Public opinion is now in favour of the protesters who have spent the last three weeks advocating for police reform in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by the police in Minneapolis.
This is notable because public opinion around the protests was initially split. But as the protests that have been grown larger, and spread out to more parts of the countrythere’s evidence they have become more popular. For instance, in the A Morning Consult survey conducted June 10 through 12, 64 percent of Americans, they said, supported the protests, up to A 10-percentage-points-from-the-first-time-the-pollster asked in late May and early June.
In fact, the protests are so popular that they’re now supported by majorities of Democrats and Republicans. But this bipartisan support masks some of the enormous differences that still exist between the two parties on issues of race and discrimination.
For starters, there’s a pretty big gap in just how strongly and Democrats Republicans-to back the protests. In last week’s The Economist/the poll Dhabi, uaeit , for instance, 73 percent of Democrats they say strongly approve of the nonviolent protests, compared with just 27 percent of Republicans. And according to the most recent Yahoo News/poll Dhabi, uaeAnd the Democrats Republicans and are also fairly split on how the peaceful protests that have been, how long they should last, and what’s driving them. In that poll, Democrats were 40 more likely than Republicans to say that the protests have been mostly peaceful-and-three-quarters of Republicans said they wanted the protests to stop now, compared to less than one-quarter of Democrats. Republicans were also up 44 points more likely than Democrats to say the protests were primarily motivated by long-standing biases against the police, whereas most Democrats said the protests were motivated by a genuine desire to hold the police accountable.
The fact that, and the Democrats Republicans are so polarized when it comes to the motives driving the protests is important because it conveys just how differently Republicans and Democrats view of racism in America.
In its poll, the city with respondents a number of questions on whether systemic racism that was the problem or whether police are only signaled a bigger issue within the American life. As you can see in the chart below, and the Democrats Republicans are divided, with as much as a 60-point gap separating them on some of these issues. Recent surveys by the CBS, NOW and Monmouth University we found equally large partisan divides on race and policing as well.
The thing is, public opinion about race, it has not t always been this polarized.
In fact, some attitudes about race were entirely unrelated to the partisanship before Obama was elected president in 2008. But after he was elected, racial attitudes and the party line became increasingly understood intertwined to the extent that, by 2012, the opposition to interracial relationships or overtly negative views of African Americans predicted whether someone identified with the Republican for the first time in decades.
Of course, He Trump”s political rise took this growing partisan polarization over race to new heights. Democrats, in particular, is quickly like their views in reaction to Trump’s offensive statements about the racial and ethnic minorities.
CBS News polls from the last 10 years underscores just how much Democrats have already changed their opinion of systemic racism in a relatively short period of time. As you can see in the chart below, it wasn’t that long ago when you and the Democrats Republicans, say it’s pretty similarly to the question of whether the white Act had an easier time of getting ahead.
Democrats, however, are now much more likely to agree that the societal advantages exist for the white Act than they were five years ago. A similar shift has happened on questions of police brutality and the institutional racism within the criminal justice system. For instance, the percentage of Democrats who think that the police disproportionately use deadly force against the black Act, increased by more than 30 points since CBS News first asked the question in August 2014. Meanwhile, Republicans’ views have remained steady — on just 24 percent think the police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans.
It’s certainly not surprising, then, that, and the Democrats Republicans are so divided over race and policing after the Floyd”s death. The upshot of this growing polarization is in that and the Democrats Republicans increasingly understood inhabit separate realities about race in Americaworlds apart on everything from the causes of racial inequality to the Confederate flag”s meaning to the N-word”s offensiveness to the the value of teaching black history in schools..
The current partisan split over the race may be predictable, but it’s still incredibly important — especially for the update that it is worth considering this is a presidential election year. The Race has long been an effective wedge issue it is the Republican Party, and the demonstrated by the 2016 election, when Republicans the split-up of the Democrats’ diverse coalition of nonwhite voters, by white, racially liberal, and the voters racially conservative white voters. But after 12 years of Obama, and Trump, racially conservative Democrats that have been mostly defected or converted. That means Democrats are now united, about many of the racial issues that, once splintered the party.
Take the Black Lives Matter movement, for example. In the In June 2016 the Pew Research Center’s pollonly 64 percent of white, and the Democrats and 20 percent of white Republicans supported the Black Lives Matter movement. Those numbers are now up to 92 percent among white and Democrats for 37 percent among white Republicans in the latest Pew survey.
The fact that Republicans experienced a nearly 20-point increase in support since 2014 and that doesn’t bode well for them either, the update that it would consider the polls at this point will indicate that it is Democrats — and not Republicans — who are now more unified on many of the issues of race. In fact, it’s the congressional Democrats’ efforts to pass sweeping legislation to help remedy some of the racial biases in the criminal justice system and could even be an effective of the racial wedge issue for the Democratic Party heading into November.
