Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism

THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN FEATURED major-party candidateswho both explicitly put issues of race and gender at the forefront of the discourse. Notably, 2016 also witnessed the largest gap between the presidential vote preferences of college-educated and non-collegeeducated whites since 1980. While Donald Trump enjoyed just a fourpoint margin over Hillary Clinton among whites with a college degree (10 points less than Mitt Romney’s margin over Barack Obama among that group in 2012), his advantage among non-college-educated

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