White Americans who hold racially resentful attitudes are particularly prone to believing claims of election fraud, especially when those allegations target predominantly Black communities. The authors argue that such claims give people who feel threatened by Black political power a way to reject election results they dislike while still professing support for democracy. The findings were published in Political Behavior.
To understand this reaction, social scientists often examine racial resentment. In political research, this concept does not simply refer to overt hatred; instead, it describes a subtle belief system that downplays systemic barriers faced by Black Americans and views minority political or economic gains as unearned. According to the social theories the authors draw on, when members of an advantaged group feel their social standing is slipping, they often look for ways to protect their position.
Following landmark political shifts, scholars began documenting how these racial attitudes influence trust in the voting process. For instance, a 2016 study showed that racial resentment was linked to suspicions of widespread election misconduct following the historic election of Barack Obama. Later work deepened this connection: a 2021 study found that racially resentful White Americans tend to become less satisfied with democracy when their preferred candidate loses an election.
Fraud allegations may also serve a particular purpose for dissatisfied voters. In a 2021 survey experiment, researchers found that exposure to unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud lowered people’s confidence in the integrity of elections without reducing their support for democracy itself. These findings raised a question the new study set out to answer: whether fraud accusations carry a racial charge that makes them especially persuasive to resentful White voters.
To test this dynamic, a research team led by Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice and Ian Shapiro of Tennessee State University conducted three distinct investigations. The authors sought to understand how racial attitudes interact with claims of election malfeasance.
“The motivation for this study was an urge to understand whether and how racial considerations shaped people’s trust in the 2020 general election,” Shapiro told PsyPost. “I suspected that fraud narratives, with their focus on crime, provided a vehicle for some White Americans to perceive specific elections as corrupt while maintaining trust in a system that had traditionally benefited them.”
The authors first examined whether real-world public discussions of election fraud actually focused on Black communities. They analyzed approximately 2.7 million public posts published on Twitter in 2020 containing the phrase “voter fraud.” From that collection, the researchers isolated about 95,000 posts that mentioned American cities with at least 100,000 residents, comparing those mentions against local demographic data and election tallies.
The social media data showed that cities with larger Black populations appeared far more often in voter fraud conversations, a pattern driven by the period after the election; before Election Day, none of the city characteristics the researchers examined predicted how often a city was mentioned.
The 10 cities mentioned most often relative to their size, a list that included Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, had an average Black population share of about 36 percent, compared with about 16 percent for the large cities in the analysis and under 7 percent for U.S. municipalities overall. In statistical models, a city’s Black population share was the only reliable predictor of these mentions; how strongly a city voted for Joe Biden was not related to how often it came up.
“I think what surprised me most was how clearly racial composition mattered in predicting which places became targets of social media fraud narratives,” Shapiro said. “Partisanship and racial politics are closely linked, but the only predictor of how frequently a city was mentioned on social media was the Black share of the population. Not even Biden’s vote share was associated with fraud narratives, other things equal.”
“Prior to election night, narratives about fraud were all over the place. They were prevalent but lacked shape,” Shapiro explained. “On election night in 2020 and in the weeks after, attention narrowed to specific places that became focal points for fraud accusations. Those places were not random.”
Next, the researchers evaluated how these public narratives corresponded to shifts in individual attitudes over time. They examined data from roughly 4,300 White participants in the 2020 Cooperative Election Study who answered questions about election confidence both before and after Election Day. The authors tracked changes in confidence while controlling for conservative ideology, support for Donald Trump, age, gender, education, income, and Fox News viewership.
Confidence in the election dropped sharply among White Trump supporters after Election Day, as is typical for voters whose candidate loses. But even after accounting for this pattern, along with ideology and the other factors, higher racial resentment was associated with an additional decline in confidence. This link held among Trump supporters, whereas resentment was not related to changes in election confidence among White supporters of Biden.
“Trump voters generally trusted the election less after it looked like he had lost. That’s normal,” Shapiro observed. “But confidence fell off a cliff among Trump supporters who scored higher in racial resentment, following the election and the accompanying focus on Black cities.”
To test whether racial cues directly cause people to believe fraud claims, the researchers conducted an online survey experiment in July 2024 with 1,500 White American adults. Participants read a mock news report describing either an apolitical story about a local restaurant, allegations of voter fraud in a fictional suburban city portrayed as largely White, or identical allegations in an “inner-city” described as predominantly Black. The stories included matching photographs of either White or Black election workers, voters, and local election administrators. After completing the questions, participants were debriefed and informed that the city was fictional and that election fraud is rare.
Across the entire sample, reading about fraud increased suspicion compared to reading about the restaurant, but participants overall did not view the Black city as more fraudulent than the White city. Important differences emerged, however, when examining specific subgroups. White Republicans who read about the predominantly Black city scored an average of 0.65 on a scale measuring belief in fraud, compared with 0.58 for Republicans who read about the White city, a gap of 0.07 points, or about 12 percent. This partisan comparison was not part of the authors’ preregistered analysis plan.
Personal levels of racial resentment also shaped how participants responded. Participants with higher resentment showed elevated suspicion of fraud even when assigned to read about the restaurant, and the fraud stories moved their beliefs considerably more than those of less resentful participants. Resentful participants also tended to find accusations more believable when they targeted the Black city, though this pattern was statistically reliable for only one of the resentment measures, and the authors describe the evidence as somewhat mixed. Fraud beliefs lined up more closely with resentment toward Black Americans than with White consciousness, a measure of attachment to one’s own racial group.
“The survey experiment confirms prior findings that just talking about fraud can substantially affect how much of it people think is happening,” Shapiro noted. “Despite fraud being so rare, words have power. And when those words are tied to tangible places for a political purpose, the effects can be substantial.”
These findings align with a study covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that White Americans who felt their racial group faced widespread mistreatment were consistently more skeptical of election fairness from 2012 to 2020. That earlier research measured perceived discrimination against White Americans rather than resentment toward Black Americans. It also found that strong White identity without a sense of grievance went along with greater faith in elections, which is broadly consistent with the new study’s finding that White consciousness tracked fraud beliefs less closely than resentment.
The results also support research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which indicated that higher levels of racial resentment are tied to broader anti-democratic views among White Americans. Morris and Shapiro argue that skepticism about ballot integrity often intersects with underlying anxieties regarding multiracial governance.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The social media analysis relied on public posts from Twitter, which may not capture the complete range of political discussion experienced by ordinary citizens offline. In addition, the researchers could not distinguish between posts promoting fraud claims and those seeking to debunk them, and some messages could have been amplified by automated accounts or foreign entities rather than regular voters.
Shapiro also emphasized that the investigation centered on how narratives are received rather than how political leaders strategize behind closed doors. “The data we use can’t really tell us about the motivations behind elite-driven narratives,” he told PsyPost. “The paper didn’t directly show people Trump’s social media posts or anything like that.”
“However, it’s not a stretch to suspect that the narratives we see spreading on social media took some structure and encouragement from elites,” Shapiro added. “A lot of agenda setting and attitude formation happens from the top down. This study is more about where and among whom these racial narratives find, excuse me for this, fertile ground.”
Shapiro is now examining how these rhetoric-driven policies affect the electorate. “I’m looking into how restrictive laws passed in response to these narratives turn people off from voting,” he explained. “I’m interested in what psychological mechanisms drive that process for different people.”
Reflecting on the democratic stakes, Shapiro stressed the broader danger these narratives pose to public trust. “This study is important because we’re in an era when people are cynical about all sorts of institutions, including elections,” he remarked. “But things like losers’ consent—accepting election results even when your side loses—and the belief that elections are a viable way to hold leaders accountable are at the heart of democratic functioning. Politically convenient narratives about crime and race threaten these pillars of democratic life.”
The study, “On Fertile Ground: How Racial Resentment Primes White Americans To Believe Fraud Accusations,” was authored by Kevin T. Morris and Ian Shapiro.