Americans nationwide are evenly divided over the issue of same sex marriage. But Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.
In a PPP poll released Thursday, a 46% plurality of registered Republican voters said they thought interracial marriage was not just wrong, but that it should be illegal. 40% said interracial marriage should be legal.
Gov. Haley Barbour, with a home state advantage in Mississippi, also topped PPP’s survey of the GOP primary field at 37%, followed by Mike Huckabee at 19%, and Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at 10%.
The poll also found that voters who thought interracial marriage should be banned liked Barbour, Palin, and Huckabee the most among the slate of potential GOP presidential candidates. Seventy-nine percent of those voters said they approved of Gov. Barbour’s job performance, while 74% said they had a favorable opinion of Sarah Palin, and 73% viewed Huckabee favorably.
In February, a Gallup poll found that Mississippi was the most conservative state in the nation. In that survey, 50.0% of adults identified themselves as conservatives.
The PPP poll was conducted March 24-27 among 400 registered Republican voters. It has a margin of error of 4.9%.