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Trump Supporters: They’re Just Not That Into You (Or Anyone Else, For That Matter)

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Donald Trump is well on his way to becoming the Republican nominee for President, thanks in part to unwavering support from the bigoted, immigrant-beating, obscenity-yelling, sign-tearing base that makes up the most extreme of Republican voters.

This isn’t just pure conjecture, either. New polling data from YouGov and PPP, conducted before Trump’s victories in Nevada, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, exposes some pretty nasty views from Trump supporters about, well, just about everybody.

Trump supporters on the internment of 127,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II:

YouGov data reveal that a third of Mr. Trump’s (and Mr. Cruz’s) backers believe that Japanese internment during World War II was a good idea, while roughly 10 percent of Mr. Rubio’s and Mr. Kasich’s supporters do. Mr. Trump’s coalition is also more likely to disagree with the desegregation of the military (which was ordered in 1948 by Harry Truman) than other candidates’ supporters are.

Trump supporters on banning gays and lesbians from entering the United States:

Data from Public Policy Polling show that a third of Mr. Trump’s backers in South Carolina support barring gays and lesbians from entering the country. This is nearly twice the support for this idea (17 percent) among Ted Cruz’s and Marco Rubio’s voters and nearly five times the support of John Kasich’s and Ben Carson’s supporters (7 percent).

Trump supporters on the Civil War, the Confederate flag, and the freeing of some four million slaves after the Civil War:

According to P.P.P., 70 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters in South Carolina wish the Confederate battle flag were still flying on their statehouse grounds. (It was removed last summer less than a month after a mass shooting at a black church in Charleston.) The polling firm says that 38 percent of them wish the South had won the Civil War. Only a quarter of Mr. Rubio’s supporters share that wish, and even fewer of Mr. Kasich’s and Mr. Carson’s do.

Nationally, the YouGov data show a similar trend: Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with the freeing of slaves in Southern states after the Civil War. Only 5 percent of Mr. Rubio’s voters share this view.

“Mr. Trump’s popularity with white, working-class voters who are more likely than other Republicans to believe that whites are a supreme race and who long for the Confederacy may make him unpopular among leaders in his party,” the New York Times concludes. “But it’s worth noting that he isn’t persuading voters to hold these beliefs. The beliefs were there —and have been for some time.”

“Mr. Trump has reinvigorated explicit appeals to ethnocentrism, and some voters are responding.”