapse of the multi-racial Democratic coalition that has consistently delivered the party popular vote victories since the Civil Rights movement. Moreover, it provides a foundation for future work that specifies causal mechanisms driving racial partisan realignment in the contemporary United States.

Authors

• Adam Burston, The Ohio State University

• Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ohio State University