(CN) – A poll released Wednesday finds two in three people believe telling minority Americans to “go back where they came from” is racist, amid a recently passed House resolution condemning President Donald Trump for his tweets made Sunday using the same language.
The Democrat-controlled House voted Tuesday to condemn Trump for telling four Democratic congresswomen to return to the countries they came from. Three of the four women, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, were born in the U.S., while the fourth, Rep. Ilhan Omar, was naturalized as a citizen when she was a teenager.
While the USA Today/Ipsos poll found that 65% of those surveyed said that such a message was racist, only 45% of Republicans agreed compared to 85% of Democrats and 67% of independent voters. Additionally, 57% of Republicans said they agreed with the president’s tweets, while only 19% of independents and 7% of Democrats said the same.
A majority of Americans, 59%, said President Trump’s tweets targeting the minority women were “un-American.” Although only 25% of Republicans said the tweets were “un-American,” three out of four women and more than half of independents said the same.
“A majority see President Trump’s tweets as un-American,” Cliff Young, president of Ipsos Public Affairs, said in a statement. “However, there’s a huge partisan difference in how we interpret what’s racist in this country.”
The results of the poll, taken on Monday and Tuesday, come as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the president’s remarks “racist” on the House floor on Tuesday before voting on a resolution to condemn Trump.
"Look, I stand by my statement," Pelosi said. "I'm proud of the attention has been called to it because what the president said was completely inappropriate against our colleagues. But not just against them, but against so many people in our country and he said to them 'go back to where you came from.'"
A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday showed that President Trump increased his approval among Republicans to 72% after his Sunday tweets, a jump of 5 percentage points from the week before.
Only a small number of House and Senate Republicans have publicly condemned the president’s tweets. Texas Rep. Will Hurd called them “racist and xenophobic” and “unbecoming of the leader of the free world.”
Others, such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the issue was “all politics.”
The poll surveyed 1,005 July 15-16 and has a credibility interval of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
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