The Ideological Asymmetry of White Identity

White attitudes about race, particularly white racial identity, are becoming increasingly salient in American politics. We use data from the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies to document a clear partisan asymmetry of the ideological distributions with respect to white identity. While Republicans as a group exhibit relatively higher rates of white identity, white identity within the Republican coalition provides little to no differentiation on ideology or policy preferences. By contrast, high white identity among Democrats, while less common overall, is far more predictive of conservative ideology and issue positions. High-white-identifying Democrats stand out from their copartisans in ways that high-white-identifying Republicans do not. This is true of both summary measures like ideological self-placement as well as specific issue positions. The stronger relationship between ideology and white identity on the Democratic side of the aisle suggests important party coalition challenges discussed in the conclusion.