Why Most Americans Support the Protests
Beyond the scenes of protest and resistance playing out in cities across the country, a movement of a different sort has taken hold.
The American public’s views on the pervasiveness of racism have taken a hard leftward turn over the past few years. Never before in the history of modern polling have Americans expressed such widespread agreement that racial discrimination plays a role in policing — and in society at large.
Driven by the Black Lives Matter movement, this shift has primed the country for a new groundswell — one that has quickly earned the sympathy of most Americans, polling shows. As a result, in less than two weeks, it has already forced local governments and national politicians to make tangible policy commitments.
In a Monmouth University poll released this week, 76% of Americans — including 71% of white people — called racism and discrimination “a big problem” in the United States. That’s a 26-percentage-point spike since 2015. In the poll, 57% of Americans said demonstrators’ anger was fully justified, and another 21% called it somewhat justified.
In the Monmouth poll and in another released this week by CBS News, exactly 57% of Americans said police officers were generally more likely to treat black people unfairly than to mistreat white people. In both surveys, about half of white people said so. This was a drastic change, particularly for white Americans, who have not historically said they believed that black people continued to face pervasive discrimination....
In 2009, the year President Barack Obama took office, just 36% of white Americans said the country needed to do more to ensure that black people gained equal rights, according to a Pew Research Center poll. By 2017, four years after the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, that number had leapt to 54% of white people and roughly 3 in 5 Americans overall.
Sixty-one percent of the country in that poll said it supported Black Lives Matter....
(journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin Douglas) McLeod said that as videos showing police brutality against black people have appeared relentlessly on social media, they have helped persuade skeptical Americans that an endemic problem exists.
“When these things accumulate over time, and we start to see more and more of these images, the evidence starts to become more incontrovertible,” he said.
A Youth Movement — With Broad Appeal
The current round of protests is youth-led, and so too, to some degree, is the shift in nationwide sentiment. Millennials and members of Generation Z are far more likely to say they believe police are prone to racist behavior....
A Pew survey in 2018 also found a stark generational divide over whether NFL players were right to kneel in protest of racial inequality. Among millennials and teenagers in Generation Z, more than 3 in 5 expressed approval of the protests; among baby boomers and other older Americans, an equally large share said they disapproved.
Similar trends play out specifically among young black people and other people of color, who express a greater desire for sweeping change and a more unanimous suspicion of police. In a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll of African Americans, among respondents 35 and younger, 9 out of 10 said they did not trust police to treat people of all races equally — higher than in any other age group....
The Trump Effect
... A similar trend has occurred over the past few years with regard to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for enforcing the country’s immigration laws. It has become the least popular federal agency, according to data from the Pew Research Center.
In a March poll, Americans were just as likely to disapprove of the agency as they were to approve. Of the other nine agencies Pew asked about, none had less than 60% approval....
As he (Trump) embraces harsh tactics against protesters and seeks to label many of those fighting for racial justice as “domestic terrorists,” he has helped force a commitment one way or the other. And for the moment, a large and growing majority appears to be choosing the other side.
The Public Religion Research Institute was in the midst of a nationwide poll last week when the first protests broke out over George Floyd’s killing. The group’s researchers found that as demonstrations ramped up, Trump’s favorability rating fell significantly among certain key voting groups.
In the first three days of the poll, May 26-28, 40% of political independents expressed a positive view of the president; in interviews conducted over the three days that followed — starting May 29, when Trump tweeted, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — his approval among independents dropped to 30%. Among white Christians, the dip was 11 points. Among seniors, his rating fell especially hard: from 58% to 41%.
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