Saturday thread on new insurrection polling at the anniversary of the January 6th riot

While many Republicans don’t support the insurrection per se, the vast majority support what it stood for

Here’s something I missed during my recovery from covid-19 this week.

A new poll from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst sheds light on Americans’ attitudes towards Joe Biden, Donald Trump and the January 6th attempted coup. The partisan breakdown in opinions is not exactly what I expected, so I thought it worth noting, but more than that, the questions treat separately the matter of whether Americans support the insurrectionists and what they stood for. I think that is a useful distinction that ultimately tells us more about the landscape of electoral illiberalism in the US than whether, eg, Republicans support breaking windows at the Capitol or some such.

For example, the poll finds that 28% of Republicans — roughly a third of the ones who expressed an opinion — say they support law enforcement efforts to “identify, arrest, and charge individuals who participated” in the “events at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021.” This is a good reminder that partisans are not uniform in t…