There’s a significant difference in how Republicans and Democrats view the nation’s deadliest shooting, according to a recent poll.
The majority of Republicans — 79% — believe the incident at an LGBT Orlando nightclub, in which Omar Mateen killed 49 people after pledging allegiance to ISIS, was “Islamic terrorism.”
In contrast, only 29% of Democrats labeled the shooting that way, according to the Gallup poll. Most Democrats — 60% — saw the massacre as an act of “domestic gun violence.” Only 16% of Republicans viewed the killings as such.
The perspective between independents was much closer with 44% viewing the attack as “Islamic terrorism” and 42% seeing the shootings as “domestic gun violence.”
Mateen, a Muslim, American-born, 29-year-old security guard from Fort Pierce, Florida, had been on a terror watch list and was looked into at least twice by federal authorities before.
The shooting at Pulse Nightclub happened on June 12. The poll was conducted on June 14 and 15.
The poll was conducted by telephone with a random sample of 1,021 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.