The party’s three leading candidates are speaking about history and race in polarizing and provocative ways that sometimes diverge from or distort the facts, some political strategists, experts and civil rights leaders said
Former president
Donald Trump uses dehumanizing rhetoric to describe undocumented immigrants before largely White audiences. The runaway GOP polling leader
says they are “poisoning the blood of our country”
Florida Gov.
Ron DeSantis defended part of his state’s African American history
curriculum standards that claimed some enslaved people developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”
And
Nikki Haley omitted any mention of slavery when she was asked to explain the cause of the Civil War at a town hall event this past week.
Their comments have stoked outrage among many Americans and risk alienating wide swaths of voters
But their rhetoric is also appealing to many Americans who lean conservative, interviews with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire show, including some who reject the accusations that the statements are racially insensitive or worse.
Doug Vogel, 56, who attended a Friday [Haley] event in Concord, N.H. -- “She spoke the truth,” he said.
[In Iowas, Dorothy] Fischer, a Republican who is eager for the party to move on from Trump, said the war wasn’t driven by slavery. “It was an economic battle” that pitted “Southern plantation economics versus the Northern industrial economics,” she said.
GOP presidential candidate
Vivek Ramaswamy, who has excited some voters in the base but remains a long shot,
declared during a debate that “great replacement theory” — which holds that Jews, minorities and immigrants are attempting to replace White, native-born Americans through immigration and higher fertility rates — “is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory"
