Wearying of protests, some Republicans wary of support

Most Americans continue to support the nationwide protests against racial injustice, but with President Donald Trump issuing an ever-more-combative barrage of attacks, new polling shows some Republicans have grown wary of demonstrators’ demands and retreated toward saying that racism is not a big problem in the United States.

At the start of June, many polls showed the emergence of a rare consensus around calls for racial justice and changes to policing, with a majority of Republicans joining other Americans in saying racial discrimination is a big issue for the country.

But a Monmouth University survey released recently found that at the end of last month, just 40% of Republicans still said racism was a big problem, a drop of 15 percentage points.

And while close to 4 in 10 Republicans told Monmouth researchers at the start of last month that protesters’ anger was justified, that number fell by more than half in the new poll, with just 15% of Republicans saying so. A majority of Democrats and independents continued to say that the demonstrators’ grievances were fully justified.

Overall, a wide majority of Americans across age, gender and race said they thought the Black Lives Matter movement had brought attention to real racial disparities in the country — and most said they expected the current protest movement to have a positive impact on race relations.

Republicans were the only major subgroup to be about evenly split on the legitimacy and likely effects of the protests. Forty-nine percent of Republicans told Monmouth researchers that Black Lives Matter had shined a light on real problems; 47% said it hadn’t.

But even if many Republicans have been receptive to Trump’s messaging, just 43% said that his handling of the protests had made things better, while another 45% said it had either made things worse or had no impact.

Glen Bolger, a longtime Republican pollster, said that he saw some Republicans’ heightened aversion as the natural result of what they are seeing in the news. “It’s becoming a partisan issue, and that’s clearly a shame, but there’s not a lot of sympathy for the people who are blowing things up or looting stores” or taking down monuments to the country’s founding fathers, he said.

But Bolger said Democrats had shown a surprising ability to avoid being painted as extreme on one particular issue: calls to “defund the police.”

This has become the major rallying cry at protests, with activists pushing for a scaling-down of the police presence in municipalities across the country and a greater investment in social services. While some Democrats — including Joe Biden, the party’s presumptive nominee for president — have distanced themselves from the language, many prominent progressives have proudly embraced it.

Trump and other Republicans have seized on this phrase, believing most voters will find it alienating and extreme.

But the Monmouth poll’s results, along with similar data from other surveys, don’t bode well for this messaging. An overwhelming share of Americans told Monmouth’s interviewers that understood the phrase as a demand to change the way police departments operate, not a push to eliminate the police altogether.