In one of our recent Insight polls we asked this question: “Whatever you believe in principle, have you ever been wary or fearful of a person because they appeared to be Muslim or from a Middle Eastern background?”
We drew a very large sample (almost 9000 qualified respondents) because I wanted to look at the demographic breakdown of the answers. The topline results were: No – 72.3%, Yes – 23.3%, I’m not sure 4.4%.
The breakdowns show relatively little difference in the results across various demographic metrics. So slightly more men said Yes. But the two were barely distinguishable. Ideology showed some spread but not a huge amount. People who defined themselves as “far left” had just under 10% saying “yes” while those who defined themselves as “just left of center” had 21% saying “yes”. And a sloping trend toward more yeses as you go from left to right.
One thing that was a little surprising to me was that people who hold passports and thus presumably have spent more time abroad were slightly more likely to say “yes” than non-passport holders. So passport holders were Yes – 14.6%, No 82.4% versus non-passport holders Yes – 9.6%, No – 87.7%.
