Like the bullies they are, the GOP picked on the smallest, mot vulnerable populations in their ugly and hateful 2024 election attacks: Muslims and transgender people.
When people’s average perceptions of group sizes are compared to actual population estimates, an intriguing pattern emerges: Americans tend to vastly overestimate the size of minority groups. This holds for sexual minorities, including the proportion of gays and lesbians (estimate: 30%, true: 3%), bisexuals (estimate: 29%, true: 4%), and people who are transgender (estimate: 21%, true: 0.6%).
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It also applies to religious minorities, such as Muslim Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%) and Jewish Americans (estimate: 30%, true: 2%). And we find the same sorts of overestimates for racial and ethnic minorities, such as Native Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%), Asian Americans (estimate: 29%, true: 6%), and Black Americans (estimate: 41%, true: 12%).
Naturally, the GOP saw this as an opening for messages of hate, That's what they do!
After years of improvement, American public attitudes toward Muslims and Islam have declined in the past few months, and expressed public prejudice toward Muslims remains higher than toward any other religious, ethnic, or racial group studied. These are two of the key findings in our latest University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll (UMDCIP) with SSRS, which measured opinions on several relevant dimensions and compared them with previous polls. The poll was carried out by SSRS among a sample of 1,510 American adults from their probability-based online panel, in addition to oversamples of 202 Blacks and 200 Hispanics, July 26-August 1. The margin of error is +/- 3.0%.
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