Late Wednesday, Thomas Edsall posted his latest column, “The Great White Hope,” in which he explores whether the Republican party would be better off denouncing their decades-old “Southern strategy” when vying for voter turnout in both the 2014 midterm and 2016 presidential elections. For the article, Edsall asked PRRI CEO Robert P. Jones how much comfort conservative Republicans might take from PRRI’s data on Americans’ attitudes about race. Not much, was Jones’s reply.

“’There are still considerable anxieties among whites about the changing makeup of the country,’ he wrote, but ‘any Republican strategy that relies on tapping these anxieties has a limited success horizon, primarily because the white voters who hold these anxieties the strongest are older. In a midterm election, where the electorate is strongly influenced by older white voters, this could be a plausible strategy, but it carries significant risks for the Republican broader party brand in 2016.’”

To read Edsall’s column in its entirety, click here.