POLITICS
10/13/2017 05:33 pm ET

The NFL Protesters Are Getting Their Message Across

Even if many Americans still don’t like how they’re doing it.

Michael Zagaris via Getty Images
The San Francisco 49ers kneel and stand together while the national anthem plays prior to their game against the Indianapolis Colts on Oct. 8.
The NFL players who have been kneeling during the national anthem as a way to protest police brutality aren’t winning any new fans, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds. But they are, increasingly, making their point to the public.
Asked to identify from a list the main reason for the players are protesting from a list, a 57 percent majority of Americans surveyed said it was in response to “police violence.” That’s up from 48 percent in a HuffPost/YouGov poll taken in late September. (Respondents were allowed to select multiple options.)
The percentage of self-described football fans who say they believe the protests are meant to target police violence has risen to 66 percent, a 13-point increase.
Just 26 percent of the public now considers the protests to be in large part against President Donald Trump, down from 40 percent in the previous survey. As before, relatively few ― 14 percent in the latest poll, and 12 percent in September ― agree with the Trump administration’s assertions that the protests are aimed at the American flag.
HuffPost
Notably, even people who don’t support the protests have grown more likely to see them as a response to police violence. And Trump voters, who in late September were more likely to see the protests as anti-Trump than anything else, also now say they’re mostly about police brutality.
Americans’ overall opinions of the protests and Trump’s response to them have remained both unsparing and basically stagnant, according to the poll. They say, 49 percent to 36 percent, that the protests are inappropriate, effectively unchanged from the earlier survey.
A 52 percent majority currently disapproves of Trump’s response to the protests, with 38 percent approving. In the previous poll, those numbers stood at 54 percent and 36 percent, respectively.
The public takes a more positive view of the actions of Vice President Mike Pence, who left an NFL game between the Indianapolis Colts and the San Francisco 49ers last weekend after several 49ers players knelt during the anthem. Forty-five percent of those polled approve of Pence’s decision to leave the game, with 41 percent disapproving.
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