We wish to thank David Peterson and Mark Ramirez for their thorough and insightful review of our book. In this response, we would like to address two general issues that they raise in their review.

First, Peterson and Ramirez suggest that our conceptualization of “mainstreaming” is somewhat “fuzzy,” especially as it relates to racism among the mass public. As we discuss in chapter 1 of our book, we use the term “mainstreaming” (or “political mainstreaming”) to refer to the tendency of overtly racist candidates, white nationalist organizations, and white racial extremist voters to increase their participation in electoral politics over the last decade. We provide copious evidence for all three developments in our book. As they note in their review, Peterson and Ramirez see a potential contradiction between our claim of mass-level mainstreaming of racism in American politics and the empirical fact that outgroup hostility has actually decreased during the Trump era. Specifically, they note, “Trump did not make racism more popular and there is not a majority of the public espousing racially conservative or extreme attitudes. One could argue, then, that outgroup hostility is not mainstream in the mass public.” We generally agree with this statement. Further, we do not argue that the mass level of mainstreaming of racism has occurred through a conversion of racial moderates into racial extremists. Rather, it has been primarily characterized by changes in the political behavior of existing racial extremists. Specifically, we show that at the mass level the mainstreaming of racism has largely occurred through two mechanisms: (1) a shift in the political participation of politically active white nationalists from unconventional to conventional electoral politics and (2) the electoral mobilization of previously inactive (i.e., politically alienated) white racial extremists (regardless of whether they were active in white nationalist organizations). Our argument is that the mainstreaming of racism in American politics has occurred less through changes in attitudes than through the mobilization of racial extremists to become more active in mainstream politics.

Second, Peterson and Ramirez question whether our measure of outgroup hostility is the best way to measure racial attitudes in the Trump era. Our book emphasizes that mainstreaming today is reflective of three key factors: (1) the changing nature of racism, (2) the cyclical nature of race politics, and (3) the relationship of structure to agency. On the first point, we argue that racism today is more than a Black–white issue and involves white hostility toward a diverse set of outgroups, including especially the Latinx and Muslim populations, as well as African Americans. We emphasize that the set of relevant racial outgroups is not fixed and evolves over time as race-baiting political candidates adapt to new opportunities to create racialized narratives that resonate with their racial extremist base. Therefore, we agree that Asian Americans have likely become a target of outgroup hostility due to Trump’s framing of China as being responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Peterson and Ramirez note, our approach contrasts with the many studies that have focused most of their attention on attitudes toward a more limited set of racial groups. Regardless of whether one measures outgroup hostility as an index (our preference) or as separate variables, our primary argument, which is supported by many analyses, is that attitudes toward all three racial outgroups (Blacks, Latinx immigrants, and Muslims) have played an important role in recent election outcomes during the Trump era. Because all of these racial attitudes are correlated, studies that do not account for the full range of racial outgroups in their analyses risk overstating the importance of the racial attitudes that they do choose to include. Nevertheless, we fully agree that there is more work to be done to disentangle the various effects of attitudes toward the full range of racial (and even cultural) outgroups on American politics in the current era.