In the wake of the Capitol riot and on the eve of former President Trump’s second impeachment trial, from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý reveals the attitudes and beliefs that are growing within the Republican Party.

Surveys of hundreds of fervent Trump voters, whom researchers refer to as Make American Great Again (MAGA) supporters, reveal strong beliefs that the election was stolen; that COVID-19 is a bioweapon from China; and that the riot was the work of antifa. The data, collected just before and after the Capitol riot, is believed to be the only information of its kind, shedding light on MAGA supporters’ opinions about race, gender, the pandemic and the 2020 election.

The data also uncovers demographic information that may dispel some myths about hard-core Trump supporters: Nearly half of MAGA adherents, for example, roughly half earn at least $50,000 a year, considered middle-income by many standards, and approximately one-third have at least a college degree.

“Right now, these people feel like they’re losing their country and their identity. They feel like they’re being displaced by communities of color, by feminists and by immigrants. These people are motivated by what they see as an existential threat to their way of life,” said , professor of political science at the UW and co-author of the research.

The results have not yet been peer-reviewed and will be submitted to an academic journal, Parker said.

The impetus for the study was something Parker and co-author of the University of Oklahoma have been pursuing in their individual research for years: what drives the Trump wing of the GOP, which in many ways builds on the Tea Party movement of a decade ago. The two researchers planned an online survey to be administered in late 2020—regardless of who won the November election—by placing ads on Facebook, identifying MAGA affinity groups. Nearly 1,500 people completed the survey at the end of December.

Then, after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Parker and Blum again surveyed respondents who had supplied their email addresses in the first wave of the study, providing rare insight into MAGA supporters’ beliefs and perspectives before and after that historic event. This time, about 300 people responded.

“The historic nature of the Capitol Riot, and the involvement of MAGA supporters, forced us to re-interview people sooner than we preferred. But we needed to capture how the event may have affected their opinions on the country,” Parker said.

Results of the Panel Study of the MAGA Movement are grouped by categories: demographics of the respondent and their views on democracy and the election, on the Capitol riot, on COVID-19, and on “difference”—namely, race, gender and other characteristics.

Highlights of the findings include:

• Nearly all (98%) of respondents said they believe Trump’s election fraud claims and distrust the actual results of the presidential election;
• About 90% said voting “shouldn’t be easier”
• More than two-thirds said Trump bears no responsibility for the events of Jan. 6 – roughly the same percentage that laid the blame on antifa
• At least 90% said Trump was honest about COVID-19, and that state and local government restrictions related to the pandemic should be loosened
• Almost all said they were concerned that “forces are changing our country for the worse” and “the American way of life is disappearing”

The findings related to “difference”– race, gender and immigration status — provide an additional lens through which to view the MAGA movement, Parker said.

On race, significant majorities of respondents agreed with statements like “Black people should work their way up like other minorities” and “Black people would be as well off as white people if they tried.” Along the same lines, a majority disagreed with statements such as “Slavery/discrimination made working up difficult for Black people” and “Black people have gotten less than they deserve.”

Similar themes emerged in the results regarding women and immigration. A majority of respondents agreed with statements such as “Women interpret innocent remarks as sexist,” “Feminists are seeking more power than men,” and “Immigration is changing our culture for the worse.”

Such statements are a reaction to decades of change, from the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s, to the election of President Obama and an increasingly multiracial society, Parker said: “Like clockwork, whenever racial progress occurs, it’s followed—in short order—by racial retrenchment. Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and the election of Barack Obama, are the most prominent examples.”

Accessing supporters through affinity groups fell within a narrow window of opportunity, Parker said, given Facebook’s eventual crackdown on posts and pages that promoted baseless and dangerous ideas, and many conservatives’ departure to other platforms.

In the second wave of the study – the post-riot portion – researchers also sought to determine what role race might have played in MAGA supporters’ perspectives on events. Parker and Blum devised questions about whether the Jan. 6 riot was justified based on the idea that the election was stolen. If so, was it because of voter fraud in Pennsylvania and Georgia, or because of voter fraud in Philadelphia and Atlanta, two cities predominantly made up of people of color.

Results showed 25 percent more of the respondents believed the riot was justified when the cities were mentioned, compared when only the states were included.

To further highlight supporters’ views on the Capitol riot Parker and Blum then created word clouds, based on the themes that emerged when study participants described the events of Jan. 6. The word clouds below show the pattern in how MAGA supporters characterized events mostly as “small,” “peaceful,” and a “protest” or “rally” (Topic 1) and on the most frequent terms used in explaining the cause of the riot (Topic 2).

Parker and Blum note in the study that these responses represented a puzzling mix, in terms of how the Capitol riot is viewed — in some ways as a peaceful protest of the election, but also as a riot incited by antifa and Black Lives Matter.

In the end, Parker said, the study shows the popularity of more extremist views within the Republican Party, a pattern that dates back to the early 1960s when the party was divided between the more reactionary Sunbelt conservatives, and the more establishment East Coast conservatives. The same pattern is essentially repeating itself. It’s no wonder, he said, that members of the party are fighting over whether to punish Congressional Republicans who voted for impeachment and/or those who promote conspiracy theories.

“One of the two major political parties is essentially captured by these people. They’re not going away any time soon. They were here before Trump, and they’ll be here after Trump,” Parker said.

Results of the study, including charts and information on data collection and survey methodology, are available .

For more information, contact Parker at csparker@uw.edu.

The findings, the researchers say, indicate sentiment against Trump and his policies creates an opportunity for African-American mobilization as the country heads toward the 2018 midterm elections.

“Our findings suggest that political strategies that highlight the racially regressive politics of Trump and reactionary conservatives may serve as a powerful motivating force,” said lead author of California State University, Sacramento.

In a published Feb. 27 in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Towler and , UW professor of political science, used information from the 2016 Black Voter Project Pilot Study — an ongoing project overseen by Towler — to examine African-American political engagement in the post-Obama environment. This study consisted of 511 responses from African-Americans located in six battleground states with significant black constituencies.

The researchers found that:

• Black voters who “strongly disapprove” of Trump are 30 percent more likely to have voted in 2016 than those with no opinion of Trump.
• Black voters who strongly disapprove of Trump were more than 40 percent more likely “to express confidence in their 2018 midterm participation” than those with no opinion of Trump.

The respondents also were asked if they believe President Trump is “destroying the country.” Those who agreed tended to be much more politically active and interested than those with no opinion on Trump, and more likely to participate in “four or more political acts beyond voting, such as calling their representative or donating to a political cause.”

The researchers also found that black voters holding negative opinions of Trump in 2016 voted at rates similar to the that sent Obama to the White House.

“It might be time for progressive politicians and party leaders who depend upon African-American political engagement for success to take note, and potentially shift their mobilization strategy in black communities to emphasize the damaging effects of Trump and the reactionary conservative movement on racial progress,” Towler and Parker write.

Such a scenario, they write, could be enough to spark a national black political counter-movement, returning to the high engagement shown under President Obama. Such a movement could “swing battleground states and once again exert an African-American voice into the local, state, and national political conversation.”

Parker connected the research to the 2018 political landscape: “Exit poll data that examine recent high-profile elections in Virginia and Alabama suggests that Democrats pulled out wins thanks, in large measure, to the black community’s turnout,” he said. But until now, he added, there was little explanation for why blacks turned out in such large numbers.

“In this paper, we demonstrate that the existential threat posed by Trump and his administration not only explained why many blacks mobilized in 2016, but why they’ll mobilize in even greater numbers in 2018.”

Parker added, “The black community, in short, is critical to the resistance.”

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For more information, contact Parker at csparker@uw.edu, or Towler at towler@csus.edu.

But new research by ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý political scientist Christopher Parker argues that the tea party ideology owes more to the paranoid politics associated with the John Birch Society — and even the infamous Ku Klux Klan — than to traditional American conservatism.

Parker is the author, with fellow UW political scientist Matt Barreto, of a new book titled “,” published this spring by Princeton University Press.

At the heart of their book is a nationwide telephone survey overseen by Parker in early 2011 of 1,500 adults — equal numbers of men and women — across 13 geographically diverse states. The results starkly illustrate where tea partyers and true conservatives part ideological ways.

Responses place tea party members far to the right of the mainstream Republican conservatism of Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and even George W. Bush — viewing President Obama as a faux citizen, a Muslim and socialist agitator, bent on America’s demise.

“Tea party conservatives believe in some conservative principles, to be sure, but they are different from more mainstream conservatives in at least one important respect,” Parker said. “True conservatives aren’t paranoid; tea party conservatives are.”

Asked flat-out if they think President Obama is “destroying the country,” only 6 percent of non-tea party conservatives agreed, a number that rose to 36 percent among all conservatives regardless of tea party affiliations. By contrast, 71 percent of self-identified tea party supporters thought this extreme statement true.

“And that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Parker, a UW associate professor of political science. “It’s no secret that tea party conservatives view President Obama with such contempt, but I am the first to document it empirically.”

Other survey results include:

• Three-quarters of tea party conservatives said they think President Obama’s policies are politically socialist while only 40 percent of non-tea party conservatives held that view.

• Twenty-seven percent of tea party conservatives said they think President Obama is a practicing Muslim, while 18 percent of non-tea party conservatives took that view.

• Similarly, 46 percent of non-tea party conservatives allowed that President Obama is a practicing Christian, while only 27 percent of tea party conservatives believed it so.
• Was President Obama born in the United States? A majority — 55 percent — of conservatives allowed that this was true, but of tea party conservatives, only 40 percent agreed.

And perhaps not surprisingly, fully three-quarters — 75 percent — of tea partyers said they wish President Obama’s policies to fail, compared with 32 percent of conservatives.

Parker called the tea party a continuation of what political scientist Richard Hofstadter in the 1960s described as “the paranoid style in American politics,” characterized by exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy.

Parker said, “Consider me a skeptic when tea party supporters call upon a conservative tradition to which they have but a slight claim.”

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For information or interviews, contact Parker at 510-285-7770 or csparker@uw.edu, or Barreto at 206-569-4259 or mbarreto@uw.edu.