Follow the Racist ? The Consequences of Trump ’ s Expressions of Prejudice for Mass Rhetoric

Much of the literature on public opinion and political communication posits that elites are influential in how people think and talk about politics. Ideally, elite behavior provides a normatively desirable model for citizens to follow. But what happens when a prominent political elite violates norms of political and social discourse? The 2016 presidential campaign provided an example of such a dynamic, featuring a presidential candidate who made frequent comments that were explicitly prejudiced. What consequence did Trump’s campaign have on the nature of mass rhetoric regarding issues of race? To answer this question, I use data from experiments fielded on the 2016 and 2017 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies. These experiments show evidence of a so-called “Trump Effect. ” That is, exposure to Trump’s prejudiced statements made people more more likely to write offensive things, not only about the groups targeted by Trump, but sometimes about other identity groups as well. By contrast, in the second experiment, exposure to a quotation from Clinton lamenting the prejudice of Trump’s supporters made people less likely to say offensive things about the target group. Much of the literature on public opinion and political communication posits that elites are influential in affecting how people think about politics (Zaller, 1992). For the most part, this research has examined how elite cues or frames can affect discrete political choices, such as the positions that citizens take on issues or the candidates voters choose in elections. However, some scholars have also examined the extent to which elite rhetoric influences how people talk about politics. For example, individuals who are exposed to uncivil elite discourse are more likely to be uncivil in their own discussions about politics (Gervais, 2015, 2014). But how far does the influence of elite rhetoric extend? In this paper, I examine whether exposure to prejudiced rhetoric from a prominent politician – Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump – affects what respondents say about identity groups. During the 2016 campaign, Costello (2016) posited the existence of a “Trump Effect” – the notion that Trump’s offensive rhetoric on the campaign trail was affecting the way that the mass public was talking about racial and ethnic minorities. Their survey found that “Teachers report that students have been ‘emboldened’ to use slurs, engage in name-calling and make inflammatory statements toward each other” (p. 10). On one hand, the notion that politicians could have such an effect on expressions of prejudice by members of the public is a remarkable one. After all, the research on racial rhetoric in American politics has long held that a “norm of racial equality” leads Americans to reject elite rhetoric that is explicitly racist (Mendelberg, 2001). If the public rejects appeals that are based on explicit racism, then one would also expect that public rhetoric would be unmoved by racist statements made by a prominent politician. On the other hand, recent scholarship suggests that the norm of racial equality has weakened in recent years and that white Americans no longer reject explicit racism as much as they once did (Valentino, Neuner, and Vandenbroek, 2018). If this is true, then we might expect that the rhetoric of some white Americans could also be influenced by how politicians talk about racial and ethnic minorities.