Nearly Half Of All Trump Voters Say They’d Vote For Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis Over President Obama

A recent poll indicates that almost half of Trump supporters — more specifically, Trump voters — would rather have Jefferson Davis, the slave-owning president of the Confederate States of America, as president of the U.S. than former President Barack Obama. Given the accuracy of polls and the disclaimers of a few points for margin of error, that would constitute some tens of millions of American voters that feel this way.

Public Polling Policy released its latest poll this week (August 23) and found that President Donald Trump had lost just a percentage point since July in his overall approval ratings. This, even after his much-condemned statements and comments — by numerous advocacy groups and politicians on both sides of the political aisle — on the incident in Charlottesville where a pro-white supremacist sympathizer drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a young woman.

According to Public Polling Policy, Trump’s approval rating stood at 40 percent (with 53 percent disapproving of his job performance) in August, down from 41 percent (and down from a higher disapproval rating — 55 percent — as well).

The poll also found that, overall, 89 percent of Americans have a negative opinion of neo-Nazis. This, as opposed to just 3 percent with a positive view. Slightly less of the general population have an unfavorable opinion of white supremacists (87 percent), with more (4 percent) having a positive opinion of them. Only 11 percent agree with President Trump’s sentiment that it’s possible for white supremacists and neo-Nazis to be “very fine people” (per The Atlantic). A majority (69 percent) say that is not possible.

As for the issue of Confederate statues, the removal of which — in particular, a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee — was the purported reason for the rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, not to mention the counter-demonstrators, the issue is a bit more evenly divided with 39 percent of Americans in support of the monuments to the Confederacy and 34 percent of Americans opposed. However, 58 percent of poll respondents said that removal of monuments from government property to museums or other historic sites was preferable. As to the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, Trump voters support its continued positioning in Charlottesville by a 61 to 10 percentage margin.

Two out of five (45 percent) of those same voters told Public Polling Policy that they would rather have Confederate President Jefferson Davis as president than former President Barack Obama.

It is unclear if respondents to the poll understood that Jefferson Davis was a slave owner, led the Confederacy in a four-year rebellion against the United States, and that the rebel nation fought to continue its economic dependence on slavery.

Regardless of their knowledge of history, 45 percent of Trump voters would amount to over 28,000,000 million people who would rather see a slave owner elected president over the first-ever African-American president.

That particular poll result follows another result where it was found that, among President Trump’s voters, 45 percent responded that they believe white people face more discrimination in the U.S. than any other ethnicity.

According to the 2010 U.S. census, people who identify as white alone comprised 72 percent of the U.S. population.

[Featured Image by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]