That’s the finding of the same expert who, at the request of USA Today, analyzed the same polling data used by the NYT to prove that Trump supporters are racist. – this time, she looked at Democrats’ responses. The Times, of course, didn’t mention in its article that they’d asked her to restrict her original analysis to Republicans. So what’d she find?
According to the poll, backers of Clinton and Sanders, white Democrats, are more likely to disapprove of the Civil-War executive order than supporters of Hispanic Republican Marco Rubio. One in 10 Sanders supporters disapproves of Lincoln’s executive order. Rubio supporters are less likely to disapprove of or have doubts about the landmark civil rights decision than African-Americans themselves.
The same poll finds that Clinton supporters are about 40% more likely than Sanders backers to be fans of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to round up Japanese-Americans and throw them into “internment camps.” Supporters of the two Democrats are both more likely to support the racist policy than Rubio’s backers by a margin of 2 to 1. The poll of 2,000 Americans found that 39% of Clinton backers either support the action, for which the U.S. Congress and President Ronald Reagan apologized in 1988, or are unsure of their position. The United States paid reparations to the interred Japanese-Americans.
The YouGov poll results began to gain national attention on Tuesday when Vavreck reported in the Times that more than 1 in 5 Trump supporters disapproved of Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. YouGov had provided the raw data so Vavreck could perform her analysis. The Times cited the poll’s results as evidence of racist undercurrents and intolerance on the part of Trump and his supporters in the Republican presidential primary, backing them with exit poll results and data from another pollster the Times described as “aligned with the Democratic Party.”
Originally, Vavreck, the Times and YouGov only reported on the racially insensitive views of Republicans, failing to publish or even analyze the responses of potential Democratic voters. Vavreck only performed the Democratic analysis and released it to me on Friday after YouGov refused to release the data on Thursday and I contacted YouGov’s European executives, its in-house polling expert and Vavreck herself.
What USA Today will tell its readers, the NYT will not:
While The New York Times, Time magazine, Nate Silver’s 538 and Ezra Klein’s Voxtreated the poll as credible, the results are transparently ludicrous. The poll found that almost one-third of African-Americans polled on Lincoln’s executive order to end slavery in the treasonous Confederate States of America either opposed freedom for their ancestors or were not sure what they thought.
So the point is not that this poll shows any particular candidate’s supporters to be racist – it’s useless for that, but that the New York Times presented it as a credible poll and manipulated the results, by focusing solely on Republican voters, to “prove” what all good progressives already know: Republicans are racist. Thus the Paper of Record.
