The Slatest

New Poll Finds That Hillary Supporters Are Pretty Racist Too

Hillary Clinton greets supporters during a primary night event on June 7 in Brooklyn.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll paints a particularly depressing picture of the U.S. electorate’s opinions on race. The main takeaways from the survey, which was released late Tuesday: A significant slice of Americans expressed racist views against blacks, and those who identify as Donald Trump supporters are more likely to fall into that group, though Hillary Clinton supporters are definitely there too.

Pollsters interviewed 16,000 Americans and asked them to grade whites and blacks on a series of personal traits, ranging from their intelligence to lawfulness. “In nearly every case,” the outlet notes, “Trump supporters were more likely to rate whites higher than blacks when their responses were compared with responses from Clinton supporters.” To wit:

  • Roughly one-third of Trump supporters described blacks as less “intelligent” than whites, compared with about one-fifth of Clinton supporters who did the same. Among all respondents, 22.5 percent suggested whites were smarter than blacks.
  • 40 percent of Trump supporters described blacks as more “lazy” than whites, compared with one-quarter of Clinton supporters who did the same. Among all respondents, 26.8 percent suggested whites were harder working than blacks.
  • 44 percent of Trump supporters described blacks as more “rude” than whites, compared with 30 percent of Clinton supporters who did the same. Among all respondents, 31.3 percent said whites were more well mannered than blacks.
  • Nearly half of all Trump supporters described blacks as more “violent” than whites, compared with nearly one-third of Clinton supporters who did the same. Among all respondents, 32.8 percent said whites were less violent than blacks.
  • Nearly half of all Trump supporters described blacks as more “criminal” than whites, compared with nearly one-third of Clinton supporters who did the same. Among all respondents, 33.2 percent said whites were more lawful than blacks.

Trump backers on average rated blacks more negatively than whites on all six character traits Reuters provided than did supporters for any of the other candidates listed (Trump, Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich), which shouldn’t come as a shock given the ethno-nationalist worldview the celebrity strongman has built his campaign around. (The trend was consistent even when pollsters filtered the results to include only white respondents to account for the reality that Democrats tend to attract far more nonwhite voters than their Republican counterparts.)

Still, it’s worth taking a long hard look at the non-Trump results, too. Racism—that is, the belief that one race is superior to another, which is exactly the view being expressed in these numbers—is not hard to find among those backing the presumptive GOP nominee. But this survey makes clear that it’s also not all that much harder to find it among the general population, including those who want to see Clinton in the White House: all you have to do is ask.

Read more of Slate’s coverage of the 2016 campaign.