PPP: In GOP, “Islamophobia” Concentrated In Trump Supporters

With the Iowa caucuses less than two months away, Donald Trump still holds a big lead in the race for the GOP presidential nomination – either despite his penchant for controversy, or because of it.

In the latest Public Policy Polling survey, conducted this week in New Hampshire, Trump is holding steady with 27 percent of GOP voters backing him – more than twice the support of Ted Cruz, who’s in second place with 13 percent. (Marco Rubio is in third with 11 percent; Chris Christie, barely a blip on the radar not long ago, has moved up into fourth place with 10 percent.)

Get the full numbers from PPP’s New Hampshire survey here.

PPP’s New Hampshire numbers mirror trends that pollsters are finding nationwide: Cruz is gaining ground, but he still has a long way to go to knock Trump out of the lead. (Ben Carson, who had been creeping up on Trump, has dropped back. PPP director Tom Jensen says that may be because recent events like the Paris attacks have made voters more concerned about foreign policy, where Carson lacks experience.)

Is Trump a lock? Absolutely not, says Jensen. Many primary voters don’t make up their minds until a couple weeks before they vote, so nothing is a sure thing yet. At this same point four years ago, Newt Gingrich appeared to be pulling away in the race for the GOP nomination, but he lost his lead before the primaries even began. Nor was Gingrich the only candidate ever to see his supporters vanish at the last second. Jensen says Trump’s candidacy bears some resemblance to Howard Dean’s in 2004: Dean too was an insurgent candidate who fired up the base, worried party insiders, and led the polls consistently in the months leading up to the Iowa caucus – but his support vanished quickly (even before his infamous “Dean scream” gaffe) as Democrats turned to the ostensibly more ‘electable’ John Kerry when it actually came time to vote.

Still, with Trump it could turn out differently. Jensen says his support is particularly resilient because of the “almost cultlike” devotion he inspires from his followers, who “basically buy into everything he says.” What that means is that Trump supporters are far more likely to agree with his most incendiary, even “Islamophobic” ideas. Only 30 percent of Republicans believe Trump’s claim that “thousands of Arabs in New Jersey” were publicly celebrating after the 9/11 attacks – but 58 percent of Trump supporters say they believe it. 53 percent of Trump supporters favor creating a “national database of Muslims,” and 49 percent say they want to shut down all U.S. mosques – but only 25-30 percent of Republicans as a whole support those ideas, with every other candidate’s supporters generally opposed. Trump supporters even say they favor special laws for Muslims: 66 percent are opposed to a general ban on assault weapons, but 56 percent would favor a law prohibiting Muslims from owning them.

Jensen spoke Thursday with WCHL’s Aaron Keck.

 

One thing that Republicans are more likely to favor – not just Trump supporters – is a blanket ban on Islam as a whole: previous surveys (including in North Carolina) have suggested anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of GOP voters would favor “banning Islam” in the U.S. In response to those surveys, conservative commentator Ann Coulter (half-facetiously) challenged PPP to ask Democrats whether they’d favor “banning Christianity.” Jensen obliged in the New Hampshire poll – and found, unsurprisingly, that 90 percent of Democrats would oppose such a thing. (About five percent of Democrats did say they supported “banning Christianity” – but Jensen says pollsters find about the same percentage of Americans say they believe the world is secretly governed by “lizard people.”)

Jensen says there is a somewhat larger contingent of Democrats who favor a blanket ban on Islam – but support for such a measure is still much higher among Republicans.