Over all, 68 percent agreed that political correctness was a big problem, including 62 percent of self-identified Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 81 percent of Republicans. These views cut across racial lines. Seventy-two percent of whites and 61 percent of nonwhites (mostly African-American and Hispanic) describe political correctness as a big problem. A Rasmussen poll in August found that 71 percent of 1,000 adults surveyed agreed with the statement that political correctness was “a problem in America today.”

This poll data indicates that even members of racial and ethnic minorities who are protected by speech codes as well as by the suppression of offensive language are hostile to political correctness.

This does not mean that majorities of all political persuasions agree with Trump’s allegation that Mexican immigrants are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” — or that voters are comfortable with women being referred to as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals,” as Trump put it.

President Obama has been prescient in his critiques of political correctness, but his remarks have been empathetic rather than hostile and have done little to defuse the issue.

In a March 2008 campaign speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Barack Obama, then a candidate, said:

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

Obama then noted the consequences:

So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Obama also made a point about the political importance of what is said behind closed doors:

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation.

Just this past September, Obama was more explicit in his criticism of political correctness on the nation’s campuses in a speech at the North High School in Des Moines:

I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative. Or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. And I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of views.

Obama’s remarks and Trump’s comments after supporters beat up a Black Lives Matter protester at a rally in Birmingham in November — “Maybe he should have been roughed up” – reflect the gulf between the two men.