Parties, Race, and Political Violence: Evaluating Whether Attitudes toward the January 6 Insurrection Vary Across Racial Groups

Abstract The insurrection and its aftermath remain salient to contemporary American Politics. Existing scholarship has shown the insurrection was fueled by an effort to return Donald Trump to power while also protesting the decline of the non-Hispanic white population. Scholars also discuss the impact of continuous division across partisan and ideological lines. We are interested in exploring if these divisions are visible across attitudes of non-Hispanic white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American/Pacific Islander respondents in a nationally representative survey. We explore the following research question. Does the impact of partisanship, ideology, and attitudes toward Trump’s responsibility affect the attitudes of respondents from various racial and ethnic groups? We use the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) to complete our analyses. We contribute to the existing literature by examining whether partisanship, ideology, and attitudes toward Trump lead to potential differences across race and ethnicity. We find that respondents across all racial and ethnic groups share similar evaluations of the insurrection, the president’s role, and the rioters, particularly when they hold identical partisan and ideological views and identify the president as the cause of the insurrection.