Fifty-nine percent of those who support Joe Biden for president believe that white people benefit “a great deal” from advantages that black people do not have, compared to just 1 in 20 Trump backers, according to a poll released Thursday afternoon.
The study by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington concluded that supporters of the Republican president overwhelmingly do not believe whites have a significant advantage over black people.
Seventy-five percent of Trump backers said white people either do not have any or do not have “too much” of an advantage of black people, versus roughly 1 in 10 Biden backers. More than two-thirds of Trump supporters believe whites have some kind of advantage, including 43% who said their advantage was “not too much.”
Voter attitudes on race and gender are more divided in 2020 than they were in 2016, Pew found. Across all registered voters, 44% said it is harder to be a black person than a white person in America. Approximately one-third of respondents said it is a little more difficult, and 23% said it is no more difficult.
The survey was conducted two months after the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer put his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes on May 25. Protests erupted in dozens of U.S. cities nationwide, some lasting months.
The online poll was conducted among 11,001 U.S. residents, including 9,114 registered voters, and had a 1.5% margin of error for the collective group. It had a 2.4-percentage point margin of error among voters who support Trump and a 2.0-percentage point margin of error among Biden supporters.
