Below we show voters’ feeling thermometer ratings of the police and Black Lives Matter (BLM) using data from the 2015 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We find considerable polarization between Democratic and Republican respondents’ evaluations of these two groups (the feeling thermometer scores run between 0 [very cold] and 100 [very warm]). Nearly all Republicans are clustered in the upper left: giving police high ratings and BLM low ratings. On the other hand, Democrats are dispersed throughout the space. Democrats have nearly identical mean ratings of the police (56.1) and BLM (55.8).
The 2016 election is reminiscent of the 1968 election in the salience of law and order issues. Using feeling thermometer data from the 1968 American National Election Study, Bayesian multidimensional scaling finds a stark law and order divide running from Humphrey voters on the left to Wallace voters on the right, with Nixon voters in between:
We see the same divide on a question specifically about how best to deal with the problems of rioting and urban unrest. The urban unrest question in the 1968 ANES asked respondents where they and the candidates stood on a seven-point scale ranging from “solve problems of poverty and unemployment” on the left to “use all available force” on the right. Here again, Wallace was able to pick up a substantial amount of voters most in favor of using force to deal with urban unrest.
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