There Was No Ferguson Backlash Among Republicans

Pew Research released a survey on our growing partisan divide a few weeks ago, but I missed it while I was on vacation. Generally speaking, it says mostly what you’d expect: liberals and conservatives have both moved substantially since 2008 and are now farther apart than ever. But it’s not all bad news, and I feel like I need to put up a little ray of sunshine after my last post. So here it is. This is what happened after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson three years ago:

After Ferguson, everyone, Democrats and Republicans alike, became more likely to believe that we need to do more to address racial inequities. What’s more, after a bit of a decline, it spiked back up among Republicans after a few months of Trump.

That’s good news. Far from causing a racial backlash, Ferguson helped change minds on both sides of the aisle. And it doesn’t appear that Trump did any lasting damage to the gains among Republicans. The gap between Ds and Rs is still large, but at least everyone is moving in the right direction.

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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