Donald Trump's fascist rhetoric about immigrants has been polling frighteningly well, according to a sobering new survey.
More than a third of the former president's 2020 voters – 35 percent – agree that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, according to a survey by University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll, while just 32 percent of Trump voters and 37 percent of Republicans disagreed with the Nazi slogan, reported Rolling Stone.
“There is a significant market for openly authoritarian ideologies in the United States,” said UMass Amherst political science professor Jesse Rhodes, who oversaw the poll. “It would be naive to think that these ideas will eventually just wither away on their own."
Trump started ratcheting up his attacks on immigrants, whom he has previously derided as “rapists,” “murderers” or “animals," and a source previously told the magazine that Trump believed the blood-poisoning line echoing Adolf Hitler was a "great line."
READ MORE: 11 ways Trump doesn’t become president
More than half of Americans overall – 54 percent – disagree with that statement, and 39 percent "strongly" disagree, but 25 percent “neither agree nor disagree” with that sentiment, which indicates his fascist rhetoric may not turn off voters who don't already dislike him.
The poll found 64 percent of Latinos disagree, and 80 percent of liberals do.
The survey also measured the public acceptance of the white nationalist "great replacement theory," which falsely claims a globalist cabal is flooding the nation with immigrants to undermine the influence of white Americans, and the idea has been pushed into the mainstream by Trump and other GOP politicians and right-wing broadcasters like Tucker Carlson.
Two-thirds of Trump voters agree the U.S. is "in danger of losing its culture and identity," while 76 percent of them believe elected officials wanted to bring in more immigrants to serve as "obedient voters," and a plurality of Americans – 43 percent – either strongly or somewhat believe in the "obedient voters" theory, but only 29 percent of voters reject the idea.
“It would be easy to dismiss the great replacement theory as a white supremacist fever dream," Rhodes said. "But this simplistic view would significantly understate the theory’s appeal."
The poll found 24 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of independents are drawn to the false theory, and so are substantial numbers of Black, Asian, and Latino voters.
"The great replacement theory doesn’t fall neatly on ideological lines — its appeal is much broader" Rhodes said. "[The idea] works like a conspiracy theory ‘should,’ providing a neat, tidy explanation for events — and identifying the culprits for the instability.”
