Why 11 percent of Americans think Obama is Muslim.

Republicans (17 percent) were more than twice as likely as Democrats (7 percent) to believe the Muslim myth. (The GOP number has remained steady since the last Pew poll back in October.) The less-educated a respondent, the more open they were to the suggestion: 14 percent of folks with only a high-school education thought the president was a Muslim, versus 6 percent of people who’d been to college. Nineteen percent of evangelical Protestants buy into the Muslim myth. And, for whatever reason, Texans seem easily duped: Before the election, 23 percent of said they thought Obama was a Muslim.

But there’s something deeper than simple stupidity going on here. There is a willful ignorance pumped up by partisan impulses. Witness, of course, how the president’s full name—Barack Hussein Obama—is invoked with sarcastic mock honor from Netroots conservatives. It has become the right-wing equivalent of 1960s liberals huffing over the specter of “Richard Milhous Nixon” in the White House, with religious bigotry added for good measure.

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