White identity, Donald Trump, and the mobilization of extremism

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to examine the relationship between extremist mobilization and elite cues. Specifically, I explore how political elites can mobilize fringe extremists by looking at a specific example where Trump's 2016 candidacy mobilized members of the White extremist alt-right by appealing to their sense of White in-group identification. It will first be shown how the alt-right was responsive to Trump's rhetoric by performing interrupted time series analyses on blog texts from the prominent extremist Daily Stormer. Then, I will incorporate results from a survey experiment showing how White identity motivates those high in alt-right sentiment to support candidates who use racialized and White identity-related rhetoric. Finally, I connect these observations using data from the 2016 ANES pilot to show how White identity uniquely motivated primary-era support for Trump, showing how Trump was distinct in his appeal to those high in White identity. Across these last three analyses, I also show how out-group animus in the form of racial resentment consistently fails to predict the unique support that Trump received from the alt-right. Overall, this paper shows how White identity can result in White extremist support for a mainstream political candidate.