Poll Shows Trump Supporters Feel Discriminated Against — Data Says Otherwise (VIDEO)

A new poll released by Public Policy Polling shows that most of President Donald Trump’s core group of supporters feel discriminated against.

The poll asked respondents which race likely was on the receiving end of most discrimination in the United States. While a clear majority (61 percent) responded that non-white Americans — including African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and Native Americans — faced the most challenges regarding discrimination, two core groups of Trump’s supporters felt that discrimination actually hurt them more.

A plurality of respondents who voted for Trump felt that white people were more discriminated against than any other racial group, according to the poll. Forty-five percent of his supporters responded affirmatively when asked whether white people faced more discrimination than any other groups of people.

Supporters of Trump also felt that Christians were unfairly treated. A majority, 54 percent, of Trump voters felt that Christians faced discrimination in America. For comparison, only 29 percent of respondents of all political stripes felt that Christians were discriminated against, and nearly half (49 percent) of respondents felt that Muslims faced such obstacles.

Just one-fifth of Trump supporters thought that Muslims faced the most discrimination in the U.S.

Those two groups of people — white Americans and Christians — are among Trump’s largest blocs of supporters, exit polls from 2016 suggest. White people supported Trump over Hillary Clinton by a rate of 57 percent to 37 percent, and both Protestant and Catholic Christians backed the current president over Clinton, CNN reported in November.

The attitudes of Trump’s core supporters do not reflect reality: according to the two most recent years of hate crime data, crimes directed specifically at white people increased by 7.5 percent, while hate crimes against African Americans went up by 8.9 percent over the same time period. Hate crimes against Protestant and Catholic Christians during that two year period went up by 10 percent, while hate crimes against Muslims went up by nearly 67 percent during that same time.

Watch Trump’s speech in Arizona:

Featured image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr/CC-By-SA 2.0