In the usual liberal account, President Donald Trump reawakened America’s atavistic, bigoted side, driving both the Republican Party and the United States to the right. In the usual conservative retort, it’s the left that became more extreme in the 2010s, adopting radical views on race and gender that meant a moderate could seem to be moving rightward while in fact he was standing still.
But there is a third possibility: that liberals spent the decade moving leftward on questions of race and sexual orientation—and so did conservatives. And while the so-called Great Awokening has cooled somewhat since Joe Biden succeeded Trump as president, Republicans may have quietly continued to trend leftward on racial issues.
To be clear: I am speaking of public opinion here, not public officials or public policy. And I don’t dispute that explicit bigots became a lot noisier in the mid-’10s, or that they acquired more influence in certain circles.
But noisier and more typical are not the same thing. In a 2020 paper for Public Opinion Quarterly, the University of Pennsylvania political scientists Daniel Hopkins and Samantha Washington reported that from 2007 through 2018, antiblack and anti-Hispanic stereotypes declined among both white Democrats and white Republicans. It’s just that the Democratic drop in these surveys was much larger, creating a wider gap even though both groups, on average, were moving in the same direction.
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A similar picture appeared when Ohio State political scientist Thomas Wood tried in 2017 to measure the relationship between Americans’ presidential votes and how they scored on the “symbolic racism” or “racial resentment” scale, which Wood described as a way to uncover “racial attitudes among respondents who know that it’s socially unacceptable to say things perceived as racially prejudiced.”
This scale is controversial, because some of the statements it asks people to evaluate—such as “Over the past few years blacks have gotten less than they deserve”—could elicit the “wrong” answer for reasons unrelated to prejudice or resentment. The underlying problem was highlighted when surveys found substantial numbers of African Americans endorsing the purportedly racist positions, leading some social scientists to call for giving the measurement a less loaded label. At best, the scale measures whether people attribute racial disparities to structural barriers or individual failings.
But whether or not the people who score higher on the scale are racists, it seems fair to say that the people who score lower on the scale are racial liberals. So what did Wood find?
For Wood, the big takeaway was that “we’ve never seen such a clear correspondence between vote choice and racial perceptions” in three decades of these surveys: The higher you landed in the scale, the more likely you were to vote Republican. But as Musa al-Gharbi pointed out in a critique of Wood’s work for The American Sociologist, this ignored the direction those Republicans were moving in. According to Wood’s own data, al-Gharbi noted, whites who backed Trump over Hillary Clinton were “less racist than those who voted for [Mitt] Romney. The same holds among whites who voted for Clinton as compared to those who voted for [Barack] Obama.” Again, voters in both parties were getting more racially liberal; it’s just that Democrats went further.
The explicitly racist and even fascist elements of the right—the sort of people who chant antisemitic slogans while carrying tiki torches—may have gotten larger and better-known in the early Trump years. But it is one thing to be large by fringe-group standards; it is another thing entirely to be embraced by the mainstream. Indeed, al-Gharbi argued during the 2020 election that when voters associated Trump with that sort of rhetoric and behavior, it made him less rather than more popular, including among white Republicans.
Needless to say, most Republicans still tend to favor individual over structural explanations for racial disparities. But there is still plenty of variation within that worldview, including on such hot-button issues as race and policing. In June 2020, a Washington Post survey showed 53 percent of Republicans endorsing the protests that erupted after a cop murdered George Floyd—and this was after some of the protests turned into riots. Around the same time, a Pew poll showed a large minority of Republicans (40 percent) endorsing Black Lives Matter.
Views on the George Floyd movement later became more polarized along partisan lines. But that initial configuration of opinions, persisting even after the street violence began, hints at how much the conventional narratives of the period miss.
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The Trump era also marked what was, at that point, the highest recorded rank-and-file Republican tolerance for gays and lesbians. In Gallup’s annual polls, Republican support for same-sex marriage didn’t reach 40 percent until 2016, but by 2020 it had gotten to 49 percent. It later became the majority opinion, leaping to 55 percent for the first two years of the Biden administration, though it sank back below the 50 percent mark in 2023 and 2024, probably in response to recent LGBT culture wars. (The figure currently stands at 46 percent.)
Most of those culture wars center around trans people, whose political fights are currently far more contentious than the battles around gays and lesbians. Many social conservatives have tried to use those trans-rights conflicts as a wedge to reopen older debates about gay liberation; one way to read that drop in gay-marriage support from 55 percent to 46 percent is as a measure of how many Republicans have been receptive to that sort of messaging. We can’t be sure whether that decline will continue or be a temporary recession. But it is notable that even now, after a two-year retrenchment, Republican support for same-sex marriage is higher than in any year before 2017.
On racial questions, there hasn’t been a Republican retrenchment at all. In June, the Democracy Fund published a report on “how attitudes about race and immigration are settling and shifting after Trump,” drawing on surveys conducted regularly since 2016. On immigration, the authors found, both Democrats and Republicans have moved rightward since Biden took office. But when they looked at those “racial resentment” questions (while avoiding that dubious term), they found Democrats getting a smidge more conservative since Trump left office—and Republicans getting a smidge more liberal.
There’s one more shift worth noting here. While Democrats have continued to receive a majority of the nonwhite vote, their share has been declining—even, to a small extent, among African Americans. That could just be temporary turbulence. But with Hispanics in particular seeming more open to voting Republican, we could be seeing the start of a long-term trend comparable to the movement of many “white ethnic” voters toward the GOP in the 1960s and ’70s.
No culture war configuration is permanent. Time and again, once-vivid fights have receded, as with same-sex unions, or disappeared almost entirely, as with interracial marriage. Sometimes an alliance formed to fight one cultural conflict will be what finally buries an old one, as when conservative Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons came together to fight liberal sexual mores. And even when a fight persists, the lineups on each side can radically change. Do not be shocked if that happens again.
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