As the Black Lives Matter movement continues its fight for racial equality, public opinion on the issue of Confederate memorials and race relations has begun to change in a big way.
Director of Public Policy Polling in Raleigh, Tom Jensen, recently spoke with 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck about the trends he’s seen in public opinion — specifically over the last three years.
PPP’s most recent poll showed 47 percent of Americans are in favor of taking Confederate names off of military bases compared to 39 percent who disapprove.
In 2017, riots began in Charlottesville, Virginia when white nationalists and Neo-Nazi organizations protested the proposed removal of a statue depicting Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Three people died and over 34 were injured, with many of those coming when a self-identified white supremacist rammed his car through a crowd of counter-protesters.
At the same time, a debate raged in Chapel Hill over whether to remove the Confederate monument at UNC known as Silent Sam. The statute was ultimately torn down by protesters in 2018, but public opinion wasn’t necessarily in support of its removal at that time.
“There was a lot of polling about that specifically in North Carolina because of Silent Sam at UNC,” Jensen said. “In 2017, those polls were consistently finding people opposed by about 30 points removing Confederate memorials or removing Confederate statues and those sorts of things. By almost a two-to-one margin voters were saying — even after that poor old woman was killed in Charlottesville—that we should keep all that Confederate stuff up.”
Jensen found similar results when it came to polls on race relations, and how President Donald Trump has handled them as the Black Lives Matter movement has risen to the forefront of the country.
Even though the president’s approval rating sits at 43 percent with 54 percent disapproval, when polled on his handling of race relations he has only 40 percent approval and saw his disapproval percentage rise to 58 percent — a number which Jensen found to be surprising, thinking that Democrats could face a backlash similar to events that unfolded during the civil rights movement back in 1968.
“The thinking behind this theory is that protests across the country were what caused Richard Nixon to get elected president,” Jensen said. “We’ve actually seen public opinion go the opposite direction when it comes to Black Lives Matter and related issues.”
When it comes to dramatic shifts in public opinion like this, Jensen compared the issue to marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage — which have undergone similar changes over the last two decades.
Each of those movements moved at much slower paces, however, which might affect perception. Jensen noted only 10 percent of people in a battleground state said they think police departments should be dismantled in their current forms, a rallying cry started after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
Change is certainly on the horizon, Jensen predicted, just not as quickly as it may seem right now.
“I think it is something where public opinion is moving a lot,” Jensen said. “But some of the ideas that are coming out of this moment are still a little bit too fast for the public at large.”
To listen to Jensen’s full conversation with Aaron Keck, click here. To view polls of North Carolinians and from other states, visit Public Policy Polling’s website.
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