Revisiting “Trump’s African Americans”: racial attitudes and vote choice in the 2024 presidential election

This article revisits and extends the analysis of Sommer and Franco [Sommer, Udi, and Idan Franco. 2024. “Trump’s African Americans? Racial Resentment and Black Support for Trump in the 2020 Elections.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 12 (4): 921–947. https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2023.2265899], who argued that “racially resentful” African Americans were more likely to support Donald Trump in 2020. Using data from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study (CES) to examine vote choice in the 2024 presidential election, this study demonstrates that the measure Sommer and Franco employed captures a different construct – African American Resentment Toward Whites (AARTW) – first developed by Davis and Wilson [Davis, Darren W., and David C. Wilson. 2022. Racial Resentment in the Political Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.] to reflect frustration with White denial of racism and perceived inaction on racial inequality. In models of 2024 vote choice, both AARTW and the traditional racial resentment measure affected vote choice, but in opposite directions. At the same time, party identification and perceptions of the economy had stronger effects on vote choice than either measure. These findings build upon the broader claim of Sommer and Franco that racial attitudes matter when explaining African American vote choice, while clarifying that items measuring AARTW and traditional racial resentment should not be combined because they are distinct concepts with different relationships to Trump support.