The party’s three leading candidates are speaking about history and race in polarizing and provocative ways that sometimes diverge from or distort the facts, some political strategists, experts and civil rights leaders said

Former president Donald Trump uses dehumanizing rhetoric to describe undocumented immigrants before largely White audiences. The runaway GOP polling leader says they are “poisoning the blood of our country” — comments some experts have compared to Adolf Hitler’s writings on blood purity.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis defended part of his state’s African American history curriculum standards that claimed some enslaved people developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.” And Nikki Haley omitted any mention of slavery when she was asked to explain the cause of the Civil War at a town hall event this past week. It wasn’t until the next day that Haley acknowledged the war was “about slavery.”

…

But their rhetoric is also appealing to many Americans who lean conservative, interviews with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire show, including some who reject the accusations that the statements are racially insensitive or worse. Many in the GOP are resentful of liberal leaders who they see as constantly pointing out or forcing the country to apologize for past atrocities, and some are angry about demographic and cultural shifts in America driven in part by immigration.