David Mastio

USA TODAY Opinion

Bernie Sanders supporters are 50% more likely than Hillary Clinton supporters to disapprove of Abraham Lincoln’s war-time decision to free the slaves according to a YouGov/Economist poll cited by The New York Times' TheUpshot blog and analyzed by a UCLA political science professor Lynn Vavreck. That may be one reason Clinton is expected to trounce Sanders in the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday or it might not have anything to do with it.

According to the poll, backers of Clinton and Sanders, white Democrats, are more likely to disapprove of the Civil-War executive order than supporters of Hispanic Republican Marco Rubio. One in 10 Sanders supporters disapproves of Lincoln’s executive order. Rubio supporters are less likely to disapprove of or have doubts about the landmark civil rights decision than African-Americans themselves.

The same poll finds that Clinton supporters are about 40% more likely than Sanders backers to be fans of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to round up Japanese-Americans and throw them into “internment camps.” Supporters of the two Democrats are both more likely to support the racist policy than Rubio's backers by a margin of 2 to 1. The poll of 2,000 Americans found that 39% of Clinton backers either support the action, for which the U.S. Congress and President Ronald Reagan apologized in 1988, or are unsure of their position. The United States paid reparations to the interred Japanese-Americans.

The YouGov poll results began to gain national attention on Tuesday when Vavreck reported in the Times that more than 1 in 5 Trump supporters disapproved of Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. YouGov had provided the raw data so Vavreck could perform her analysis. The Times cited the poll's results as evidence of racist undercurrents and intolerance on the part of Trump and his supporters in the Republican presidential primary, backing them with exit poll results and data from another pollster the Times described as "aligned with the Democratic Party."

Imagining Trump's reality-show America: Jill Lawrence

Think Trump's troopers are racist? Don't be so smug: David Mastio

Originally, Vavreck, the Times and YouGov only reported on the racially insensitive views of Republicans, failing to publish or even analyze the responses of potential Democratic voters. Vavreck only performed the Democratic analysis and released it to me on Friday after YouGov refused to release the data on Thursday and I contacted YouGov's European executives, its in-house polling expert and Vavreck herself.

While The New York Times, Time magazine, Nate Silver's 538 and Ezra Klein's Vox treated the poll as credible, the results are transparently ludicrous. The poll found that almost one-third of African-Americans polled on Lincoln’s executive order to end slavery in the treasonous Confederate States of America either opposed freedom for their ancestors or were not sure what they thought. (More about the YouGov online poll's goofy results here.)

Glenn Reynolds: A Trump wave is on the way

Since everybody seems to know that the Republican Party is the most comfortable home for America’s remaining racists (Hello? David Duke), it is hard to understand why non-partisan pollsters, independent academics and prestigious media organizations would have to manufacture outrage. You could forgive Trump voters for thinking that when it comes to reporting nasty things about them, nobody cares enough to double check.

David Mastio is the deputy editorial page editor of USA TODAY. Follow Mastio on Twitter.