Poll: Americans see improved race relations since 2020, but divisions remain

Politics NewsPoll: Americans see improved race relations since 2020, but divisions remainA new NBC News poll finds Americans are split over the state of race relations, but more say they are good than did in 2020, amid that year’s racial justice protests.Protesters gather outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, N.J., on June 12.Michael M. Santiago / Getty ImagesShareAdd NBC News to GoogleJune 19, 2026, 5:00 AM EDTBy Bridget Bowman, Annelise Hanson, Lauren Zola and Ben KamisarAmericans say race relations in the U.S. have improved significantly since the summer of 2020, amid protests calling for racial justice and police accountability after George Floyd’s death. But deep differences in opinion remain, particularly between white and Black Americans, according to a new NBC News poll. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.The poll — which was sponsored by More Perfect, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to advancing democracy — finds that 50% of Americans say race relations are generally bad, while 48% say they are generally good. The share of Americans who say race relations are good has increased by 20 points since July 2020.Just 7% of all adults say race relations are “very” good, though that is the highest level measured in NBC News polling since 2011. And 17% of poll responders rate race relations as “very bad,” the lowest in more than a decade.Most of the responses clustered toward the middle, with 41% calling race relations “fairly good,” up 20 points since 2020, and 33% calling them “fairly bad,” down from 39% in 2020.But the underlying data, along with conversations with more than a dozen Americans who participated in the survey, underscore how views of race relations vary widely depending on a person’s race. While 46% of white Americans say race relations are “fairly good,” 24% of Black Americans say the same. A similar share of white and Black adults, about one-third, rate r...