Basket of deplorables..."she might have low-balled" it

On September 12, Dana Milbank wrote a column in the Washington Post stating, “Yes, half of Trump supporters are racist.” He goes on to note that “when it comes to Trump’s racist support, [Hillary Clinton] might have low-balled the number.”

His supporting evidence:

1. The American National Election Studies, the long-running, extensive poll of American voters conducted a test in 2012 asking voters 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.”
2. “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.”
3. “Pew research [has also] 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.
4. “Research by Washington Post pollsters and by University of California at Irvine political scientist Michael Tesler, among others, has found that Trump does best among Americans who express racial animus.”
5. Given than few people embrace the “racist” label, Milbank sets up another scenario. “If you are ‘very enthusiastic’ about a candidate who has based his campaign on scapegoating immigrants, Latinos and African Americans, talked of banning Muslims from the country, hesitated to disown the Ku Klux Klan and employed anti-Semitic imagery — well, you might be a racist. But if you are holding your nose and supporting Trump only because you think him better than Clinton, that doesn’t put you in the basket. The new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds the two groups roughly equal: Forty-six percent of Trump supporters say they are “very enthusiastic” about his candidacy. The rest were “somewhat” or not terribly enthusiastic.

In an appearance on CNN, Milbank stated, “There’s been a huge jump in the amount of racial stereotypes expressed by white people in America; people who will say that black Americans are less intelligent or lazier than white Americans.”

We’ve all heard the term implicit-bias - the attitudes and stereotypes that unconsciously affect our understanding, actions and decisions. In fact, most of us have implicit biases. This test will reveal yours.

 

What separates many from the “deplorables” is the knowledge of such biases and the conscious effort to overcome them. The data above show that many Trump supporters don’t view bias as a problem and aren’t thinking about ways to overcome it. In fact, half enthusiastically support someone who plays on our biases to stoke fear and anger.

That’s pretty deplorable.