By Chris Megerian | The Associated Press

February 24, 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans are starkly divided by race on the importance of President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, with white Americans far less likely to be highly enthusiastic about the idea than Black Americans — and especially Black women.

That’s according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that shows 48% of Americans say it’s not important to them personally that a Black woman becomes a Supreme Court Justice. Another 23% say that’s somewhat important, and 29% say it’s very or extremely important. Only two Black men have served on the nation’s highest court, and no Black women have ever been nominated.

The poll shows Biden’s pledge is resonating with Black Americans, 63% of whom say it’s very or extremely important to them personally that a Black woman serves on the court, compared with just 21% of white Americans and 33% of Hispanics. The findings come as Biden finalizes his pick to fill the seat that is being vacated by Stephen Breyer, who announced his retirement last month.

“While I’ve been studying candidates’ backgrounds and writings, I’ve made no decisions except one: The person I will nominate will be someone with extraordinary qualifications, character, experience and integrity, and that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court,” Biden said in his remarks on Breyer’s impending retirement. “It’s long overdue, in my view.”

Black women are particularly moved by the idea, with 70% placing high importance on the nomination, compared to 54% of Black men.

Diana White, a 76-year-old Democrat from Hanley Hills, Missouri, said Biden wouldn’t choose someone if “she didn’t have the potential and the professionalism and the knowledge to do the job.”

White, who is Black, said making a groundbreaking nomination could be inspirational to younger people.

“That’s what I think about, things for other people to look forward to later in life,” she said.

Any enthusiasm that could be generated by Biden’s nomination could benefit his party in this year’s midterm elections, when Democrats risk losing control of Congress. So far Biden has struggled to deliver on other goals for the Black community, such as police reform legislation and voting rights protections.

Some 91% of Black voters backed Biden in the 2020 presidential election, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of the electorate.

But recent polls suggest Biden’s approval rating has dipped substantially among Black Americans since the first half of 2021, when about 9 in 10 approved of how he was handling his job. The new poll shows that his approval among Black Americans stands at 67%.

Jarvis Goode, a 35-year-old Democrat from LaGrange, Georgia, agreed that it’s “overdue” to have a Black woman on the court.

Goode, who is Black, said he hopes the nomination would provide further proof that “women can do the same as men.”

Biden first promised to choose a Black women for the Supreme Court when he was running for president. According to a person familiar with the process, he’s interviewed at least three candidates for the position — judges Ketanji Brown Jackson, J. Michelle Childs and Leondra Kruger — and he’s expected to announce his decision next week.

The poll shows that most Democrats say a Black woman on the court is at least somewhat important, though only half think it’s very important. Among Republicans, about 8 in 10 say it’s not important.

John Novak, a 52-year-old Republican from Hudson, Wisconsin, said he disliked Biden’s pledge to choose a Black woman, saying there’s too much focus on “checking boxes” when it comes to nominating people.

“It should have been stated that we’re going to pick the best candidate who is going to follow the Constitution,” said Novak, who is white. “And then throw in that we’d like her to be a woman and woman of color.”

There’s been a mixed reaction from Republican elected officials.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, described Biden’s promise as “offensive” because it sends a message to most Americans that “I don’t give a damn about you, you are ineligible.”

However, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said it did not bother him, and he noted that President Donald Trump and President Ronald Reagan had promised to nominate women for the Supreme Court.

“I heard a couple of people say they thought it was inappropriate for the president to announce he was going to put an African American woman on the court. Honestly, I did not think that was inappropriate,” said McConnell said during a Tuesday event in his home state.

The poll found that Americans’ faith in the Supreme Court continues to wane. Only 21% said they have a great deal of confidence in the high court, while 24% said they have hardly any confidence. The latter number has risen somewhat from 17% in September 2020, the last time the question was asked.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,289 adults was conducted Feb. 18-21 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

By Calvin Woodward and Zeke Miller | The Associated Press
February 28, 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — In good times or bad, American presidents come to Congress with a diagnosis that hardly differs over the decades. In their State of the Union speeches, they declare “the state of our union is strong” or words very much like it.

President Joe Biden’s fellow Americans, though, have other ideas about the state they’re in and little hope his State of the Union address Tuesday night can turn anything around.

America’s strength is being sharply tested from within — and now from afar — as fate, overnight, made Biden a wartime president in someone else’s conflict, leading the West’s response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine that makes all the other problems worse.

The state of the union is disunity and division. It’s a state of exhaustion from the pandemic. It’s about feeling gouged at the grocery store and gas pump. It’s so low that some Americans, including prominent ones, are exalting Russian President Vladimir Putin in his attack on a democracy.

Measures of happiness have hit a bottom, with fewer Americans saying they are very happy in the 2021 General Social Survey than ever before in five decades of asking them.

This is what a grand funk looks like.

Biden will step up to the House speaker’s rostrum to address a nation in conflict with itself. The country is litigating how to keep kids safe and what to teach them, weary over orders to wear masks, bruised over an ignominious end to one war, in Afghanistan, and suddenly plenty worried about Russian expansionism. A speech designed to discuss the commonwealth will be delivered to a nation that is having increasing difficulty finding much of anything in common.

Even now, a large segment of the country still clings to the lie that the last election was stolen.

THAT ‘M’ WORD

Four decades ago, President Jimmy Carter confronted a national “crisis of confidence” in a speech describing a national malaise without using that word. But Vice President Kamala Harris did when she told an interviewer last month “there is a level of malaise” in this country.

Today’s national psyche is one of fatigue and frustration — synonyms for the malaise of the 1970s. But the divides run deeper and solutions may be more elusive than the energy crisis, inflation and sense of drift of that time.

Take today’s climate of discourse. It’s “so cold,” said Rachel Hoopes, a charity executive in Des Moines, Iowa, who voted for Biden. “It’s hard to see how him talking to us can break through when so many people can’t talk to each other.”

It’s as if Americans need group therapy more than a set-piece speech to Congress.

“We have to feel good about ourselves before we can move forward,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show.”

Yet in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s attack last week, a long-absent reflex kicked back in as members of Congress projected unity behind the president, at least for the moment, in the confrontation with Moscow. “We’re all together at this point,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said, “and we need to be together about what should be done.”

Politics didn’t stop at the water’s edge but it paused. Though not at Mar-a-Lago’s ocean edge in Florida, where Donald Trump praised Putin’s “savvy,” “genius” move against the country that entangled the defeated American president in his first impeachment trial.

PICK YOUR POISON

White House officials acknowledge that the mood of the country is “sour,” but say they are also encouraged by data showing people’s lives are better off than a year ago. They say the national psyche is a “trailing indicator” and will improve with time.

Biden, in his speech, will highlight the improvements from a year ago — particularly on COVID and the economy — but also acknowledge that the job is not yet done, in recognition of the fact that many Americans don’t believe it.

A year into Biden’s presidency, polling indeed finds that he faces a critical and pessimistic public. Only 29% of Americans think the nation is on the right track, according to the February poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

In December’s AP-NORC poll, most said economic conditions are poor and inflation has hit them on food and gas. After two years of a pandemic that has killed more than 920,000 in the U.S., majorities put masks back on and avoided travel and crowds in January in the sweep of the omicron variant. Now, finally, a sustained drop in infections appears to be underway.

Most Americans are vaccinated against COVID-19, but debates over masks and mandates have torn apart communities and families.

With Biden so hemmed in by hardened politics, it’s difficult to imagine a single speech altering the public’s perception, said Julia Helm, 52, a Republican county auditor from the suburbs west of Des Moines.

“He’s got a lot of stuff on his plate,” she said. “You know what could change how people feel? And pretty fast? What they pay at the pump. I hate to say it. But gas prices really are the barometer.”

Biden suggested last summer that high inflation was a temporary inconvenience. But it’s snowballed in recent months into a defining challenge of his presidency, alongside, now, the threat of geopolitical instability from Russia’s attack on its neighbor.

Consumer prices over the past 12 months jumped 7.5%, the highest since 1982, as many pay raises were swallowed up and dreams of home ownership or even a used car became prohibitively expensive.

Inflation was a side effect of an economy running hot after the economically devastating first chapters of the pandemic, when Biden achieved the kind of growth that Presidents Barack Obama and Trump could not deliver.

The prime engine for both the gains and the inflation appears to be Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which pushed down the unemployment rate to a healthy 4% while boosting economic growth to 5.7% last year — the best performance since 1984.

SINKING POLLS

Still, voters have largely overlooked those gains as inflation bit. The February AP-NORC poll found that more people disapproved than approved of how Biden is handling his job as president, 55% to 44%.

That was a reversal from early in his presidency. As recently as July, about 60% said they approved of Biden in AP-NORC polls.

After four years of Trump’s provocations from the White House, Hoopes, 38, the Des Moines charity executive, finds Biden to be a “nonthreatening” leader, a “decent person, someone it seems you could talk to.”

“He seems to be a quiet decision-maker,” she said. “But I don’t know if that’s good or bad for him or the country right now.”

The most she could say about Biden’s State of the Union speech is that “it can’t hurt.”

That’s about the most that historians say about it, too.

THE SPEECH

If State of the Union addresses are remembered at all, it’s generally because feathers were ruffled on a night of tradition and forced comity: Obama admonishing the Supreme Court justices seated in front of him for their ruling on campaign finance laws in 2010; Justice Samuel Alito mouthing “not true” in response, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., ripping up Trump’s speech in disgust in 2020.

In 2009, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., was reprimanded by fellow Republicans and lacerated by Democrats for shouting “you lie” at Obama when he spoke to Congress about his health care plan.

“Inaugural addresses sometimes do have an impact because they are big picture, far horizon speeches,” said political scientist Cal Jillson of Southern Methodist University. “State of the Unions rarely do because they tend to be listy rather than thematic.”

Among presidents of the last half century, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and Trump repeatedly declared “the state of our union is strong” while Bush’s father took a pass and Gerald Ford confessed: “I must say to you that the state of the union is not good.”

Trump being Trump and Clinton being Clinton, both additionally claimed that the state of the union had never been stronger than on the nights they said it.

Whatever diagnostic phrase Biden chooses, his task is to promote an agenda and plausibly claim credit for positive developments over the last year “without a ‘mission accomplished’ moment,” Jillson said. “That’s delicate. It’s delicate to claim credit for the economic recovery … and still acknowledge people’s pains and fears.”

Biden comes to Congress with some missions actually accomplished, like his historic infrastructure package, as well big dreams deferred.

He still wants to “Build Back Better.” In the funk of these times, Americans just seem to want someone to wake them up when it’s all over.

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Associated Press writers Josh Boak, Emily Swanson and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington and Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

By Michael Rubinkam and Hannah Fingerhut | The Associated Press

February 28, 2022

Omicron is fading away, and so are Americans’ worries about COVID-19.

As coronavirus pandemic case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths continue to plummet, fewer people now than in January say they are concerned that they will be infected after the rise and fall of the wildly contagious virus variant, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Just 24% say they are “extremely” or “very” worried about themselves or a family member contracting COVID-19, down from 36% in both December and January, when omicron caused a massive spike in infections and taxed public health systems. Another 34% say they are somewhat worried. More than 140,000 deaths in the U.S. have been attributed to COVID-19 since omicron became the dominant strain of the coronavirus in mid-December.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, trucking dispatcher Erica Martinez said she let down her guard last summer, before the deadly delta variant took hold, then “stopped doing a lot of the social stuff” when cases spiked again during successive waves of delta and omicron. Now, with virus numbers falling rapidly, she said she is more comfortable about socializing than she has been in months.

“I feel like the country is desperately trying to recover from the last two years,” said Martinez, 36. “I think there will always be new variants popping up, left and right. I think, sadly, this is going to be the new norm for society,” with people taking fewer or more precautions as cases ebb and flow.

That’s a widespread attitude; most Americans think the virus will stick around as a mild illness, according to a January AP-NORC poll. Just 15% think COVID-19 will largely be eliminated when the pandemic is over.

Signs the nation is ready to move on from the biggest COVID-19 wave to date are everywhere. Statewide mask mandates have all but disappeared, and on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it’s no longer recommending indoor masking for most Americans, based on current data.

Cities are lifting vaccine requirements to enter bars, restaurants and entertainment venues. Companies are bringing workers back to the office. California said it’s taking an “endemic” approach to the virus that leans on prevention and swift containment of outbreaks.

“I think it’s reasonable and appropriate for people to live their lives a little more as the risk of infection goes down but to do it in a way that recognizes that, at some point, we’re going to have another wave,” said Dr. David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “And we’re going to need to be willing to buckle down just a little bit in the future.”

Worries about infection have dipped among both vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans. Still, roughly two-thirds of vaccinated Americans say they are at least somewhat worried about COVID-19 infection. About 4 in 10 unvaccinated Americans say the same.

Amie Adkins, of Gassaway, West Virginia, who is unvaccinated, said she was “surrounded” by omicron but never worried about getting it, counting on a mask and good hygiene to protect herself. Data shows unvaccinated people are at much higher risk for serious illness and death than people who got the shot.

“Even after all that, if we’re going to get something, we’re going to get it, and there’s nothing we can do about. So there’s no use worrying about it,” said Adkins, a 43-year-old stay-at-home mom.

Public support for masking requirements also has ticked down, though Americans are still more likely to favor than oppose requiring masks in public, 50% to 28%, in the new poll. In August 2021, 55% were in favor. Support was much higher, at roughly three-quarters of the public, in 2020.

George Reeves, an 83-year-old semiretired electrical engineer in Raleigh, North Carolina, said his mask might soon come off.

“It’s a risk-reward kind of thing,” said Reeves, who is vaccinated. “There’s some guesswork involved, but is it worth the hassle? Probably pretty soon it won’t be worth the hassle of messing with masks.”

More broadly, concern about the spread of infectious diseases as a threat to the U.S. has fallen sharply from a clear majority just six months ago, according to the poll.

About half of Americans now say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the threat posed by infectious diseases, down from roughly two-thirds in August. Still, only about 2 in 10 are not concerned.

The current level of concern is similar to an AP-NORC poll in January 2019, well before the global pandemic.

Dave Pitts, a computer engineer and college math and science tutor in Denver, is vaccinated, doesn’t socialize much and wears a mask when he goes out, so he’s not that worried about getting COVID-19. But Pitts — who spent three miserable weeks battling influenza in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic — predicts infectious disease will continue to pose a huge threat to the country.

He worries about a new, even deadlier variant of the coronavirus.

“I think we’re in a better position now, but I think the minute spring break hits, we’re going to see something worse show up,” he said. “I think humanity’s too dumb to be free of this just yet.”

The U.S. is still reporting about 66,000 new, confirmed infections per day as the pandemic enters its third year.

In North Carolina, Reeves’ restaurant gift certificates have been collecting dust for two years. He said that will soon change as the virus eases its grip.

“After getting vaccinated, the probability of a bad result is really low. I’m reasonably well protected,” he said.

Martinez, the Nebraska transportation dispatcher, said she looks forward to “actually taking a vacation now, a vacation to try to feel as normal as possible. Maybe Mexico. Mexico sounds wonderful right now.”

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,289 adults was conducted Feb. 18-21 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

By Nicholas Riccardi and Hannah Fingerhut | The Associated Press

March 10, 2022

DENVER (AP) — Majorities of Americans in both major parties think voting rules in their states are appropriate and support a voter identification law, but Democrats are increasingly worried about progress in voting rights for Black Americans.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed voting was the only one of eight subjects — including education and treatment by police — in which fewer Americans now than four years ago said African Americans had achieved significant progress since the civil rights era. Concern about a lack of progress is much higher for Democrats, 86% of whom believe more must be done to secure racial equality in voting rights, compared with 40% of Republicans.

That’s a reflection of the continuing partisan fight over election procedures that spawned more restrictive laws in 19 GOP-controlled states last year.

“I’m concerned that the more conservative elements are attempting to create a Jim Crow 2,” said Richard Barnett, a retired attorney who volunteered as an election judge in his Chicago suburb, echoing the term President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat, used to attack the new Republican laws. “They’re making it hard for ‘the other’ people to vote to consolidate their power.”

Still, even Democrats are fairly happy with the voting laws in their own states — red and blue. About 3 out of 4 Americans think the laws in their states are “about right,” according to the poll.

Recoa Russell, a 67-year-old retired machine operator in Mobile, Alabama, who is Black, lives in a state with some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country. But he said the rules there “work well. Just show your ID and pull the lever.”

Indeed, voter identification is the most popular of a series of voting reforms in the poll, with 70% favoring requiring photo identification before casting a ballot. Smaller majorities were in favor of automatic voter registration of eligible citizens and sending mail ballots to all registered voters, two top Democratic priorities. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to support the voter ID law, 87% to 55%.

The poll illustrates why Democrats have had such problems in their push for a federal overhaul of voting laws. An attempt to pass sweeping election changes stalled in the Senate earlier this year amid unanimous Republican opposition. For months, Democrats hesitated to even bring the bill to a vote because they couldn’t get their entire 50-member Senate caucus to agree to it.

One of the bill’s provisions would have banned partisan gerrymandering, or the contorted redrawing of legislative lines to make it easier for one party’s representatives to win elections. The poll found that 69% of Americans believe that’s a major problem, with Democrats more likely than Republicans to say so, 80% to 58%. The GOP had great success in the prior round of redistricting and has pushed to lessen legal oversight of the once-a-decade drawing of legislative lines.

Lisa Thomas worries about gerrymandering. The 48-year-old janitor in Lakeland, Florida, believes the Republicans who control her state government have been drawing lines to weaken the votes of African Americans like her. She links it to changes in the state’s voting laws implemented by the GOP last year even though Republicans touted Florida’s system as an example of a well-run election system.

Thomas, who says she leans Democratic but is an independent and hungers for more viable parties, dismissed arguments that voter identification laws hurt minorities because they have a harder time getting a government ID. “There are a lot of situations where you have to show who you are,” she said.

Although she likes Florida’s voting laws, she’s worried that the changes — new procedures for mail ballots and limitations on drop boxes where they can be deposited — will ruin things. “It seems like in the past several years, it’s been going the opposite direction, it’s reversing,” she said of progress on voting rights for African Americans.

Just 32% of Black Americans say there has been significant progress in racial equality in voting rights since the civil rights era, compared with 52% of white Americans. Majorities of Black and white Americans say more needs to be done, but Black Americans are much more likely to say a lot more is needed, 57% to 29% of whites who feel that way.

Thomas, like roughly three-quarters of all Americans regardless of party, also worries about the future of the country’s democratic system. “We’re still a two-party system, and they both fail us on a daily basis,” she said.

Peggy Orr, 66, who lives in rural Nebraska, is also concerned, but for very different reasons. She’s convinced there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, echoing former President Donald Trump’s false claims that that is why he lost.

Repeated audits and investigations have shown no widespread fraud in the election, but Orr, who described her profession as “a farm wife,” isn’t satisfied. “There were too many unexplained things going on,” she said.

Orr, who is white, was baffled at the concerns Thomas and others have about Black Americans’ voting rights.

“I think African American voting rights — just like women’s voting rights — are settled,” Orr said. “We don’t make a big issue about women having a hard time voting.”

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,289 adults was conducted Feb. 18-21 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

By Aaron Morrison and Hannah Fingerhut | The Associated Press

March 15, 2022

NEW YORK (AP) — Few Americans believe there has been significant progress over the last 50 years in achieving equal treatment for Black people in dealings with police and the criminal justice system.

Most Americans across racial and ethnic groups say more progress is necessary, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. But Black Americans, many whom may have held hope in Democrats’ promises on racial justice initiatives in 2020, are especially pessimistic that any more progress will be made in the coming years.

Overall, only about a quarter of Americans say there has been a great deal or a lot of progress in achieving racial equality in policing and criminal justice. Roughly another third say there’s been “some” progress. An overwhelming majority of adults say more progress is needed for racial equality, including about half who say “a lot” more.

“There’s more attention around certain issues and there’s a realization — more people are waking up to a lot of corruption in the system,” said Derek Sims, a 35-year-old bus driver in Austin, Texas, who is Black. He considers himself more optimistic than pessimistic that change will happen.

However, Sims said: “People don’t really want to come together and hash out ideas. There’s just too much tribalism.”

Among those who think more progress is needed on achieving fair treatment for Black Americans by police, 31% say they are optimistic about that happening in the next few years, while 38% are pessimistic. Roughly another third say they hold neither opinion.

Only 20% of Black Americans who think more needs to be done are optimistic; 49% are pessimistic.

The AP-NORC poll results reflect what some criminal justice advocates have warned elected leaders about for more than a year: that unless something definitive is done soon to begin transforming police and the criminal justice system, it could become more difficult to mobilize dissatisfied Black voters in the midterm elections.

And already, Democrats’ pivot to the center on racial justice issues has given advocates pause. During his first State of the Union address earlier this month, President Joe Biden said the answer to reported rises in violent crime “is not to defund the police.”

“The answer is to fund the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities,” Biden said in remarks that have been seen as a clear disavowal of some Black Lives Matter activists’ rhetoric.

In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, many Americans across racial and ethnic backgrounds called for criminal justice reforms in nationwide protests. On Capitol Hill, consensus on reforms, via the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, has not been reached nearly two years later.

“What we saw from the George Floyd case, we in the Black community know that those officers were found guilty because of the outcry,” DeAnna Hoskins, president and CEO of JustLeadershipUSA, a New York-based nonprofit criminal justice reform advocacy group, told the AP.

“The only reason why you get results is because there was an outcry that included Black and white people. You’ve got a much larger voter base saying something has to be done,” she said.

Due to vastly different lived experiences, it’s been harder to get Americans across racial and ethnic groups to sustain their outcries and demand an end to systemic racism, Hoskins added.

The poll shows there is common ground on the issue across racial and ethnic groups, but also suggests there is urgency felt among Black Americans more than white Americans. More white Americans than Black Americans say there has already been significant progress toward racial equality in policing, 30% vs. 10%. Among Black Americans, 40% say there has been no progress at all.

And while at least three-quarters of white and Black Americans say more progress is needed, Black Americans are much more likely than white Americans to say a lot more needs to be done, 70% vs. 47%.

Last year marked 50 years since a war on drugs was declared in America. The bipartisan public policy at the federal and state levels saw the nation’s incarceration rate skyrocket to the highest in the industrialized world. Black Americans, in particular, bore the brunt of police militarization and laws that imposed mandatory minimum prison terms.

There were also post-incarceration consequences, such as losing the right to vote, being barred from public housing and certain college financial aid programs, and struggling to find employment with a felony record.

Compared with views on policing and criminal justice, Americans are more likely to think there has been significant progress over the last 50 years in achieving equal treatment for Black Americans in political representation, access to good education, access to good health care and access to good jobs. And there’s more pessimism about progress over the next few years in policing and criminal justice than in the other areas.

Heydy Maldonado, 30, blames how crime is covered by TV and print news outlets — which she said often frame violence in a way that suggests it is only endemic to Black and Hispanic communities — for the lack of hope in reforms.

“We get targeted,” said Maldonado, whose family is Honduran and Salvadoran. “I’m sure there’s more crime out there, and it’s not just our race, it’s not just people of color. It’s an ongoing battle.”

“I do feel like we need to be united and speak to each other and keep fighting for change,” she added. “Eventually, hopefully, this could all be a thing of the past.”

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,289 adults was conducted Feb. 18-21 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

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Fingerhut reported from Washington.

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Aaron Morrison writes about race and justice for the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter at: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.