https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...7a4a412e93a_story.html?utm_term=.8cb816467118 By Dana Milbank BALTIMORE — Hillary Clinton may have been unwise to say half of Donald Trump’s supporters are racists and other “deplorables.” But she wasn’t wrong. If anything, when it comes to Trump’s racist support, she might have low-balled the number. The American National Election Studies, the long-running, extensive poll of American voters, asked voters in 2012 a basic test of prejudice: to rank black and white people on a scale from hardworking to lazy and from intelligent to unintelligent. The researchers found that 62 percent of white people gave black people a lower score in at least one of the attributes. This was a jump in prejudicial attitudes from 2008, when 45 percent of white people expressed negative stereotypes. this is a good indicator of how one votes: Republican Mitt Romney won 61 percent of those who expressed negative stereotypes. In June, the Pew Research Center found that 79 percent of Clinton voters believe the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities is an important issue, while only 42 percent of Trump supporters feel that way. As I wrote previously, earlier Pew research found that Trump supporters were significantly less likely than other Americans (and supporters of other Republican presidential candidates) to think that racial and ethnic diversity improves the United States. Research by Washington Post pollsters and by University of California at Irvine political scientist Michael Tesler, among others, have found that Trump does best among Americans who express racial animus. Evidence indicates fear that white people are losing ground was the single greatest predictor of support for Trump — more, even, than economic anxiety.Trump, on stage, rejected any notion of racism, saying people who want secure borders “are not racists,” people who warn of “radical Islamic terrorism are not Islamophobes” and people who support police “are not prejudiced.” But moments later, he repeated the campaign slogan he borrowed from an anti-Semitic organization that opposed involvement in World War II. “America First – remember that,” he said. “America First.”
If Trump supporters would stop being offended by terms like 'deplorable', they wouldn't have been called that in the first place. It's their own fault.
