The scenes at Washington on the day the US Senate and the House of Representatives certified Joe Biden’s November 2020 victory were absolutely unbelievable, to put it mildly. But there are polls coming in that are even more shocking. According to YouGov polls, forty-five per cent of Republicans support the storming of Capitol Hill.
One in five voters support the storming of Capitol Hill. Only 52% of voters believe the protesters were ‘extremists’ and only 49% believe they are a threat to Democracy. The political disparity is quite astonishing as there is great partisanship observed with regards to the manner in which the chaos was perceived.
65% of Democrats believe that the protests were anti-democratic while only 12% of Republicans believe the same. In fact, Republicans are more likely to believe the protesters are patriots than extremists, domestic terrorists, criminals or anti-democratic.
The same disparity is observed with regards to the blame awarded to incumbent President Donald Trump. 69% of Republicans believe there is not much to blame Trump for or there is nothing at all to blame him for. In stark contrast, that figure is 96% for Democrats.
Similarly, 93% of Democrats see the storming of Capitol Hill as a threat to Democracy while 62% of Republicans do not see it that way. However, Independents appear to lean towards the stand of Democrats in almost every case but significantly less staunchly.
The polls prove amply that what happened at Washington appears unbelievable but it did not occur in a vacuum. There is a genuine political divide within the country that is responsible for great internal strife. People on the two sides of the divide cannot even agree on whether people who stormed Capitol Hill, the seat of the US Senate and the House of Representatives, are a threat to Democracy or not.
Pipe bombs were recovered from the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington DC and the media was attacked as well. Four people are reported to have died during the ensuing chaos.