Pew Research Center has been studying online harassment for several years now. A new report on Americans’ experiences with and attitudes toward online harassment finds that 41% of U.S. adults have personally experienced some form of online harassment – and the severity of the harassment has increased since we last studied it in 2017.
We spoke with Emily Vogels, a research associate at the Center focusing on internet and technology research, about the new findings. The interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.
Donald Trump leaves the White House having appointed more than 200 judges to the federal bench, including nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight.
Trump, the nation’s 45th president, worked closely with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans to reshape the federal judiciary – particularly the appeals courts – for decades to come. Federal judges have lifetime tenure and typically remain on the bench long after the presidents who nominated them have left office.
As his administration comes to an end, here’s a look at how Trump compares with his recent predecessors in the overall number and demographic characteristics of the judges he appointed. All findings are based on a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Judicial Center, the research and education arm of the federal judiciary.
In the days following the November 2020 election, about six-in-ten American voters said that the 2020 election was run well in the United States, but Black voters were more likely than voters in other racial and ethnic groups to say the election was administered very well both nationally and in their own communities.
About nine-in-ten Black voters (88%) said the elections nationally were run and administered well in the weeks after the election, including 60% who said they were run very well. Smaller majorities of Asian (76%) and Latino (68%) voters also said U.S. elections were administered well. And about half of White voters (53%) said the elections were run and administered well, with only about a third (31%) saying they were run very well.
Broadly, these racial and ethnic differences reflect the partisan preferences of these groups. Overall, those who voted for Biden in the general election (94%) were far more likely than Trump supporters (21%) to say the elections across the country were run and administered well, with nine-in-ten or more White (95%), Black (93%) and Hispanic (91%) Biden supporters saying this, compared with just 20% of White Trump voters and 29% of Hispanic Trump voters.
The transition of news from print, television and radio to digital spaces has caused huge disruptions in the traditional news industry, especially the print news industry. It is also reflected in the ways individual Americans say they are getting their news. A large majority of Americans get news at least sometimes from digital devices, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2020.
More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults (86%) say they get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet “often” or “sometimes,” including 60% who say they do so often. This is higher than the portion who get news from television, though 68% get news from TV at least sometimes and 40% do so often. Americans turn to radio and print publications for news far less frequently, with half saying they turn to radio at least sometimes (16% do so often) and about a third (32%) saying the same of print (10% get news from print publications often).
Republicans who relied heavily on Trump and his campaign for news were significantly more concerned than other Republicans about the possibility of election fraud heading into the election and more convinced that it had actually occurred in the weeks that followed. But not all Republicans have said they were paying the same amount of attention to Trump’s messages.
Pew Research Center’s American News Pathways project examined, among other topics, differences between Republicans who said in September that Trump and his campaign were a major source of election news for them (27% of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents) and those who said he was a minor source or not a source at all (72% of Republicans and GOP leaners).
The final U.S. Senate races of the 2020-21 election cycle have continued a pattern that’s emerged over the past decade or so: Senate election results are very much in sync with states’ presidential votes.
Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won both of this week’s Senate runoffs in Georgia by relatively narrow margins – albeit wider than Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory over Donald Trump in the state’s presidential contest two months ago.
With Warnock’s victory over appointed Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Ossoff’s defeat of Sen. David Perdue, 34 of this cycle’s 35 Senate races were won by candidates of the same party that carried the state in the presidential contest. The lone exception was Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who handily won a fifth term even as Biden won the statewide vote. (Trump did, however, take Maine’s 2nd Congressional District and its one electoral vote.)
A couple celebrates Thanksgiving with friends by having dinner together over a Zoom video call on Nov. 22, 2020, in New York City. (Scott Heins/Getty Images)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has cautioned Americans to avoid holiday travel this year because of the COVID-19 outbreak. And while it’s not yet clear how many Americans will heed that advice for the upcoming Christmas holiday, more than half (57%) say they changed their Thanksgiving plans due to the pandemic, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
Following Joe Biden’s narrow presidential win in Georgia, early voting is underway in the state’s Jan. 5 runoff election for two U.S. Senate seats, races that will determine whether both chambers of Congress are led by Democrats during the first years of the new administration. Once a reliably Republican state, Georgia has received much attention for the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of eligible voters in the state, which has highlighted the importance of Black voters and other fast-growing groups like Latino and Asian voters.
The number of Black registered voters in Georgia increased by about 130,000 between Oct. 11, 2016, and Oct. 5, 2020, the largest increase among all major racial and ethnic groups, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Georgia Secretary of State’s Office data. Meanwhile, early reports suggest that turnout in November 2020 among Black registered voters increased compared with 2016, but not as much as other groups.
The increase of 520,000 in new registered voters in Georgia since 2016 came from a variety of sources, as no single racial or ethnic group accounted for more than 25% of the newly registered. Even so, some groups of registered voters saw larger increases than others, shifting the overall racial and ethnic composition of registered voters.
A teacher works from her home due to the coronavirus outbreak on April 1, 2020, in Arlington, Virginia. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)
When the coronavirus outbreak led to widespread shutdowns and stay-at-home orders throughout the country in March, many Americans were forced to adapt and shift parts of their daily routines. Some of these adaptations have relied heavily on technology – including adults working from home and students engaging in online learning. Many other activities – like social gatherings, fitness classes, school activities and medical appointments – went virtual for a time, though some of these activities have resumed in person in many places.
Over the course of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, Pew Research Center has studied Americans’ attitudes about the role and effectiveness of various technologies and their views about digital privacy and data collection as it relates to the pandemic. Here is what we found.
One of the fascinating things about being a public opinion researcher is hearing from all kinds of Americans about a variety of topics. One of the best ways to learn what’s on people’s minds is to ask them “open-ended” questions – no pre-set answers or response options, just their unfiltered thoughts and impressions.
For years, our surveys have provided considerable evidence of just how politically divided we are, but in our new survey, we wanted to learn what voters who supported Joe Biden and Donald Trump would want the other candidate’s supporters to know about them. We asked an open-ended question: Tell us something – anything – you’d like the supporters of the opposing candidate to know to understand you a little better. It didn’t have to be about politics, though given that it was survey on politics conducted just days after the election, most people had politics on their minds.
