White Papers Policy Institute: The Party That Forgot Its Base: How the GOP has Failed White America (Part 2)

By White Papers Policy Institute, March 18, 2026

This is part two of a three-part series examining the Republican Party’s race-neutral ‘colorblind’ strategy and its effects on its core voters. Part one can be found here.

When one side treats politics as a contest of ideas and the other as a struggle against moral enemies, “neutrality” becomes a one-sided disadvantage.

In a paper by Petsko & Kteily (2023), political dehumanization was measured along two axes: viewing opponents as “immature” versus viewing them as “savage.” Conservatives tended to see liberals as immature, whereas liberals were more likely to view conservatives as savage. Both sides roughly understood how the other perceived them. But here is the imbalance: liberals overestimated how much conservatives dehumanized them, while conservatives underestimated how much liberals dehumanized them. Additionally, the absolute level of dehumanization flowed more strongly from left to right than the reverse.

Another paper, Casey et al. (2023), conducted four studies and found a similar asymmetry in empathy. In both the U.S. and the U.K., liberals were less likely than conservatives to extend empathy toward the suffering of political opponents. They judged opponents’ moral character more harshly and were more inclined to view them as actively harmful. These patterns held regardless of which party was in power, and they were not explained by perceived dominance. …