Donald Trump’s Monday evening call to ban all Muslims from entering the United States — including US citizens — was condemned by virtually everybody in American public life, right and left.
Donald Trump has a base: 76% of Republicans think Islam is un-American
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Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
But Trump thrives on elites calling him out for being a bigot. It’s the Republican primary electorate Trump is playing to — and he’s got a decent chance of succeeding, as the chart below shows.
The American Values Survey, an annual poll from the Public Religion Research Institute released in November, asked Americans whether “the values of Islam are at odds with American values and way of life.” Below are the results, broken down by Republicans, Democrats, and the entire American population (including Ds, Rs, and independents):
A full 76 percent of Republicans, currently Donald Trump’s target audience, see Islam’s values — and thus, presumably, the Muslims who adhere to them — as incompatible with the American way of life.
And a majority of the general public agrees with them! Fifty-six percent of all Americans in the survey agreed Islamic values are incompatible with American values — as a did substantial minority of Democrats (43 percent). Hostility toward Muslims and Islam is fairly popular, as far as bigotry goes.
This finding is hardly unique. After Ben Carson said that Muslims shouldn’t be president in September, a YouGov poll found that 57 percent of Americans agreed with him. Thirty percent of Republican voters in Iowa, a critical primary state, told Public Policy Polling that Islam should be illegal.
This data explains why Trump is hardly the only Republican in the race pandering to anti-Muslim sentiment: it’s disturbingly popular. And it’s starting to manifest in actual, real-life bigotry.
One final ironic twist: The American Values Survey also asked Americans which groups there was “a lot of discrimination against” in the United States. The group that more Americans singled out than any other as a target for discrimination?
Muslims.
