Most Republicans are more anti-immigration than their party’s official stance. In a May 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 59 percent of Republicans said their party has not done a good job representing their views on immigration. That number spikes up to 65 percent among Republicans who do not believe that immigrants who entered illegally should be allowed to stay in any fashion. In other words, the subject is the perfect springboard for an outsider presidential candidate like Trump to talk to these voters.

Republicans are generally not predisposed to think of Trump’s harsh remarks as racist, as many in the media have called them. In a September 2014 Pew poll, just 28 percent of Republicans said they believed that Hispanics face a lot of discrimination in the United States. To cite one example, Sean Hannity, the conservative talk-show host, said recently that Trump’s remarks were not “racially tinged.” A majority of Democrats (64 percent), on the other hand, said there was a lot of discrimination against Hispanics in the U.S.

Trump’s populist grandstanding, in fact, lines up with the views of a high percentage of Republicans. A majority of Republicans think immigrants — regardless of how they entered the U.S. — “burden” the country rather than make it stronger. In the May 2015 Pew survey, 63 percent of Republicans felt this way compared with 32 percent of Democrats. Just 27 percent of Republicans said immigrants made the country stronger, which was the lowest percentage recorded since 2004.