White Americans' and Black Americans' ratings of Whites relative to Blacks, 1964-2016

The American National Election Studies Time Series Cumulative Data File (1948-2016) contains data for feeling thermometer measures for Whites and for Blacks, collected in face-to-face or telephone interviews, for each U.S. presidential election year from 1964 to 2016.

Feeling thermometers range from 0 to 100, with higher values indicating warmer or more favorable feelings about a group. The ANES Cumulative Data File and some early individual year ANES Time Series files collapse responses of 97 through 100 into a response of 97. This means that a respondent who selected 97 for Whites and 100 for Blacks would have the same "difference" value as a respondent who selected 100 for Whites and 97 for Blacks. Therefore, I placed respondents with a substantive value for the feeling thermometer about Whites and the feeling thermometer about Blacks into one of three categories:

• rated Whites more than 3 units above Blacks
• rated Whites within 3 units of Blacks, and
• rated Blacks more than 3 units above Whites.

Abrajano and Alvarez (2019) reported evidence from ANES Time Series Studies that responses to racial feeling thermometers differed between the non-internet mode and the internet mode, so my reported results do not include results from the internet mode, which do not go back to 1964.

Below is a plot of how Whites Americans (left) and Black Americans (right) fell into each of the three categories, not including the respondents in the cumulative data file who did not report a substantive response to the items, which ranged from 1% to 8% (see the Notes). Documentation for the cumulative data file indicated that in 1964 and 1968 a response was recorded as 50 for a "don't know" response or if the participant indicated that the participant did not know too much about a group.

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The plot below indicates how these thermometer ratings associated with two-party vote choice, among White participants:

The right panel indicates a steep drop in two-party vote for the Republican presidential candidate among Whites who rated Blacks more than 3 units higher than Whites, which seems to be consistent with evidence of a "Great Awokening" (see, e.g., Yglesias 2019 and Goldberg 2019, and this image linked to in Goldberg 2019).

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The plot below is the plot above, but with columns grouped by year:

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NOTES

1. Percentage non-responses to one or both thermometer items, by year: 3% (1964), 4% (1968), 8% (1972), 5% (1976), 5% (1980), 7% (1984), 5% (1988), 4% (1992), 4% (1996), 8% (2000), 3% (2004), 3% (2008), 1% (2012), 2% (2016).

2. Code for my analyses and black-and-white plots.

3. Feeling thermometer ratings about Chicanos/Hispanics and about Asians are not available in ANES Time Series Cumulative Data File until 1976 and 1992, respectively.

4. A color version of the first plot, for comparison:

5. A color version with a black line divider: