This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: As Americans prepared to celebrate the nation's 250th birthday on the morning of July 4, sobering images flashed across their phones and TV screens. Hundreds of masked men marched through the streets of Washington carrying flags and chanting "Reclaim America!" It soon became clear from the logos on their identical baseball caps that the marchers were members of Patriot Front, a white nationalist group.
The march ended without incident. Still, it joined the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol—both of which culminated in deadly violence—as recent mass demonstrations with participants who openly embrace white nationalism.
Members of a loosely organized movement that usually operates out of public view, white nationalists hold that shifting demographics pose an existential threat to the white race, which they view as culturally superior and deserving of power over other groups in the U.S. Combined with the spread of white nationalist ideology from obscure corners of the internet into mainstream politics, these events have led many Americans to wonder: How extensive is white nationalism's appeal among the broader public, and who is drawn to this extremist ideology? We are political scientists who study political behavior, identity and social media.
In recently published research in the scientific journal Nature, we offer some answers to these questions using national surveys we conducted with nearly 8,000 non-Hispanic white Americans from 2021 to 2025. We expected many Americans would be unfamiliar with the term "white nationalism," so we defined it for survey respondents with a brief statement covering the movement's major tenets: the purported need to maintain a white majority in the U.S., claims about the superiority of white culture and calls for white people to hold more political and economic power than other groups. We measured endorsement of the movement's ideology, not participation in the movement itself or approval of its tactics.
We randomly varied whether respondents saw the description before or after we asked whether they supported the white nationalist movement. Overall, nearly 5% of white adults—about 1 in 20—said they did. Those asked the question before seeing the description were less likely to express support at first, but their reported support rose after they read it.
Along with several tests for possible response bias, this suggests that 5% is a reasonable lower-bound estimate of the true level of support. Whether 1 in 20 white adults is a high or low number is a matter of interpretation. For context, it's roughly the same as the share of American adults who identify as vegetarian or vegan.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
