Trump and tolerance

Since the 1930s, the Gallup poll has asked people if they would vote for certain kinds of people for president:  specifically, "If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be [type], would you vote for that person?"  In June 2015 and April 2019, they asked about hypothetical candidates who were black, Catholic, Jewish, a Muslim, gay or lesbian, a woman, an evangelical Christian, and a socialist.  The table below shows the change in the percent of Democrats, Republicans, and independents who say they would vote for the candidate.

                    Rep  Ind  Dem
Evangelical  8       6       5
Jewish         -1       5       2
Catholic       4        2       1
Hispanic      1        9       3
Black           4        7       3
Woman       -1        5       0
Gay              0        9      -2

Atheist        -3        5       7
Muslim       -7      15      13
Socialist      -7       0       15

For the first group (evangelical, Jewish, Catholic, Hispanic, Black, woman, gay), there is no clear evidence of partisan difference in the changes (of course, there is sampling error, especially for independents, who are the smallest group).  By and large, tolerance has increased--a total of 16 positive changes, three negative, and two no change.

For the other three, there has been polarization--Democrats are more likely to say they would vote for the person, Republicans less likely.  Socialist is different from the others in principle--it's a political position, not an ethnic or religious group.  Presumably the difference is because socialism has become more prominent after the strong showing of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and the high profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In the contemporary United States there is a pretty strong norm of saying that you don't pay attention to race, color, or creed.  Even Donald Trump has made some effort to appeal to (or at least say he doesn't have any animosity towards) groups like blacks, Latinos, and gays and lesbians.  However, there is always an implicit restriction to groups that are inside a circle of those that are accepted as parts of American society.  I think the partisan divergence for atheists and Muslims shows that they haven't made it in that circle.  In contrast, although you might expect that the support given to Trump by many prominent evangelical leaders might cause a reaction among Democrats, willingness to support an evangelical Christian has increased among Democrats as well as Republicans (and Independents).

However, for atheists and Muslims, the increase among Democrats is larger than the decline among Republicans (and the increases among Independents are about as large among Democrats).  You could say that the reaction against intolerance among Democrats and Independents is stronger than the increase among Republicans.  So ironically, Trump may be contributing to the growth in tolerance.