The questions ask those surveyed whether they agree or disagree with these statements:

I am fearful of people of other races.

White people in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin.

Racial problems in the U.S. are rare, isolated situations.

I am angry that racism exists.

The authors tested the questions in a sample of more than 40,000 white voters conducted during the 2016 primary elections by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

They found that Trump voters, as opposed to voters supporting other Republican candidates, were “less empathetic (angered by racism), they were more likely to deny Whites have an advantage in America and expressed far more fear of other racial groups.” In addition, DeSante and Smith found that the FIRE questions proved especially effective in identifying voters who backed Obama in 2012 and switched to Trump in 2016.

In an email, Candis Smith described the advantages of the FIRE question battery:

We developed FIRE for a number of reasons. First and foremost, because while we (scholars/journalists) tend to conflate ‘racial attitudes’ with ‘racial prejudice.’ But, there’s more to it than that. There’s all sorts of feelings, attitudes, and knowledge surrounding issues of racial groups and racial inequality. FIRE aims to get at this multidimensionality. So, it’s not just that some people are resentful, but some people are fearful, some people are unaware or unwilling to be aware of (structural) racism, some people are actually empathetic about inequality. Taken together, we can say more about how the various dimensions of racial attitudes influence political attitudes/behaviors.

Exploring these dimensions, Smith continued, enables you to identify

people who are fearful of other racial groups (and you might be surprised that people are willing to admit this) were more likely to vote for Trump. So here, it’s not just “resentment” but fear that influenced people. FIRE allows us to pinpoint how both feelings (affect) and knowledge (cognition) influence people’s orientation toward politics.

Much effort has been devoted to understanding the role of race in shaping American politics over the 55 years since passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It’s clear that all the leading Democratic presidential candidates are committed to the idea that improved race relations are crucially important. And it’s not too much to say that the future of the nation depends on arriving at a more equitable sharing of resources — tangible and intangible.

The 2020 election will be fought over the current loss of certainty — the absolute lack of consensus — on the issue of “race.” Fear, anger and resentment are rampant. Democrats are convinced of the justness of the liberal, humanistic, enlightenment tradition of expanding rights for racial and ethnic minorities. Republicans, less so. This may well prove to be a base-vs.-base election, but even so the outcome may lie in the hands of the substantial proportion of the electorate that is undecided — 7 percent according to Pew. And if Democrats want to give themselves the best shot of getting Trump out of the White House, it is toward these voters that they must make concerted efforts at pragmatic diplomacy and persuasion — and show a new level of empathy.

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