While 40% of Republicans think mainstream Islam is violent, a majority of GOP voters support Donald Trump's ban on Muslims entering the U.S. Poll: 6 in 10 GOP voters back Trump's Muslim ban

Nearly six in 10 Republican voters agree with Donald Trump's call to temporarily ban all Muslims from the United States in the wake of recent terrorist attacks, according to the results of the latest ABC News/Washington Post survey out Monday afternoon.

About 59 percent of Republican voters surveyed said they supported Trump's proposal, while 38 percent said it was the wrong thing to do. Overall, however, 60 percent of all adults surveyed disagreed with Trump's Muslim proposal, while just 36 percent said it was the right thing to do.


The latest poll comes on the same day a national Monmouth University poll found Trump nearly tripling the numbers of his closest rival.

Asked whether mainstream Islam is inherently a religion of peace or one that encourages violence and terrorism, 54 percent overall said it was peaceful, while 28 percent said it encourages violence. Those numbers are roughly in line with September 2010 figures taken during the controversy over the construction of an Islamic center in lower Manhattan.

On a partisan basis for that question, Republicans were more split, with 40 percent suggesting that mainstream Islam is violent and 45 percent calling it peaceful. Just 20 percent of Democrats called it violent, compared to 64 percent who deemed it peaceful.

Langer Research Associates conducted the poll from Dec. 10-13, surveying a random sample of 1,002 adults nationwide via landlines and cellphones. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The exact number of Republicans, Democrats and independents polled was not immediately clear from the initial information released, though the shares of each group broke down 23 percent, 33 percent and 34 percent, respectively.