A few of my friends and online correspondents were a bit put out with me for using birtherism as a proxy for racism in a previous post.
One of them helpfully suggested that a better metric would be whether white people prefer to self-segregate into majority white neighborhoods. By a happy coincidence, this metric has already been put in the field during a Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted between March and June of 2016. Among many other findings, they discovered major differences between Clinton and Trump voters on the question of whether they prefer to live in a diverse community:
When asked about where they wanted to live, 36 percent of Trump supporters said, “I prefer to live in a community with people who come from diverse cultures,” compared with 46 percent of Cruz supporters, 55 percent of Kasich supporters and 70 percent of Clinton supporters.
Here is what that looks like in chart form:
Multicultural doesn’t map perfectly onto multiracial, though the terms are often used interchangeably. At any rate, it looks like I may have slightly underestimated the extent to which Trump voters are motivated by fear of racial and cultural diversity. My apologies.
