Racial Attitudes, Voter Turnout, and the Politics of Evangelicals Across the Racial Divide

Abstract While much scholarship has considered the role of racial attitudes in shaping public opinion, this paper extends this line of research by examining how racial resentment influences voter turnout and further, how this effect differs across religious and racial groups. Building on conflict decision theory and theories of racialized social pressure, the paper develops expectations about the conditional influence of racial attitudes on voter participation, depending on these compounding religious and racial identities. Analysis of the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) reveals that racial resentment is associated with higher voter turnout among White evangelicals, Asian American evangelicals, and Latino evangelicals, while having no impact on White, Latino, and Asian Americans who do not identify as evangelical. In contrast, holding more conservative racial attitudes is associated with a lower, rather than higher, likelihood of voting among both Black evangelicals and Black non-evangelicals. The paper concludes by underscoring the need to examine how multiple social identities can structure the factors that influence political decision-making in American politics.