A third of Republicans believe US President Barack Obama poses an imminent threat to the US, outranking concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll this month asked 2,809 Americans to rate how much of a threat a list of nations, organizations and individuals posed to the US on a scale of one to five, with one being no threat and five being an imminent threat.
The poll showed 34 percent of Republicans ranked Obama as an imminent threat, ahead of Putin (25 percent), who has been accused of aggression in the Ukraine, and al-Assad (23 percent). Western governments have alleged that al-Assad used chlorine gas and barrel bombs on his own people.
Given the level of polarization in US politics the results are not that surprising, said Barry Glassner, a sociologist and author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things.
“There tends to be a lot of demonizing of the person who is in the office,” Glassner said, adding that “fear mongering” by the Republican and Democratic parties would be a mainstay of the US presidential campaign next year.
“The TV media here, and American politics, very much trade on fears,” he said.
The survey, done between March 16 and Tuesday last week, included 1,083 Democrats and 1,059 Republicans.
Twenty-seven percent of Republicans saw the Democratic Party as an imminent threat to the US, while 22 percent of Democrats deemed Republicans to be an imminent threat.
People who were polled were most concerned about threats related to potential terror attacks. Islamic State militants were rated an imminent threat by 58 percent of respondents and al-Qaeda by 43 percent. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was viewed as a threat by 34 percent and Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by 27 percent.
Cyberattacks were viewed as an imminent threat by 39 percent and drug trafficking was seen as an imminent threat by a third.
Democrats were more concerned about climate change than Republicans, with 33 percent rating it an imminent threat. Among Republicans, 27 percent said climate change was not a threat.
The data was weighted to reflect the US population and has a credibility interval of plus or minus-2.1 percentage points for all adults.
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