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The differences between the Democratic and Republican parties continue to get starker and starker. With multiple admissions from elected officials to dressing up in "blackface" for past photographs—in the case of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, his medical school yearbook page showed a man in blackface posing next to another wearing KKK robes—the topic has been at the top of the news.
So, then, how many Americans are unclear on whether or not it is racist to smear shoe polish on your face in a crude personal re-enactment of an old minstrel show? A new HuffPost/YouGov poll sought to answer that, asking Americans whether it is "acceptable or unacceptable" for a white person to wear blackface "for a costume."
Among Democrats, 78 percent said it was unacceptable. Among Republicans? It was a near tie, with 38 percent considering it unacceptable and 36 percent saying it’s acceptable.
This is at least in part due to demographics. Among black Americans, who tend to lean strongly toward the Democratic Party, 80 percent said it was unacceptable, while white Americans were more divided, 50 percent to 20 percent. Given the Republican Party's status as an almost exclusively white enterprise, there's part of your answer.
But something else is going on in the Republican numbers. If you drill down specifically to 2016 Trump voters (both Republican and other), the numbers change dramatically. In fact, they flip.
Self-identified Trump voters say wearing blackface is acceptable, as part of a costume, by a 44 to 34 spread. They are the only identified subgroup in which a plurality defended it as acceptable, in fact, and by a 10-point spread.
So there's something about Trump voters that coincidentally also allows them to believe that dressing up in blackface is acceptable, even as the rest of the nation rejects it. What could it be? Why such a strong correlation?
It's a stumper, it is. A real red hat-wearing mystery.