Some Republicans Have Grown Wary of Protests Against Racism, Poll Shows

Glen Bolger, a longtime Republican pollster, said that he saw some Republicans’ heightened aversion as the natural result of what they are seeing in the news. “It’s becoming a partisan issue, and that’s clearly a shame, but there’s not a lot of sympathy for the people who are blowing things up or looting stores” or taking down monuments to the country’s founding fathers, he said.

But Mr. Bolger said Democrats had shown a surprising ability to avoid being painted as extreme on one particular issue: calls to “defund the police.”

This has become the major rallying cry at protests, with activists pushing for a scaling-down of the police presence in municipalities across the country and a greater investment in social services. While some Democrats — including Joseph R. Biden Jr., the party’s presumptive nominee — have distanced themselves from the language, many prominent progressives have proudly embraced it.

Mr. Trump and other Republicans have seized on this phrase, believing that most voters will find it alienating and extreme. More than half of the Trump campaign’s television budget from the past week was spent on a single advertisement depicting an empty police station under a Biden administration, according to Advertising Analytics.

Over the past seven days, the campaign has spent $3.1 million on an ad that shows an answering service in the future responding to a 911 call, with scenes from eruptive protests taking over the split screen. The ad appears to illustrate a dystopian nightmare, resembling imagery from Fox News more than from the Biden campaign platform.

But the Monmouth poll’s results, along with similar data from other surveys, don’t bode well for this messaging. An overwhelming share of Americans told Monmouth’s interviewers that when they heard protesters say “defund the police,” they understood it as a demand to change the way police departments operate, not as a push to eliminate the police altogether.

Seventy-seven percent of all Monmouth respondents — including three-quarters of white Americans and two-thirds of Republicans — said this, while less than one in five said they thought “defund the police” meant getting rid of police departments.