A year after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., erupted in violence leading to the death of a counterprotester, a new poll released Wednesday shows that a majority of voters believe race relations have become worse since President Trump was elected.
Fifty-five percent said race relations have worsened under Trump, while 16 percent said they have improved, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll. Another 18 percent said there has been no change.
Among white voters, 51 percent said race relations have gotten worse, but that view is shared by a larger majority of African-American voters (79 percent) and Hispanics (60 percent).
Broken down by political party, 82 percent of self-identified Democrats said things have gotten worse, compared to 4 percent who say they are better and 9 percent who say they haven’t changed.
But 35 percent of Republican voters believe relations have gotten better, 25 percent say they’ve gotten worse and 29 percent say they’ve stayed the same.
The poll was conducted a year after protests over the removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee rocked Charlottesville.
Trump reacted to the mayhem by saying there were “some very fine people on both sides.”
Heather Heyer, 32, was killed Aug. 12 when a Nazi sympathizer plowed his car into a crowd of demonstrators protesting the gathering of white supremacists.
Looking at race relations under former President Barack Obama, voters were split at 37 percent over whether they got better or worse. Seventeen percent said they didn’t change.
Under former President George W. Bush, 16 percent of voters said relations got better — the same percentage as with Trump — and 16 percent said they got worse.
The poll was conducted between Aug. 2 and 6 and surveyed 1,994 registered voters. It has a plus or minus 2 percentage-point margin of error.




