Barack Obama is a US-born Christian, not a foreign-born Muslim. But even today, a majority of Republican voters say they believe otherwise.
That’s the result of the latest national survey from Public Policy Polling. According to the poll, 54 percent of GOP voters still think President Obama is a Muslim, and only 29 percent are willing to say Obama was born in the U.S.
(To put that into perspective, 40 percent of GOP voters say Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz was born in the United States. Cruz was definitely born in Canada, by all accounts including his own.)
Donald Trump supporters are even more likely to hold those views than GOP voters as a whole. 66 percent of Trump voters say President Obama is a Muslim; 61 percent say they don’t think he was born in the U.S. (PPP director Tom Jensen says these responses may come from voters treating these factual questions as if they were opinion questions: “I know he was born in Hawaii, but I feel like he’s not really an American.”)
Get the full results from the survey here.
But on other points, GOP voters aren’t nearly as conservative as they’re often depicted. The vast majority – 78 percent – support requiring criminal background checks for firearm purchases. And 49 percent support an increase in the federal minimum wage, against a combined 47 percent who either want to keep it level, reduce it or eliminate it.
In the race for the GOP presidential nomination, Donald Trump still leads his competitors by a wide margin with 29 percent of the vote. In second place with 15 percent is the other ‘outsider’ candidate, Ben Carson; Jeb Bush is a distant third with 9 percent, followed by Carly Fiorina at 8 percent. Carson may have an edge as we draw closer to the actual primaries, though: he’s the most popular candidate in the field with a 68 percent popularity rating, and he’s also the most common second choice among GOP voters – so as candidates gradually drop out of the race, Carson could see his vote share rapidly increase.
PPP director Tom Jensen spoke Wednesday with WCHL’s Aaron Keck.
The poll also showed Hillary Clinton maintaining a big lead in the race for the Democratic nomination: she gets 55 percent of the vote, compared to 20 percent for Bernie Sanders. (Clinton also led Sanders by 35 points in PPP’s July national survey.)
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