Poll: Donald Trump leading because Republicans are still nuts

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Public Policy Polling came out with a new national poll this morning and hooooooboy.

Donald Trump and Ben Carson are, in keeping with other recent polling, enjoying plenty of space between themselves and the rest of the field in first and second place. Trump holds 29% of the vote; Carson has 15%. No other candidate is in double digits.

But the real takeaway in the poll isn’t the relative standing of each candidate, which we already knew, but rather the underlying opinions held by each candidate’s supporters, and the GOP base overall. From PPP’s release:

Donald Trump, via Gage Skidmore / Flickr

Trump is benefiting from a GOP electorate that thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born in another country, and that immigrant children should be deported. 66% of Trump’s supporters believe that Obama is a Muslim to just 12% that grant he’s a Christian. 61% think Obama was not born in the United States to only 21% who accept that he was. And 63% want to amend the Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship, to only 20% who want to keep things the way they are.

Trump’s beliefs represent the consensus among the GOP electorate. 51% overall want to eliminate birthright citizenship. 54% think President Obama is a Muslim. And only 29% grant that President Obama was born in the United States. That’s less than the 40% who think Canadian born Ted Cruz was born in the United States.

That’s right: Republicans are more likely to incorrectly believe that Ted Cruz was born in the United States than to correctly believe that Barack Obama was.

I’m not the only person to note throughout Trump’s rise that his ridiculous blather was resonating with the Republican base because it was representative of the Republican base; his ideas weren’t all that new. And this poll confirms it. Half of Republicans think the 14th Amendment is a bad idea; Donald Trump is leading the charge to change and/or ignore it. Half of Republicans think President Obama is a Muslim; Donald Trump doesn’t have time for the politically correct, weak-in-the-knees liberals who would bother to correct them. Seven in ten Republicans aren’t sure whether President Obama was born in the country; Donald Trump is our country’s premier birther. Is it any surprise that Trump is winning large subsets of these majorities on his way to a commanding overall lead?

Of course, Trump isn’t the only candidate whose supporters hold these Foxified beliefs. In fact, the only candidates whose supporters do believe that President Obama was born in the United States are Kasich, Bush, Christie and Rubio. Only Christie, Kasich and Bush’s supporters are more likely to believe that President Obama is a Christian than believe he is a Muslim. The derp in this PPP poll says more about the median Republican voter than it does about Trump.

However, this does suggest that Trump has real staying power in the primary. The Republican base believes that the immigrants and the Muslims and the power-hungry liberals are out to destroy the country, and for them, candidates who don’t indulge in those beliefs just don’t get it.

No matter how much money Jeb Bush throws into the Des Moines media market, you can’t teach stupid.

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