Support for Black Lives Matter in the US has declined in the 18 months since George Floyd was killed, a new poll shows.
The poll, conducted by Civiqs — an online survey organization associated with the progressive media group Daily Kos — found 44 percent of respondents currently support the BLM movement.
It has dropped from the high of 52 percent of respondents who supported BLM after Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May last year.
Meanwhile, opposition to BLM has spiked over the same timeframe — 44 percent currently oppose it, which is up from 28 percent in the days after Floyd’s killing.
Eleven percent neither support nor oppose BLM and 1 percent remain unsure, according to the poll.
More than half of the respondents who oppose BLM are white, and 82 percent who support the movement are black, the poll found.
BLM was founded in 2013 after George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Florida, was acquitted of murdering black teen Trayvon Martin.
Civiqs has been tracking support for BLM since mid-2017 just before the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
BLM recorded its lowest support for the movement around the time of that rally, but it peaked drastically when Floyd and other black people, including Breonna Taylor, were killed in police-involved incidents in early 2020.
Coinciding with the decline in support, the polling did not find a significant spike in reinforcement for BLM after cop Derek Chauvin was convicted in April this year for killing Floyd.
There also wasn’t an increase in support when Wisconsin police shot black man Jacob Blake last year, which sparked the deadly Kenosha riots — which included three shootings for which white teen Kyle Rittenhouse is on trial.
