Poll: White Suburban Women Who Feel Safe Support Joe Biden; Those Who Feel Unsafe Support Trump

A Biden for President sign in a lawn of suburban Dublin, Ohio, on Friday, Sept. 18, 2020.
AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth

White suburban women who feel safe in their communities overwhelmingly support Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, but those who feel unsafe support President Donald Trump, according to an Axios/SurveyMonkey poll released on Thursday.

The “survey of 14,043 U.S. adults who are white and live in suburbs,” was part of a “SurveyMonkey poll of 35,732 U.S. adults” that was conducted between August 31 and September 6 on the SurveyMonkey platform and has a margin of error of one percent.

The popular SurveyMonkey platform — on which more than two million Americans participate in surveys of all sorts each day — uses a different polling methodology than most other polling firms, many of which begin with a file of confirmed registered voters whom they contact by landline phone, cell phone, or online, and ask questions about their likelihood of voting. Many polls use samples of registered voters only, while the subset of likely voters is considered by many polling professionals to be a more accurate predictor of actual voting behavior.

In contrast, SurveyMonkey polls are open to all adults who reside in America. That sample includes registered voters, but also residents of the country — not necessarily American citizens — who are not registered to vote.

With those caveats in mind, the SurveyMonkey poll results paint a clear and compelling picture.

Fifty-eight percent of poll respondents who are white and live in suburbs say they feel “very safe” in their community, while 38 percent say they feel “somewhat safe” and four percent said they feel “unsafe.”

Among white suburban women who feel “very safe” in their communities, Biden leads Trump 55 percent to 36 percent. Suburban white women who feel “somewhat safe” are almost equally divided between Biden, with 45 percent supporting him, and Trump, with 44 percent supporting him.

In contrast, white suburban women who say they feel “not safe” prefer President Trump by an eight-point margin, 42 percent to 34 percent.

Fifty-five percent of white suburban women say they feel safe in their communities, while about sixty percent of white suburban men say they feel safe.

Suburban white men support President Trump over Biden regardless of how safe they feel in their communities.

Among white suburban men who feel “very safe” in their communities, Trump leads Biden by five points, 49 percent to 44 percent.  Suburban white men who feel “somewhat safe” support Trump by a huge 24-point margin, 57 percent to 33 percent. That margin grows to 28 points in favor of Trump among white suburban men who feel “unsafe” in their communities, 52 percent to 24 percent.

“What jumps out at me from the data is a clear connection between anxiety around security and support for Trump over Biden,” SurveyMonkey Chief Research Officer Jon Cohen told Axios.

“The survey finds that public support for protests over the killing of George Floyd has cooled since mid-June across racial and ethnic lines. The trend is about the same in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin as nationally,” Axios reported.

Those results of declining support for the protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement are similar to the results of several recent polls.

Notably, 57 percent of white suburban women “hold favorable views of Black Lives Matter. Among those white suburban women who feel safe in their communities, Black Lives Matter has a 63 percent favorable view, but among white suburban women who feel unsafe in their communities, Black Lives Matters has only a 43 percent favorable view.

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