Only 16 percent of Americans believe democracy in the country is flourishing, according to a poll conducted after the deadly January 6 Capitol riots.
But the vast majority accept that popular government is a critically important principle of the United States, the poll said.
Less than 1 in 6 Americans, surveyed by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, said democracy works well or extraordinarily well. Forty-five percent said democracy doesn’t work well, and 38 percent said it works reasonably well.
About half of those polled believe that then-President Trump should be convicted in this week’s Senate impeachment process for “inciting insurgency”.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the Republican Party is at least partly responsible for the riot by promoting baseless allegations of electoral fraud.
The AP-NORC poll also found that Republicans, in particular, have lost faith in the US government system since Trump’s attack on the election results.
In October, 68 percent of GOP supporters said democracy worked at least somewhat well. That figure plummeted to just 36 percent in January.
Confidence in the representative government rose tremendously among Democrats at the time, from 37 percent to 70 percent.
In the 2020 election, about two-thirds of Americans say President Biden was fairly elected, but only one-third of Republicans agree.
Seventy percent of Americans surveyed believe that Biden, a Democrat, respects at least a fair amount for democratic institutions. But only 42 percent of Republicans are of that opinion.
Only 38 percent of respondents believed that Trump had at least fair respect for government agencies. Notably, 27 percent of Republicans said the former president had little or no respect for the government.
Survey respondents can overwhelmingly agree on one thing: 80 percent of Americans believe that democracy is very or extremely important to the country’s identity.
Nearly half of Americans also think the country is heading in the right direction, compared to just 20 percent last summer.
AP-NORC surveyed 1,055 adults between January 28 and February 28. 1 using a sample drawn from NORC’s Probability-Based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the US population. There is a margin of error of 3.8 percentage points.