POLL: Trump Supporters More Likely to View Black People as ‘Violent’ and ‘Lazy’

By Kenrya Rankin Jul 01, 2016

A new poll from Reuters/Ipsos says that people who support Donald Trump, the Republican party’s presumptive nominee for president, are more likely than other Americans to describe Black people as “criminal,” “violent,” “less intelligent,” “rude” and lazy” as compared to Whites.

Researchers surveyed 16,000 Americans from March and June to determine their views on African Americans, then sorted their responses depending on whether they were supportive of Trump, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, or former Republican candidates Ted Cruz and John Kasich. (A June 28 Reuters article on the results says that respondents were also asked about their support for Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, but those results were not relayed in the article.)

Per Reuters, “nearly half” of Trump supporters said Black people are more “violent” than their White counterparts—a view that was shared by nearly one-third of Clinton’s backers. When asked where they want to live, 36 percent of Trump’s supporters said, “I prefer to live in a community with people who come from diverse cultures.” Seventy percent of Clinton’s supporters said the same, along with 46 and 55 percent of Cruz and Kasich’s backers, respectively.

And when it comes to affirmative action—which the Supreme Court just upheld as a valid, legal policy—31 percent of Trump backers strongly agreed with the statement: “social policies, such as affirmative action, discriminate unfairly against White people.” Twenty-one percent of Cruz supporters, 17 percent of Kasich backers and 16 percent of people who say they are with Clinton felt the same way.

Click here for a chart that compares the topline responses.