Ithaca College associate professor Paula Ioanide helped Reuters interpret polling of racial sentiments among American voters, and found that racial anxieties among white Republican Americans have fallen in the past few years.
Ioanide, a faculty member in IC’s Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity, told Reuters that the poll findings confirmed her own research that white racial anxieties among conservatives peaked during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Conservative white Americans “are not feeling as under attack as they did in 2016,” Ioanide told Reuters. Under the Donald Trump administration, “they’ve seen a kind of endorsement of the kinds of things that they wanted: A restoration of a white identity that they previously had felt was under attack.”