Meredith College is out with a poll today that finds that most North Carolina voters believe the country is more divided than it was six months ago and more than 60 percent of them say Donald Trump is to blame. (Sixty-five percent say the media is a “major reason” for the disunion as well.)

Other highlights from the survey:

  • 61 percent believe Confederate monuments should stay put, and 57 percent believe they are “important monuments to North Carolina’s past.”
  • 54 percent believe that diplomacy will prove effective in the North Korea situation, and 58 percent want to see increased sanctions. 49 percent think military action would prove at least somewhat effective.
  • 48 percent oppose President Trump’s decision to end the DACA program. Only 20 percent believe Congress should do nothing to help Dreamers.
  • 57 percent believe global warming has contributed to stronger hurricanes. 57 percent believe Trump reacted well to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma (the poll didn’t ask about Maria).
  • 33 percent say they don’t talk about politics with people who have a different opinion of Trump than they do.
  • 70 percent believe the country is more divided today than it was six months ago.

The crosstabs fall along predictable-enough lines: older white people are more likely to approve of the Confederate flag and want to deport Dreamers, while younger and nonwhite people tend to have more, shall we say, progressive feelings on those issues. So, for instance, while 70 percent of white voters, and almost 80 percent of members of the Silent generation (those born from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s), say that Confederate statues are important, more than half of black voters and almost 40 percent of millennials say they’re symbols of racism. Likewise, roughly a quarter of whites and a third of Republicans believe Trump should do “nothing” for DACA recipients, but nearly 60 percent of Hispanics and 45 percent of Democrats want Congress to create a pathway to citizenship.

As the pollsters write:

The partisan [divide] in North Carolina is reflected in the question about the direction of the country. Almost 80 percent of Democrats think the country is moving in the wrong direction, whereas Republicans are more evenly split between thinking the country is moving in the right direction v. the wrong direction.

Also, people of color in North Carolina are much more inclined to think the country is moving in the wrong direction with over 83 percent of African Americans and 75 percent of Hispanics being dissatisfied with the direction of the county, as compared to just over 60 percent of white voters.

Women, on average, are more dissatisfied with the direction of the country than are men with almost 70 percent of women indicating that they are unhappy with government and politics.

[pdf-1]