The share of Americans who think the country is united has doubled since the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, new polling shows.
An NBCLX-YouGov poll released Wednesday found that while just 12 percent of respondents think the country is united, that figure is twice the 6 percent recorded in the days after the insurrection.
In January 2020, a staggering 93 percent of respondents reported feeling that the country was divided, but two years later, that number has now dipped to 81 percent.
In the new survey, men were more likely than women to feel the country is unified (16 percent to 9 percent).
White respondents (85 percent) were more likely than both Black respondents (63 percent) and Hispanic respondents (74 percent) to report feeling division in the country.
A sense of unity was strongest among the youngest age bracket, with 23 percent of respondents aged 18-29 saying they feel the country is united. That share lessened with each subsequent age bracket — just 2 percent of those aged 65 or older said the same.
Democrats were more optimistic than those affiliated with other parties about the country’s togetherness, with 23 percent of Democratic respondents saying the country feels united. Just 6 percent of Republicans, by contrast, said they feel the same — as did 8 percent of independents.
Forty percent of Democrats surveyed said the country has become more united under President Biden, while just 3 percent of Republicans and 15 percent of independents said the same.
Nearly half of Democrats in the poll, 49 percent, said President Biden should focus on fulfilling his campaign promises and working on his legislative agenda, even if that means a focus on unity falls to the wayside.
On the other hand, nearly half of Republican respondents, at 45 percent, said Biden should focus on trying to unite the country, even if that means easing up on pursuing his legislative agenda. In the 2020 survey, after Biden had been elected but prior to his taking office, 70 percent of Republicans said unity should be Biden’s priority.
Nearly half of all respondents in the new survey said former President Trump committed crimes during his presidency (49 percent) and after his presidency (43 percent).
The new NBCLX-YouGov survey was conducted Sept. 8-11 and polled 1,000 U.S. citizens aged 18 or older. The margin of error was 3.3 percentage points.