"There is little if any support in voting data for the notion that ‘economic anxiety’ drove people to vote for Trump. As documented in Identity Crisis, an important new book analyzing the 2016 election, what distinguished Trump voters wasn’t financial hardship but ‘attitudes related to race and ethnicity.’"—Paul Krugman, New York Times
"I think it is, without doubt, the most important, most illuminating book written on the 2016 election. And in doing that I think it’s one of the most important books for understanding American politics today. . . . There are so many findings in the book that if you really absorb them they can rock your understanding of politics."—Ezra Klein, Vox
"A vital new work on the political culture of the Trump era."—Carlos Lozada, Washington Post
"One of the most influential books on the 2016 election."—Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times
"The importance of the backlash around race and immigration inside the GOP is a central theme of a timely, careful and data-rich new book on the 2016 election by political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck. In Identity Crisis, they argue that Trump understood what was happening inside the party in a way his rivals did not."—E.J. Dionne, Washington Post
"Other academics may also be skeptical of Cyberwar. A forthcoming book on the 2016 campaign, Identity Crisis, by the political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, argues that Russian interference was not a major factor in the Presidential election, and that the hacked e-mails ‘did not clearly affect’ perceptions of Clinton. Instead, they write, Trump’s exploitation of divisive race, gender, religious, and ethnicity issues accounted for his win."—Jane Mayer, New Yorker
"Under their microscope, the white ‘economic anxiety’ excuse for voting Trump morphs into something completely different, identified by the authors as ‘racialized economics,’ which they define as ‘the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead while your group is left behind.’"—Charles Jaco, St. Louis American
"With the luxury of hindsight and analytical acumen, political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck have produced an exceptionally well-researched and insightful postmortem that soberly isolates the election’s core significance: a polarizing debate over American identity spurred by immigration and demographic change. The result, Identity Crisis, is a definitive, statistically informed account of the 2016 presidential election."—Justin Gest, American Prospect
"This book is going to remain the definitive explanation of what motivated and differentiated voters from one another in both primary campaigns and the general election in 2016."—Ian Reifowitz, Daily Kos
"[The authors] counter some popular assumptions about the surprising outcome of the 2016 presidential election, which pitted two ‘historically unpopular presidential candidates’ against each other. . . . The authors cite three main reasons for Trump's victory: ‘fractured ranks’ within the Republican Party that impeded party leaders from coalescing behind any candidate; outsized media coverage of Trump that made him appear to be the front-runner even when coverage focused on scandals; and ‘racialized economics,’ in which racial attitudes ‘shaped the way voters understood economic outcomes.’ . . . A cogent, well-documented analysis of the 2016 election."—Kirkus
"Identity Crisis, a 2018 book by leading political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, is the best guide to understanding why these demographic divisions are so stark and getting starker. The book is framed as a postmortem of the 2016 presidential election, but is in fact a sweeping account of the big picture in American politics over the past several decades."—Zack Beauchamp, Vox
"The definitive account of the 2016 election."—Alex Shephard, New Republic
"The most thorough social science analysis of the 2016 election."—Ilya Somin, Reason
"This is the best, most dispassionate analysis of 2016 that I have seen."—George Hawley, Law & Liberty
"Identity Crisis offers a strong and somewhat counter-intuitive thesis about the 2016 presidential election."—Survival
"After having spent years attempting to understand political and security dynamics in other countries beset by division, I, like many other Americans, am struggling to understand what’s happening in my own country. Identity Crisis provides a data-driven key for decoding the 2016 election, whose outcome was influenced more heavily than recent ones by racial and ethnic identity. The implications, although informative, are not comforting."—Stephen Tankel, War on the Rocks
“Lucid, engaging, and ruthlessly rational, Identity Crisis is the guide we needed to what really happened in 2016, an election we still haven’t come to terms with. After all the speculation and partisan blame, the authors’ search for the real answers isn’t just interesting—it’s necessary. Identity Crisis is about more than an election: it’s about the state of America at a moment of political breakdown.”—Molly Ball, national political correspondent, Time
“Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck offer context and a sense of proportion at a time of rapid change, misinformation, and uncertainty, helping us to untangle familiar patterns from what is genuinely new. Thoughtful, patient, and timely, Identity Crisis is an antidote to the hot takes of our political era.”—John F. Dickerson, author of Whistlestop and On Her Trail
“Donald Trump’s victory stunned most political observers and set off a debate that’s still raging about its causes and meaning. John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck supply a vital missing element: the data undergirding their penetrating and accessible analysis of the most shocking presidential outcome in modern history. Identity Crisis is the Rosetta stone for understanding what really happened in the 2016 election.”—Joshua Green, author of Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
“Identity Crisis presents the most thorough, nuanced, and astute analysis of the 2016 presidential election I have seen. It makes a powerful case that identity politics rather than economic distress was the driving force behind Trump’s victory, and in doing so offers deep insight into the current state of American politics. A must-read for anyone trying to understand how we got to this singular moment.”—Gary C. Jacobson, coauthor of The Logic of American Politics
“Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck provide the most thorough, in-depth, and exhaustive explanation for the 2016 presidential election yet written. Carefully examining a panoply of potential factors influencing both the primaries and the general election, they sort the wheat from the chaff, examining both the myths and reality of Donald Trump’s ultimate rise.”—Diana C. Mutz, author of In-Your-Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media
