A majority of Republicans view former President Donald Trump’s statement about Haitian immigrants “eating the pets” during his Tuesday debate with Vice President Kamala Harris as “weird,” new polling shows.
Trump’s remark was based on social media rumors, which lack evidence, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pets. City officials have discredited these claims, saying there are no reports of any immigrants in the community killing or eating pets as alleged.
Regardless, many Republicans, including Trump and his running mate Ohio Senator JD Vance, have promoted the claims. The former president repeated the claim during Tuesday night’s debate, leading to a fact-check from the ABC News moderators.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs—the people that came in,” Trump claimed about Haitian immigrants. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
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What the Poll Shows
New polling by Data for Progress published on Friday shows that a clear majority of voters viewed the statement as “weird.” That included majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents.
Among GOP respondents, 44 percent said the comment was “very weird” while an additional 25 percent said it was “somewhat weird”—for a total of 69 precent describing the statement as “weird.” Among Democrats, the total was 91 percent and among independents it was 77 percent.
Looking at all voters combined, 64 percent described the remark as “very weird” and 16 percent said “somewhat weird,” for a total of 80 percent. The survey was conducted from September 11 to 12 and included 1,283 likely U.S. voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign on Saturday afternoon via email for comment.
How Did the Rumors Start?
Erika Lee, a woman from Springfield, who initially made a Facebook post alleging that local Haitian immigrants were eating pets, leading to significant national attention on the small city, confessed she had no direct evidence supporting such a claim.
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Lee told NBC News on Friday.
Lee said the incident has left her ridden with guilt and anxiety due to the controversy it generated. Her post detailed the disappearance of a neighbor’s cat and included her neighbor’s suspicions that their Haitian residents were involved in the incident.
According to NewsGuard, an organization dedicated to combating internet misinformation, Lee was one of the first to spread the baseless rumor on social media, the screenshots of which were widely shared. The neighbor, identified as Kimberly Newton, reportedly got the information about the alleged incident from a third party, as per NewsGuard’s findings and reported by NBC News.
“I’m not a racist,” Lee told NBC News, adding that her daughter is half Black and she herself is mixed race and a member of the LGBTQ+ community. “Everybody seems to be turning it into that, and that was not my intent.”
Amplifiers of the rumor on social media also shared a video of a woman who was arrested for allegedly killing and eating a cat. While that video was from Ohio, it was captured in Canton, which is over 170 miles from Springfield. The woman, Alexis Ferrell, was also a U.S. citizen, not an immigrant.
Ferrell remains jailed with a bond of $100,000. Local law enforcement says she was first arrested in 2011 and has been known to authorities since then. She previously faced charges in 2017.
