Professor McDaniel: Policies to Aid Poor Hampered by Bias Across Parties

SALON -- Jason McDaniel, assistant professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, and Sean McElwee, policy analyst at Demos Action, publish results of a new study on racism and bias against America’s poor. “Using data from the 2016 American National Election Study, we find evidence that racism provides a key explanation for America’s relative lack of support for economic redistribution and that income does not strongly predict racial attitudes. Rather, racism frequently divides both working class and college educated whites against a robust safety net,” McDaniel and McElwee write. “Based on our analysis of the ways that continuing racial biases undermine support for the broader liberal Democratic project, we argue that continued progress is not possible without attention to the deep structural racial biases in American society.”