After shrugging off Donald Trump’s steady stream of lies and incendiary remarks about African-Americans, Latinos, women and Muslims for more than a year, the media is now in a full pearl-clutching froth over this “politically incorrect” statement by Hillary Clinton a fundraiser late last week:
You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic?—?you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites…He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
The fury with which Trump and surrogates have responded is evidence that Clinton struck a nerve. Predictably, their retaliation is based on lying. They insist that Clinton’s statement was a smear against all Republicans and conservatives when, in fact, she was specifically referring to the white supremacist alt-right base of Trump’s support.
Of course, as these things always go, the pundits are focused on whether Clinton’s statement was politically damaging while ignoring the fact that what she said is true.
This analysis, which is reflected in the graph at the top of the page, examined the feelings expressed by Trump supporters towards various types of people. The data analysts found that, “The results are pretty clear: compared to supporters of other Republican candidates in the primary, Trump supporters really dislike many groups in America. For these voters, Trump’s blend of casual racism and muscular nativism is the core of his appeal.”
Even after controlling for race, party identification, ideology, family income, education and age, Trump supporters are more likely to have cold feelings toward many groups. As the chart above shows, Trump supporters are more likely than supporters of other Republican candidates to have negative feelings towards feminists, Muslims, Latinos, Gays and Lesbians, and Transgender people. These findings also hold when compared to supporters of Hillary Clinton. In contrast, Trump supporters have far warmer feelings towards whites than supporters of other candidates.
One possible explanation for the results presented above is that attitudes about race and racial identity are stronger motivations for Trump supporters compared to supporters of other candidates. Here, we explore how white racial identity, or ethnocentrism, interacts with negative feelings about people of color. The results presented in the graph below demonstrate that as racial identity becomes increasingly important for a white Trump supporter, they express significantly more negative feelings towards both Muslims and Latinos. However, racial identity does not play the same role for supporters of other Republican candidates. Although feelings towards both groups become more negative as white racial identity becomes more important, the effect is not statistically significant. This is strong evidence that white racial identity plays a more important role in how Trump supporters evaluate people of color compared to those who support other candidates.
Other polling backs this up.
Trump voters tend to be racist:
Supporters of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump are more likely to describe African Americans as “criminal,” “unintelligent,” “lazy” and “violent” than voters who backed some Republican rivals in the primaries or who support Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll….
Nearly half of Trump’s supporters described African Americans as more “violent” than whites. The same proportion described African Americans as more “criminal” than whites, while 40 percent described them as more “lazy” than whites…
To be sure, not all Trump supporters expressed negative attitudes about blacks. No more than 50 percent of his supporters rated blacks negatively, relative to whites, on any of the six character traits in the poll. (Emphasis added.)
Many Trump voters disapprove of Muslims:
Voters supporting Donald Trump are more than twice as likely to hold an unfavorable view of American Muslims, according to the results of the latest NBC News/SurveyMonkey national online poll released Friday.
According to the results, two-thirds (67 percent) of those identifying themselves as Trump supporters said they do not hold favorable views of Muslim Americans, compared to just 35 percent in the of all voters who said they feel that way.
Nearly 9-in-10 (87 percent) said they support Trump’s call to institute a temporary ban on Muslims who are not American citizens from entering the United States, while 47 percent of all voters who responded that way.
A Pew Study during the primaries found that Trump supporters disliked undocumented immigrants far more than other Americans:
Among voters favoring Trump, 69 percent called immigrants a drain on society … [And] more than half of Trump supporters — 52 percent — said undocumented immigrants should not be allowed to stay … Eighty-four percent of Trump backers expressed support for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, compared with about 67 percent of Republicans overall.
Another Pew study found that Republicans, presumably including Trump supporters, oppose marriage equality for gays and lesbians by as much as 67 percent:
Seven-in-ten Democrats favor same-sex marriage, as do 61 percent of independents. A smaller share of Republicans favor same-sex marriage (33 percent), although they also have become more supportive since 2001.
