Poll: 6 in 10 indifferent about Occupy movement

By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY Updated 4h 31m ago

Two months after the Occupy Wall Street movement spread to dozens of cities and colleges, six in 10 Americans still don't know enough about its goals to decide if they are for or against it.

A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll conducted Saturday and Sunday found that 56% say they neither support nor oppose the movement or have no opinion. That's unchanged from a poll in mid-October.

The poll of 996 adults has a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.

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T.V. Reed, an English professor at Washington State University who wrote The Art of Protest, says it takes time for people to understand the goals of a movement.

"It's a long-term process," he says. "The Occupy strategy is not going away."

He points to the 1960s civil rights movement: Martin Luther King Jr. was reviled in some parts of the country but decades later is considered a national hero.

Reed says the public has a hard time understanding the protest because the Occupy movement does not have leaders to express consistent goals. He says the rallying cry, "We are the 99%," has "had extraordinary success in getting a conversation on economic inequality that was not happening before the movement."

The Occupy movement began with an encampment in New York City's Zuccotti Park near Wall Street. In recent days, attention has shifted to clashes with police.

The most recent clash occurred Friday at the University of California-Davis, where campus police were videotaped dousing protesters with pepper spray. Two officers and the police chief have been put on administrative leave.

The poll found the biggest change was in the percentage of Americans who disapprove of the way the movement is being conducted: 31%, up from 20% in October. One in five approved, down from one in four.

Jason Eisenmenger, 26, who is part of the Louisville Occupy movement, says incidents such as UC-Davis bring more attention to the movement, good and bad.

"The more police fight us, the bigger it gets," he says. "The whole issue is that we do not have a lot of say, and when we try to use the say we do have, it gets stripped away even more."

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