The amount of republicans that see trump and think "Yeah, I'm comfortable with this amount of racism in my presidential candidate" is really surprising too. I always thought the racist segment of the republicans was fairly minor (though weirdly pandered to), and I guess I was wrong to make that assumption.
Yeah, that was surprising to me, too. It wasn't surprising that Trump was winning when the field had more than a dozen candidates, but I was very surprised to see his numbers continue to grow as others dropped out.
There have been some really good articles on the shifting of what a "racist" actually is. Combined with the fact that the rank and file pub tries to look at issues through a lens of economics, welfare abuse, tough on crime, while ignoring the subtext of what those excuses actually mean, and you get a generation and a half of pubs who now think they aren't racist because they don't regularly attend Klan rallies and they are only mad at "those people" because they "abuse welfare."
