On April 20, 2021, almost a year after George Floyd died in police custody, a jury found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts he faced related to the death. The passing of Mr. Floyd sparked civil unrest in America, including cries for nationwide police reform and […] Read more »
U.S. Defense Budget, Afghanistan Withdrawal Not Hot-Button Issues
… The announcement of the proposed new defense budget and the pending withdrawal of all remaining troops from Afghanistan most likely will not have a major impact on the equanimity of the American public. Neither is a hot-button issue about which Americans are expressing deep concern, and available data do […] Read more »
How Covid-19 and Deaths of Despair Combine to Affect Communities
The Covid-19 pandemic has torn through the United States in the last 12 months, leaving more than half a million dead and the nation’s economy in tatters, but the virus didn’t arrive on a blank slate. Long before Covid, the Deaths of Despair epidemic was already taking a massive toll […] Read more »
A momentous shift in US public attitudes toward China
Although public opinion rarely determines the specifics of U. S. foreign policy, it typically defines the zone within which policies with public visibility can be sustained over time. Recent survey research has underscored a shift in Americans’ attitudes towards China that is far-reaching enough to sustain the most adversarial stance […] Read more »
Cyberterrorism Tops List of 11 Potential Threats to U.S.
As the Biden administration continues to explore how it will respond to Russia’s large-scale cyberattack against U.S. companies and federal agencies last year, 82% of Americans say cyberterrorism is a “critical threat” to the vital interests of the U.S. over the next decade. While cyberterrorism ranks atop a list of […] Read more »
Americans are not unanimously war-weary on Afghanistan
In debates on the future of the war in Afghanistan, policymakers and analysts have come to invoke it as a given that Americans want the troops to come home quickly. But does this conventional wisdom hold true? Not necessarily, based on our analysis of a number of polls on Americans’ […] Read more »