The South’s Voting Shift

As an opportunity to extend my Princeton education, allow me to ask a few questions regarding the article on Professor Kuziemko’s analysis of voter shifts (Life of the Mind, Dec. 7). At several places in the article, we find the use of “racially conservative” or “conservative racial” attitudes. Does this mean that Professor Kuziemko’s research included discernment of conservative voter attitudes within the large data set, in addition to racial attitudes, thereby identifying a subset for conservative racists? Was the conjoining of conservative and racial not a term-of-art in her field, but simply a journalistic license? Does failure to subscribe to income redistribution, for example, mean that you are automatically a bigot, especially in the South? It is instructive, especially in these less than halcyon times, to understand the origins and intents of such conjunctions in evaluating reports on scholarly work.