For most of the twentieth century, racial resentment wasn’t a partisan matter. Both parties counted racial conservatives—defenders of traditional racial hierarchies—among their rank and file. Indeed, many conservative southern whites remained Democrats through the 1990s. But Republican politicians spent four decades recruiting southern, conservative, and evangelical whites into a single tent, establishing the GOP as the undisputed home for white Christians who feared cultural and demographic change. According to the political scientist Alan Abramowitz, the proportion of white Republicans who
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