Could not be more on the wrong side
BY PETER HAMBY
JULY 24, 2020
... Shortly after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, the Democratic research firm Avalanche went into nine battleground states—Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, and Pennsylvania—to measure how segments of Americans were reacting to the protests. Unlike most pollsters at the time, Avalanche surveyed two large back-to-back samples of 6,986 registered and unregistered total voters — one on June 1 and a second on June 10 and 11 — allowing it to track how sentiments changed during what might have been the most consequential chapter of the protests. Like most polls, Avalanche found widespread support for the protests by June 11, with 68% of respondents saying the protesters were “completely right” or “somewhat right.” But rather than measuring responses by self-identified partisanship — Democrat, Republican, independent — Avalanche measured by vote choice. It organized respondents into five segments: Vote Trump, Lean Trump, Mixed Feelings, Lean Biden, and Vote Biden.
Avalanche found resounding support for the protests not just among Biden supporters, but among persuadable voters and even soft Trump supporters. The hardcore Vote Trump respondents were against the protests, with 56% opposing them. But among the softer Lean Trump set, an eye-opening 59% said the protesters were “completely right” or “somewhat right” — probably not what the president had in mind when he commandeered Lafayette Square. And 72% of Americans with Mixed Feelings about the presidential race—precious undecided voters—said the protesters were right too. “There’s not a lot of issues where you get even a strong majority of Americans on the same page,” said Michiah Prull, the CEO of Avalanche. “It speaks to that historic moment, and it speaks to a degree of national alignment on something that's honestly pretty rare these days.”
But just as remarkable were the shifts among those persuadables in the 10 days between June 1 and June 11, a window that opened with burning cities and Trump’s march to St. John’s Church, but concluded with mostly peaceful demonstrations nationwide. During that period Avalanche found that support for the protests grew 10 points among Mixed Feelings voters, 14 points among Lean Biden voters, and a head-spinning 25 points among Lean Trump voters. “I had never in my research career seen public opinion shift on the scale in this time frame,” Prull said. “When we look at this from electoral context, when you see a 25-point swing in Lean Trump supporters from disapproving of the protests to at least somewhat agreeing with them, that’s just a scale of public opinion shift you don’t see in this line of work very often.”
The reasons persuadables moved from opposing to supporting the protests, Prull said, can mostly be attributed to the demonstrations growing and becoming largely peaceful by their second week, with human stories of everyday police brutality saturating the media environment. Trump’s strongman performance on June 1 did almost nothing to turn public opinion against the demonstrations. Instead it likely backfired. “Between those two dates, the big driver that I see is the protests becoming larger and even more peaceful each day,” Prull told me. “The story was being told by people who are being hurt by police every day, and the empathy with that, and frankly the reasonableness of that, was breaking through. And then the president tear-gassing protestors outside the White House lawn, I think, was a nontrivial part of this. You had the draconian response of the government, and then the protests just seemed even more reasonable when it was a bunch of regular people being tear-gassed in the middle of Washington D.C. for the sake of a photo op” ...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/polling-trumps-protest-response-could-cost-him-2020
