The Party That Forgot Its Base: How the GOP has Failed White America (Part 2)

This is part two of a three-part series examining the Republican Party’s race-neutral ‘colorblind’ strategy and its effects on its core voters. Part one can be found here.

In a paper by Petsko & Kteily (2023), political dehumanization was measured along two axes: viewing opponents as “immature” versus viewing them as “savage.” Conservatives tended to see liberals as immature, whereas liberals were more likely to view conservatives as savage. Both sides roughly understood how the other perceived them. But here is the imbalance: liberals overestimated how much conservatives dehumanized them, while conservatives underestimated how much liberals dehumanized them. Additionally, the absolute level of dehumanization flowed more strongly from left to right than the reverse.