1 This is a working draft presented at the 2016 American Sociological Association annual meeting in Seattle, Washington. The revised and updated final publication can be found in the 2018 Trumping Democracy in the United States: From Ronald Reagan to Alt-Right (Routledge). The Ideological Roots of the Republican Party Shift to the Right in Election 2016 Alex DiBranco and Chip Berlet Abstract The Republican Presidential primary race for the 2016 election triggered a maelstrom of media coverage concerning the ferocity and bigotry of the rhetoric, especially from Donald Trump. In this study, we examine how ideologies, frames, and narratives exert a powerful pull on the collective behavior of large groups of people. This not only primes these populations for mobilization into specific social movements and social movement organizations, but also makes them receptive, in this case, to political campaign rhetoric. Longstanding right-wing social movements and social movement organizations mobilized the several supportive constituencies lining up behind this virulent rhetoric. In this paper we examine the role of four core ideological tendencies around which a number of these movements are clustered: White Nationalism, Christian Nationalism, Heteropatriarchy, and Neoliberalism. These ideologies overlap and compete in complex ways. Our goal is to detail the roots and branches of these ideological tendencies as one way to clarify how pre-existing social movements mobilize often temporary political and electoral power blocks, despite cleavages and tensions.