Support For BLM Protests Plummets In Wisconsin, Dropping 25 Points In Two Months

Public support for protests following the death of George Floyd has dropped in Wisconsin by 25-points since June, according to a poll published Wednesday.

Support for demonstrations against police killings stood at 61% approval to 36% disapproval in June, but both figures changed to 48% in August, according to a poll produced by Marquette Law School. The Aug. 4-9 poll was conducted prior to protests in Kenosha which began after police shot Jacob Blake on Sunday, and before 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was arrested for killing two people during Tuesday night riots.

Support for the Black Lives Matter movement in general also fell between June and August, according to the poll’s results. About 59% of respondents said they supported the movement in June, with only 27% of people holding an unfavorable view. Approval for BLM dropped 10 percentage points in August, the poll showed.

Roughly 44% of respondents in the poll said the police killings of black Americans are isolated incidents, while 48% said their deaths are part of a larger pattern.

The poll combined black and Hispanic responses, noting that the percentages between the two groups were nearly identical, with pollsters noting that this did not distort the substantive results. Still, the margin of error for the two combined demographic groups was plus or minus 13.1 percentage points in June, and plus or minus 14 percentage points in August.

The margin of error for white respondents in June was plus or minus 4.7 percentage points in June and plus or minus 4.2 percentage points in August.

The margin of error for the combined black and Hispanic group is large because black people represent only 5% of registered voters in the state while Hispanic people represent only 4% of the voting population, Charles Franklin, director of Marquette Law School’s poll, said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

A large margin of error means researchers have less confidence that a poll result accurately reflects the result of a survey of an entire population. The relatively small number of black and Hispanic voters in the state will create a wide margin of error for any researcher who conducts similar research, according to Franklin.

“I’ve accurately reported that. I also include design effects which correctly report the effect of weighting of the poll. Any poll of Wisconsin that is representative of these populations would have similar correctly reported margin of error unless the poll was enormous, which none are,” he added.