NEW POLL: Whopping 61 Percent of Trump Voters — And 53 Percent of Fox News Viewers — Agree With Replacement Theory

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A stunning 61 percent of people who voted for former President Donald Trump believe in the same “replacement theory” that was cited by the suspect in the racist Buffalo mass murder.

The suspect in last week’s terrifying racist attack  — an 18-year-old White man named Payton Gendron, said in an online manifesto that he was motivated by replacement theory. And when respondents to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll were read a description of the ideology, shocking numbers agreed with it.

Respondents to the poll were asked, “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? A group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views.”

Especially given the publicity surrounding the ideology lately, it’s a bit surprising that over a third — 34 percent — of all respondents agreed, while 46 percent disagreed, and another 21 percent were “not sure.”

But as the pollster pointed out, the belief was prevalent among majorities of right-leaning groups like Republicans, Trump voters, and Fox News viewers:

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that more than 6 in 10 Donald Trump voters (61%) agree that ‘a group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views’ — a core tenet of the false conspiracy theory known as the ‘great replacement.’

Yahoo! cited a New York Times investigation — which showed ” in more than 400 episodes of his show,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson “amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration, and his producers sometimes scoured his show’s raw material from the same dark corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did” — as one reason for the prevalence of belief in replacement theory:

As a result, 54% of Republicans and 53% Fox News viewers now also agree that ‘a group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views,’ according to the Yahoo News/YouGov poll. In both cases, just a third disagree. The rest are unsure.

The poll also showed that 66 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of Trump voters are concerned “that native-born Americans are losing economic, political, and cultural influence in this country to immigrants.”

That figure represents a sharp increase — almost double — in the prevalence of this view from a study published just before the Buffalo massacre.