The surprising reality of political violence in America

When former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated in Pennsylvania in July, a Dartmouth College political scientist named Sean Westwood happened to be in the middle of a research project asking Americans about political violence.

At the time, many feared that the shooting would lead to a growing appetite for more violence.

But Westwood and his colleagues found the opposite. In the weeks after the attack, Americans' support for partisan violence, and murder specifically, diminished -- and fell most sharply among Republicans who identify with Trump.

Americans are still exceptionally hostile about people who disagree with them on politics, but "an assassination attempt did not inflame the tensions," the authors write in a forthcoming paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Two unsuccessful attempts on Trump's life, a daily barrage of violent threats against public officials of all stripes and finger-pointing from both parties have fueled the impression that the country's politics are spinning out of control.

But some common assumptions about political violence in America are not reinforced by recent data, according to several new studies.

Instances of extremist violence have actually declined in recent years by some key measures. Although some Americans continue to say they approve of political violence, support for the most serious types of violence has not increased amid election-related tensions this year.

And neither apocalyptic political rhetoric nor extraordinary events over the past few years have produced eruptions of political violence of the sort that many feared would become more commonplace after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In short, even amid an explosive political climate and some high-profile incidents, politics may not be becoming broadly more violent.

"We should be worried about incidents of political violence, but so far we haven't seen evidence that it's leading to a broader trend," Westwood said.

Such findings come with many caveats. Political violence in the United States remains rare, leaving relatively few data points to study. Trend lines can vary widely depending on the how you define violence and what questions you try to answer.

And often the most high-profile incidents don't match the broad trends. A Reuters investigation this year found that a substantial increase in threats against federal judges has followed Trump's public criticism of the judiciary since 2020. But some of the most serious known threats against Supreme Court justices in recent years have targeted members of the court's conservative majority.

In the United States as in other countries, recorded acts of right-wing political violence have been deadlier than left-wing violence. But Trump, not President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris, has been the target of two apparent assassination attempts this summer.

Those attempts are also a stark reminder that such nation-transforming tragedies do not require many people -- or even more than one.

A tiny percentage of Americans report in surveys that they would be willing to commit acts of political violence themselves. But in a country with permissive gun laws, that still means that "on any given day, there are thousands of people walking the streets who are openly armed and support committing political violence," said Garen Wintemute, an emergency physician who leads the Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California, Davis.

"That's part of the fabric of the country at this moment," he said.

'A lot of latent risk'

From the first days of his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump's politics have been laced with references to violence, and political violence became more prevalent during his candidacy and his presidency than it had been for decades in the United States. Armed militant organizations and street-fighting groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys aligned themselves with a mainstream politician, Trump, and a major party, the GOP, in a way they hadn't before -- a trend that reached an explosive climax at the Jan. 6 riot.

Nearly four years later, the language of violence and national catastrophe has in many ways only intensified. In his campaign speeches, Trump has described his political enemies as "vermin," promising "retribution" on behalf of his supporters. He has summoned images of a country in the middle of a violent overthrow by Democrats, criminals and immigrants in the country illegally and failed by treasonous leaders.

This, and Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, led Biden to declare the former president and Trump and his political movement to be "semi-fascism" and an "assault on democracy," statements Trump claimed inspired the attempts on his life.

But instances of political violence involving extremists have declined steadily since 2020, and have grown increasingly removed from partisan conflicts, according to an analysis published last week by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a data-mapping project that tracks political violence and protests around the world.

The violent activity that persists is increasingly attributed to white supremacist organizations rather than more Trump-aligned groups like the Proud Boys, who have been diminished following the prosecution of their leaders for Jan. 6.

"Despite the tumultuous, volatile nature of what's been going on politically this year," Kieran Doyle, the North American research manager for ACLED, said, "we don't see a corresponding wave of activity from those kinds of groups."

Other trends are not as promising. Threats against local elected officials for reasons that are often at least broadly political have declined only slightly since 2022, according to data gathered earlier this year for the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and Civic Pulse.

Such threats -- which 16% of local officials surveyed recently reported having received -- suggest that some of the energy previously directed into organized public violence may be taking new, less visible and less easily prosecutable forms.

"There is still just a lot of latent risk out there," said Shannon Hiller, the initiative's executive director. "If you have a leader like the former president who has shown himself willing to activate some of that risk, that's part of what's so concerning about this moment."

A drop in public support

A growing share of Americans say they view rival partisans as a threat to the country or even as inhuman. But a bitterly contested election has not led to an increase in support for the most serious forms of political violence this year, as happened in 2022, according to new results released last week from an ongoing study by Wintemute's program.

"I would have bet money that there would have been more support for political violence in principle in this election year," Wintemute said. "And there's nothing."

Wintemute suggested the ebbing support could reflect the shadow of the Jan. 6 prosecutions. "The threat of consequences for criminal actions can be a deterrent," he said, "and those prosecutions made clear it's not just a theoretical threat."

The attack and its aftermath, he said, also "brought us up close to how ugly it gets when violence is involved. We aspire to a politics with something more than ugliness."

Westwood and his colleagues found the first assassination attempt had a similar effect. After the shooting, in a national survey Republicans' support for murder of political opponents fell from 2% to 0.3%.

The change was more dramatic still among people who identify as "MAGA Republicans," whose support fell from 3.5% to 0.5%. There was a slight but statistically insignificant decline among Democrats, 1.5% of whom say they support partisan murder.

Assassins as outliers

The two assassination attempts targeting Trump since July complicate the picture. People who try to assassinate a president are notoriously difficult to fit into prevailing trends in political violence. They are few in number and often idiosyncratic in their motives, have a history of mental illness, or both.

"There is something ideological there -- there's a kernel of something," said Jon Lewis, a research fellow in the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. "But there's also clearly a very deranged, twisted, incoherent worldview."

The first Trump gunman, Thomas Crooks, left behind little indication of a particular animus toward the former president and had evidently researched the possibility of assassinating Biden, too. The man accused in an apparent second attempt, Ryan W. Routh, appears to have been far more politically engaged: a one-time supporter of Trump who later turned against him, describing the former president as an "idiot" in a self-published e-book and calling the Jan. 6 attack a "catastrophe." On his since-removed account on the social platform X, he wrote in April: "DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose." The phrase echoed language that Biden, Harris and other Democrats have used in recent years.

But Routh's book is mostly preoccupied with foreign policy and is critical of both Trump and Biden on that score. Its sole direct mention of assassinating Trump argues that doing so would be justified by his reversal of the Iran nuclear deal, an issue that has been brought up by Trump more often than by Democrats during the campaign.

Doyle noted that one of the most important aspects of the assassination attempts was what did not happen in their wake. In 2020, political violence compounded over the course of anti-lockdown protests, police clashes and arson during racial justice protests, vigilante shootings and street brawls before reaching its climax at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The same has not happened over the past two years, despite an abundance of potential flash points: the Supreme Court's abortion ruling, Trump's indictments and his felony conviction, months of protests over the war in the Gaza Strip and, most recently, the assassination attempts.

"I think a lot of people last year, if they heard Trump was going to be convicted on felony charges, would have predicted a wave of response, both in terms of popular demonstrations and participation of extremist groups," he said. "It's interesting that hasn't been what we've seen, despite there being many moments that seem like they fit the bill for such an opportunity."

One explanation, Doyle suggested, was the obvious one: 2024 has lacked the very particular conditions, like the pandemic and an ongoing Trump presidency, that made 2020 what it was. "The situation this year is different," he said.

Still, this intense political moment is far from over. The violence researchers warned that there are more potential triggers ahead, with the final weeks of campaigning, Election Day and the inauguration of a new president.

"It's not wise to encourage anything but vigilance," Doyle said.