Online survey shows 29% would support possible takeover while 41% said they could not imagine supporting such an event

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Almost a third of Americans could imagine supporting a military coup against their own government, according to a new poll.



The YouGov survey showed 29% of Americans could imagine supporting a coup. Yet, 41% said they could not imagine supporting such an event.

YouGov, which conducts internet polls about “politics, public affairs, products, brands and other topics of general interest”, surveyed 1,000 people online on the issue.

They found that 43% of Republicans would support a military coup in certain instances, while only 20% of Democrats and 29% of independents would.

The overall numbers increased when participants were “asked whether they would hypothetically support the military stepping in to take control from a civilian government which is beginning to violate the constitution”. 43% said yes to this, and 29% said no.

Abraham Wyner, director of the undergraduate program in statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said that online polls were “worse than just about any other way you can put together a poll” because they were prone to selection bias, meaning proper randomization was not achieved and the sample was not representative of the population – since people can choose to participate.

“People who are participating in an online poll are generally attracted to that poll because of some variable, some characteristic which is connected typically to one outcome or the other in that poll,” he said.

In an attempt to avoid selection bias, YouGov obtains responses from a panel of internet users and weighs the responses to be nationally representative.

This distinguishes them from the average internet poll where anybody can choose to respond to a question on a website.

•The story was amended on 14 September to include information on how YouGov weighs online polls.