New Poll Shows 59% Of Americans Disagree With Trump’s “Go Back” Tweets About Minority Congresswomen

A new CBS/YouGov poll shows a majority of American voters disapprove of President Donald Trump‘s recent controversial tweets telling four freshmen minority congresswomen to “go back” to their countries of origin.

According to the survey, 59% of voters disagree with the tweets, while 40% said they “agree.” The poll was conducted July 17-19 among 2,099 United States residents. The posts were about Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan).

Several lawmakers, many of them Democrats and a handful of Republicans, condemned Trump’s rhetoric. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in an interview with George Stephanopoulos that Trump’s comments marked the first time in his 37 years of public service that his constituents said they felt afraid of the commander in chief.

“What president Trump is doing is he’s exploiting group divisions, divisions that have always existed in our country, regrettably,” University of Texas professor Victoria DeFrancesco told MSNBC’s Alex Witt. “There’s the immigrant, non-immigrant, there’s the white vs. black vs. Latino vs. Asian-American, the progressive vs. the conservative. What [Trump] is doing is driving wedges and propping up these divisions and making people feel nervous and scared,” she added before noting that Trump has monopolized the sentiment that disagreeing with the president on these types of issues is a sign of being “un-American” in his view.

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A related poll from the Pew Research Center also revealed telling public opinion about the effect of political leaders’ hateful or divisive rhetoric on instigating acts of violence. The survey found 78% of voters believe hate speeches from elected leaders can lead to violence. Broken down by party leanings, 91% of Democrats said they believed this, while only 61% of Republican-leaning voters said the same.