While racial tensions have existed in the United States for centuries, 2020 has seen unprecedented protests under the Black Lives Matter banner and race has been the center of clashes between protesters, militias, police, and the president.
These tensions may weigh President Trump down in the upcoming election as voters, specifically Black and Hispanic voters, believe his challenger Joe Biden would be the better man to handle the issue of race in America. A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll finds when it comes to who would do a better job handling race relations, a slim majority of voters give the edge to Biden (53%) while only 31% say Trump would do a better job.
White voters are closely divided on whether Biden (43%) or Trump (37%) would be better on race relations, minority voters are firmly behind the Democratic candidate. Black voters (85%) are nearly twice as likely White voters to say Biden would be better for race relations. Likewise, three in four Hispanic voters (75%) believe Biden would perform better on the issue of race relations.
Voters seem to view race relations as President Trump’s biggest weakness. When considering other key issues such as the economy, the coronavirus pandemic, and crime, likely voters are least likely to say President Trump would do a better job on the issue of race relations. They rate the president highest on how he would handle the economy (42%) but even in that perception, Trump trails Biden by five percentage points.
See the toplines and crosstabs from this week’s Yahoo News/YouGov Poll
Methodology: The Yahoo! News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,583 U.S. registered voters interviewed online between October 16 – 18, 2020. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, as well as 2016 Presidential vote, registration status, geographic region, and news interest. The margin of error for the sample was 4.0%.
Image: Getty
