A new poll shows that public support for the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is low, suggesting that the far right movement that helped propel former President Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 may be dwindling.
A nationwide NBC News poll published this week found that just 24 percent of Americans had a positive view of the MAGA movement, while 45 percent had a negative view. Around one in six Americans (16 percent) said they didn’t know enough about the movement to form an opinion or didn’t have an opinion on it.
The most common response in the poll, which was broken down into four categories, was a “very negative” view of MAGA, with 37 percent responding as such. Another 8 percent said they have a “somewhat negative” view of the movement. Conversely, just 13 percent of Americans said they have a “very positive” view of MAGA, with another 11 percent saying they have a “somewhat positive” view.
While the poll shows that MAGA receives a net -21 points from Americans overall, Republicans still have good feelings about the movement, with 52 percent of GOP voters saying they have a positive view. The numbers indicate that, while unpopular across the country overall, the MAGA movement is still backed by a majority of voters from one of the U.S.’s major political parties.
The continued existence of the MAGA movement — and its stranglehold on the Republican Party — is perhaps why President Joe Biden made it a focal point in his reelection announcement on Tuesday. Within his ad, Biden condemned “MAGA extremists” for pushing policies that seek to restrict democratic rights, deriding the movement for imposing book bans, attacking LGBTQ people, implementing greater voting restrictions, quashing reproductive rights and seeking to cut Social Security.
“Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to [attack] bedrock freedoms,” Biden said in his first official campaign video of 2024.
The tenets of the MAGA movement have been studied extensively by political scientists. One study, authored by University of Oklahoma assistant professor Rachel M. Blum and University of Washington professor Christopher Sebastian Parker, determined that the movement embraces fascist themes, and is “populated with a good number of racist, sexists, and nativists.”
Unsurprisingly, the movement is decidedly pro-Trump, and the study’s findings suggest that MAGA-backers would support making exceptions for him to remain in power longer, if he returns to office.
“The MAGA movement overwhelmingly believes Trump’s election fraud claims, would have supported him for a ‘third term’ (had it been an option), and don’t believe that voting should be made easier,” the authors of the study wrote.
Understanding how MAGA supporters view democracy and other aspects of American government is “paramount,” the authors added, concluding that the movement includes a disturbing distrust of the process for choosing elected leaders.
“For us, the implications are clear: our country is in grave danger since one of the two major parties is essentially captured by the MAGA movement,” the study’s authors said.
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