A little more than six months after an unarmed Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Americans remain in many ways as divided along racial and partisan lines as they were this past autumn.
The biggest change since then — and the one point of relative consensus — is that the shooting, and the turmoil that followed, are now widely believed to have done serious harm to U.S. race relations. In a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, 45 percent of Americans say the events did major damage to race relations in the country. That’s a rise of 15 points since a November poll taken just before a grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed Brown. In the time since then, a separate grand jury has also declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer who placed Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold last summer.
–
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the poll’s methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.
