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On 23 February 2016, New York Times' The Upshot published an item reporting that one in five Trump supporters don't believe slaves should have been freed: The piece largely focused on a new set of public opinion survey results asking atypical but timely questions [which] has shed some light on the Trump coalition, pulling together multiple data sets for a broader look at candidates' voter bases. But readers and pundits focused on one particular portion at the tail end of the article: The one in five Trump supporters support slavery claim originated with the following question from a joint poll conducted by polling outfit YouGov and The Economist. The verbiage included the modifier executive order: Of the 2,000 respondents, 53 percent said they strongly approved; 17 percent approved somewhat; 8 percent disapproved somewhat; 5 percent disapproved strongly; and 17 percent said they were not sure. Another report, this by Public Policy Polling, appeared to suggest likely Republican voters who identified as very liberal or somewhat liberal were likelier than those very conservative or somewhat conservative to indicate whites [were] a superior race: The same question was not asked of likely Democrat respondents. PPP provided the following methodology for that poll data collection: That poll appeared to involve 30 percent of 897 likely Republican voters, or approximately 296 individuals. Of those 296 voters, it appeared 112 Trump supporters indicated they wished the South had won the Civil War. And again, the effect of those responses was buffered by the ideology breakdown for that question, which appeared to indicate a higher rate of affirmatives among self-identified liberal likely Republican voters, not conservative ones. We searched YouGov's site for similar polling data in an attempt to locate the core polling data in question, and found a December 2014 piece about general approval for (or disapproval of) the use of executive orders: Directly beneath it was an interesting breakdown (unrelated to anything Trump) of answers to the same question provided by respondents in 2014: Before Trump ever entered the ring, between 12 and 15 percent of respondents indicated they disapproved of the executive order which freed the Southern slaves. This divide appeared to hinge less on slavery than an ideological opposition among some Americans for executive orders in general. YouGov reported: This question, then, has long been interpreted as something of an ideological purity test about unilateral executive action. If a January or February 2016 poll indicated that 20 percent of Trump's base answered the question about slavery in the affirmative, that was not a sharp divergence from general polling data in November 2014 involving the same question. Back then (and prior to Trump's campaign announcement), between 12 and 15 percent of Americans indicated disapproval of that (and all) executive orders. On 25 February 2016, we spoke to Lynn Vavreck (a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of the New York Times piece), who explained: At 6:52 PM EST on 25 February 2016, YouGov released the specific breakdown of responses by candidate: That data displayed as follows: YouGov's release of the full tables was the first reference we were able to find showing the breakdown per candidate. By combining those who disapproved strongly and disapproved somewhat of the Emancipation Proclamation, we reached a figure of 20 percent for supporters of Donald Trump, higher than any other candidate. Both Cruz and Huckabee's supporters polled at 15 percent, and Bush's at 12 percent. Although Trump beat the others in the sum of those responses, it was not by a shocking amount, contrasted with the majority of Republican frontrunners at the time the poll was conducted. Vavreck contrasted Trump's 20 percent with Rubio's five, but Kasich was notably more of an outlier with a very modest three percent rating. Shortly after YouGov tweeted a link to the previously-unavailable data, USA Today's David Mastio tweeted us a link to an editorial about the claim: The paper further analyzed the massive larger report, and provided additional context for the purported indictment of Trump's base: The data shifted yet again when viewed through a different lens: Although 20 percent of likely Trump voters indicated they disapproved of the executive order that freed slaves, 71 percent of white respondents in total said they approved of it (leaving 29 percent presumably in the disapproval category). Bizarrely, that number was static for black voters of all parties, and reached only 60 percent for Hispanic voters. Put another way, a different approach to these numbers would suggest more black voters than Trump supporters disapproved of the Emancipation Proclamation (somehow, that didn't make it into the news cycle). On 26 February 2016, a representative from YouGov clarified that the breakdown was calculated by Vavrick, and provided numbers for Democratic frontrunners Sanders and Clinton about the slavery question. Of Sanders supporters, 81.5 approved and 9.8 percent disapproved, and 85.3 percent of Clinton's supporters approved, while 6.2 percent disapproved. It remained true Trump carried the largest share of disapprovers of the Emancipation Proclamation question, but that effect of that statistical brush stroke appeared less broad on the larger canvas of a diverse American electorate motivated by a number of factors.
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