Poll: Only Half of Americans ‘Have Faith in Democracy'

A new Axios/Survey Monkey poll released on Monday indicates that 51 percent of Americans surveyed have faith in US democracy, suggesting that some citizens have lost confidence in their system of government in the political turbulence that followed the 2016 presidential election.
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Another 37 percent of respondents, of which 49 percent were African-American women and 40 percent were millennials, noted that they'd lost faith, while another 9 percent stated they'd never had faith in American democracy.

By contrast, just 35 percent of African-American women surveyed stated they have faith in US democracy, along with a larger 49 percent of white suburban women. Roughly 56 percent of men surveyed reported they believed in American democracy.

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Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Axios reported that some 52 percent of voters had faith in US democracy. However, that number would later increase by some 8 percent before settling at 53 percent in October 2017.

Of those surveyed, 55 percent of self-described liberal Democrats stated they'd lost their faith, whereas 66 percent of Republicans indicated their faith was strong.

When asked whether or not they believed that Americans were more divided than ever before, and if they expected that division to continue into the near future, one-third of respondents said the Land of the Free was definitely more divided. However, they felt optimistic about the future.

For 18 percent of the crowd surveyed, the US isn't any more or less divided than it has been in the past.

The latest report, which was published on the eve of the US midterm elections, surveyed a total of 3,913 people aged 18 and over. The survey was conducted between October 19 and 24.

The Axios report comes months after Freedom House, a Washington, DC, watchdog group, published a report in January 2018 that concluded that "democracy is in crisis" around the world due to a lack of "free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press and the rule of law."

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