Just before Thanksgiving, former President of the United States Donald Trump had dinner at his home with self-proclaimed white supremacist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes. Declaredamong other outrageous statements, that the United States “should be run by Catholics, not by Jews.” The refusal to condemn Fuentes’ views has only fueled legitimate concerns, at least among much of the Trump base, that such views will spread and spread further. Why have you chosen not to criticize Fuentes and his views? Unless he thinks he may be alienating his core supporters.
Such views are loathsome and dangerous, but there is reason to believe that they are not spreading even if their proponents have spoken out, become less deterrent and more dangerous. This prediction is supported by the survey data we have tracked over the years. Trump may have raised the voices of white supremacists and anti-Semites, as he has done in the past, but the number of people with anti-Semitic and Islamophobic views is growing. There is little evidence, and some evidence, that their numbers are actually declining. A poll of important issues at the University of Maryland yielded some surprising results.
Of course, not everyone “runs” America, but the American president is perhaps the most powerful and visible actor in American democracy. Thus, for several years, we have been asking questions about the proportion of the public who oppose voting for presidential candidates of various religious identities, assuming we agree with their positions on the issue. The latest 2022 iteration of the poll found that the Jewish presidential candidate was the least opposed of all candidates. Catholics and mainline Protestant Christians follow closely.
At 7%, opposition to Jewish presidential candidates is the lowest. Catholic candidates are 9%, mainline Protestants are 10%, Muslims are 26%, and atheists are 34%. It is also noteworthy that opposition to Jewish presidential candidates crosses partisan lines, with the smallest difference in opposition between Republicans and Democrats (2% difference) compared to other candidates. To do. This low opposition to Jewish candidates is made up of 7% Catholics, 6% Mainline Protestants, and 6% Evangelical Christians. Whites and non-whites are equal, 7% each.
Of course, even if the number of violent anti-Semites is low, the strength of the stance is important. For example, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has recorded an increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, with a 34% increase from 2020 to 2021, a 43% increase in harassment, and a 43% increase in anti-Semitic assaults. increased 167%, reaching an all-time high. The number of anti-Semitic cases has increased since the ADL first began tracking cases in his 1979. In parallel, the Council on Islamic Relations of America (CAIR) has also documented an increase in incidents against another group that has been targeted in recent years. It’s Muslim American. The number of civil rights complaints is the highest in his 27 years, including a 9% increase from 2020 and a 28% increase in hate and bigotry incidents. These increases must be met with force regardless of the number of perpetrators.
While it may be easy to conclude that the number of people expressing these beliefs has increased, the intensity of hatred, called vertical expansion, is not associated with an increase in the number of people expressing such opinions. It didn’t connect. —Something called horizontal deployment. Despite Documenting Significant Increase in Reported Anti-Semitic Incidents, ADL Poll Data Shows Fewer Americans Expressing Anti-Semitic Views Since 2007, the number of Americans agreeing with two or more anti-Semitic statements has declined. In 2007, 48% of Americans agreed with at least two of the 11 anti-Semitic statements presented, compared with 40% in 2019, with most Americans anti-Semitic. Respondents agreed with only one Jewish statement or disagreed with it at all. Additionally, the number of people who agreed to six or more statements has consistently declined from 29% in 1964 to 11% in 2019.
Trump’s Backlash Effect: Limiting and Shrinking the Spread of Lateral Hate
Needless to say, low opposition to Jewish presidential candidates seems to have endured in the Trump era. We started asking Americans in 2016 if they supported any presidential candidate based on their religious identity. Initially, it focused primarily on attitudes toward Muslim and Jewish candidates, as Trump’s presidential campaign rhetoric had raised concerns over the rise of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. 2020 and he repeated the question in 2022, expanding the survey to include other groups. In fact, from 2016 to his 2022, attitudes toward Jewish candidates have remained largely the same, opposition to Jewish candidates is low, and the gap between Democrats and Republicans has narrowed significantly since 2016.
Jewish, Catholic and Protestant candidates may look promising, but opposition to a Muslim or atheist presidential candidate is discouragingly high. But just as this opposition is high in his 2022, public opposition is actually declining. In 2022 he is 26% and 34% in 2020 compared to 31% in 2016 (including a significant drop in Republican opposition).
These trends in attitudes toward Muslims corroborate the extensive polls we have conducted since the rise of Donald Trump as president in 2015, and we explored them in our 2016 article. pointed out first. In “Measuring the Backlash against the Muslim Backlash,” Trump’s targeting of Muslims in his campaign meant that even as anti-Muslim discourse spread, more Americans, especially Democrats and independents, would turn to Muslims. I have indicated that I seem to support it. Since then, we have conducted multiple polls tracking attitudes towards Muslims that show the same trend. Favorable views of Muslims continue to climb, from a low of 53% in 2015 to a high of 78% shortly after Trump left the White House.
Document trends as there is no pre-Trump and post-Trump data on other groups such as Buddhists, Hindus and others who still face strong opposition if they choose to run for president. No. The only other group we started surveying in 2016 was Evangelical Christians. Here the story is a little different with Muslims and Jews. Since Trump began his campaign, opposition to the evangelical presidential candidate has increased slightly, from 17% in 2016 to 20% in 2022. Just as many Americans rallied in support of Trump’s opposition, Americans seem to have supported him and punished those he supported. hugged him back. Notably, most of the opposition came from Democrats (34%), with only 5% of Republicans opposing evangelical candidates in a 2022 poll, and all others except atheists. Among religious identity groups, it provides the largest partisan gap for presidential candidate opponents. The biggest change from 2016 to his 2022 is that the partisan divide has widened from 12% to 29% respectively. While this issue requires further study, Democrats’ attitudes may reflect a backlash against evangelical influence during the Trump administration and the fear stemming from the consequences of such power. As noted in another recent article, his 76% of evangelical Republicans said they supported declaring the United States a “Christian nation,” but said such a move would be unconstitutional. most people said.
Conclusion
With Donald Trump’s political rise since the 2016 presidential campaign, a daring extremist fringe that targets Jews, Muslim Americans and others must confront. Luckily, this was not a horizontal effect (more voices), but rather a vertical effect (some voice strengths), but dangerous.
