White identity politics drives Trump, and the Republican Party under him

Lee Drutman was quoted in the Washington Post on the role of white identity politics in U.S. elections.

Democratic strategists have warned that the liberal backlash against Trump’s approach could play into his hands. At the Democratic debates in June, most of the party’s presidential contenders endorsed ideas more liberal than the Obama administration’s priorities, including giving undocumented immigrants health insurance and removing criminal penalties for crossing the border.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, found in a study of voter attitudes after the 2016 election that people who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 were likely to be more liberal on economic issues and more conservative on issues of race and immigration. The study has been cited by pollsters for the Immigration Hub, a group that seeks to develop a pro-immigrant congressional agenda, as a cautionary note as the 2020 election approaches.

“If Democrats want to win some of these Obama-Trump voters back — and they should want to do that, because they made the difference in a number of Rust Belt states — they ought to be careful about taking too much of a pro-immigration stand,” Drutman said.