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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Droog. By now, I'm sure you're familiar with the details of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. Trump was speaking at a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, shortly after 6 p.m. on Saturday, when a shooter opened fire on him, barely missing his head and instead hitting his ear. Secret Service piled on top of him and he was taken away and confirmed safe.
One attendee was killed in the shooting and two others have been in critical condition. The FBI is actively searching for the shooter's motive and what we know is still limited.
I'll just say up front, it's awful and upsetting and violates so much of what the United States is supposed to be about. It's sad on a human level, and it's also sad on a societal level. And for what it's worth, it goes against the entire reason that we do this podcast, which is that elections are how we sort out political differences.
We didn't want to rush into covering this attack without fuller details, and we have some of those now. We've also gathered some information that hopefully can help contextualize what's happened and where we're headed. Though I should say, sometimes data is not the most important part of a story. And I think I can say that what's most important now is what happens next and that the country manages to curtail any political violence.
With that said, today we're going to look at America's history with political violence, see what surveys can tell us about how Americans view it, and track how lawmakers and leaders are responding to the violence. So here with me to do that today is Senior Elections Analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Hello, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. Also here with us is Senior Researcher Mary Radcliffe. Hello, Mary. Hi, Galen. And Senior Elections Analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeff. Good morning, Galen.
So I actually want to start with you, Mary, because you live pretty close to where this shooting happened. And also because, as I mentioned, this is a human thing. So we're going to get to the data and we're going to get to the history in a second. But how are you doing? How is the community doing?
Yeah, I mean, this is always a somber sort of situation. I do live in Pittsburgh, and the alleged shooter is from a suburb of Pittsburgh. I know people that knew that family. I did not know the family, but there's always a shock when this kind of thing happens. You know, it's reminiscent, I think, a little of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue, which was also in Pittsburgh, and everyone just kind of
carries a grief like there's a community grief around these kinds of events so but uh i'm okay we're okay i think um you know you make it through you get to the next day and the next yeah absolutely jeffrey nathaniel how you guys doing
I mean, it was a terrible thing to get that notification on Saturday. And, you know, we've been talking for a long time about the possibility of political violence in association with this election. And obviously, even going further back, you know, like January 6th and previous examples that we'll talk about. But it's another thing entirely to have it actually happen and for it to be real. And the...
really scary thing is that it may not be over right there. This this only kind of increases the temperature surrounding the election rather than decreasing it. And that's a scary proposition. Yeah, I think the concern that violence will beget violence is the the huge thing to be worried about with this. And
Given how divided and partisan things are right now, we sadly can't rule that out. So hopefully cooler heads will prevail. Yeah. I mean, to that point, Mary, I got in touch with you this weekend and I said, can we gather all the data we have on what Americans think about political violence and even sort of
norm-breaking and behavior that just should not be acceptable in a democratic society. And there's a lot of survey data on this because, as you mentioned, Nathaniel, it's something that we have been afraid of and concerned about for years at this point. And as we'll get into, Jeffrey, I asked you to look up some of the history of political violence in America. It stems back decades as well. But
Mary, what's the best we can say about how Americans view events like this based on the data? Well, there's at least good news in the data, which is most Americans don't support the use of violence to achieve political goals. I think that is something that we should be happy to take away from all this polling is that people aren't in support of acts like this. Before I say anything else, I want to mention a point that was mentioned
Made by our friends over at Bright Line Watch who do phenomenal survey work about democratic norms and people's opinions. They survey the public as well as experts in political science about how America is doing. They brought up that in this case, when you're talking about political violence, and this is also generally true for polling on things that have very low public support, you need to be really careful with how the surveys are conducted and what the methodologies look like.
So they did a survey experiment where they asked about support for political violence, and they also added extra methodological steps to ensure the quality of the sample, make sure people weren't just sort of clicking buttons randomly, things like that.
And they found that if you don't have these extra quality checks on your data, the support for political violence of various types is as high as 25%. But when they cleaned up the data and removed the noise of low quality respondents, support dropped below 10% for all categories. It was a little higher for things like threats and harassment, 9, 8% support, but for physical violence as low as 4%.
So just a word of caution on the data. Make sure that you trust the source that you're reading. Make sure their methodology is strong, because if you see numbers like 25 percent, it could be that polling on things with very low support is very difficult to do. But those are the first top line numbers. Right. So this poll was from 2021. Support for acts of violence was less than 10 percent in all categories and less than 5 percent for any kind of physical violence.
Obviously, those caveats are very important. And I think that people will probably see
polls over the next few days saying that, oh, 20% of Americans think that political violence is justified in some scenarios or whatever, and we have to keep those takeaways from Bright Line Watch in mind. That said, not to be the Debbie Downer here, but I'll also point out that 4% of Americans is still a huge number in absolute terms, right? That would be roughly 10 million people. And so there's basically no number that is low enough other than literally zero, which I think is just never going to be the case. But
That is worth bearing in mind, too. And obviously, that is why incidents like this can happen and why I think we are right to remain concerned about the possibility of political violence going forward. And I think sort of on top of that, I mean, we live in a culture where it's extremely easy to get radicalized online in a way that was not previously true. Like we're going to talk about the history of political violence in the U.S. and it stems back to the founding of the country. But
At the end of the day now, one person who gets radicalized online can –
get their hands on a gun and go try to shoot people, whether that's the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate and former president, or if it's killing a whole bunch of people at a synagogue or whatever other terrible political goal. And to be clear, these things are not always obviously political. Sometimes it's just someone who's also unhinged for some reason. And so it's harder to actually say for sure that it was a political motive that led them to do what they did. But in some cases, it is more obviously political. And I think in our
very online culture, social media heavy culture. It's very easy now to find things that will radicalize somebody who's
struggling with various things and looking for an outlet, and it can lead them down to some pretty dark places. And I'll also note, you know, Bright Line Watch had 4% support for violence. You see different numbers from different pollsters. I only saw one survey that had support for any kind of political violence above 10%, I suspect was an outlier. But Reuters Ipsos in August of 2023 asked,
if it was acceptable for someone in your own political party to commit violence to achieve a political goal. And that had 9% of people agree. So this does vary a little bit from survey to survey, but I think it's certainly below 10%. Yeah, I mean, just last month, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, Robert Pape, conducted a survey that found that 10% of those surveys said the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.
And 7% of respondents said they support force to restore Trump to the presidency. And that's quite a bit more specific than Bright Line Watch, which is more, is it ever acceptable to use violence to achieve a political aim? Yes or no. And the yes or no part of that survey is important because when you give people the option of
Absolutely never. Maybe sometimes. I'm not really sure. Yes, a qualified yes. Then that's how you get that quarter of Americans in some ways spanning the spectrum. But when you really ask Americans yes or no, do you support political violence? It's a no. And then on top of that, you have to make sure, especially with online surveys, that people are actually reading the questions that you're asking them.
You know, what do we know about this University of Chicago poll that got a bit more specific about the Trump factor in all of this, Mary? There is polling that shows Americans are concerned about Donald Trump as it relates to our democracy. So Georgetown University survey with Lake Research and Terrence Research in March of this year, 51 percent of respondents said that Donald Trump was an extremely or very serious threat.
to democracy. Only 35% said the same about Joe Biden. So I think there is some narrative out there that people should be concerned about Donald Trump. And you can imagine that among some portion of the electorate, as you mentioned in the Pape survey, are going to consider violence as an option to prevent what they see as a serious threat to our democracy and our way of life. And this maybe gets a little bit at how we talk about these things.
It's tricky because it is OK and acceptable to talk about January 6th, the activities surrounding January 6th, the push to prevent Vice President Mike Pence from certifying an election, et cetera. That's anti-democratic behavior, and there's no sort of two ways about it. But at the same time, we know from the Bright Line Watch survey that you cited, Mary, that
how Americans perceive the other party and whether they think the other party is committed to democracy affects how they themselves view the acceptability of anti-democratic means to political power, if that all makes sense. So maybe this is a moment where Nathaniel, I asked you to sort of survey how are leaders in American life reacting to all of this? What are you finding?
Right. Yeah. And it is also, I think, worth noting that when people perceive the election as an existential threat or the other side winning as an existential threat, and when...
politicians create a, you know, like really dig into the whole in-group versus out-group thing that can obviously raise the temperature as well, which makes it easier for events like this to happen. But yes, at the same time, you have to be able to draw clear contrasts between two parties that do have very different visions for the country without saying, oh, that like inevitably has to lead to violence or whatever.
Anyway, that is a good segue to what politicians are saying. So I will say that the majority of politicians on both sides of the aisle are trying to use more unifying rhetoric. You know, people have come out and said, you know, political violence is unacceptable. Obviously, a lot of people were just saying both Democrats and Republicans saying, you know, we're praying for former President Trump and kind of keeping to that message.
A couple of speakers at the RNC, most notably Trump himself, have come out and said that they are rewriting their speeches for this week to be less kind of fire-breathing and more unifying. And it'll be interesting to see what that looks like. Obviously, Donald Trump has not typically been one for unifying rhetoric in the past. So if he actually does that in his speech on Thursday, I think it'll be really interesting to see how Americans react to that and if that's kind of the overall message of the RNC as well.
On the more pessimistic side of the ledger, you have seen a couple of people go out there with some not helpful rhetoric. So a couple of kind of the usual suspects on the right, such as Matt Gaetz, have kind of laid blame for the shooting at Joe Biden's feet. So Matt Gaetz's quote was, quote, they tried to impeach him. They are trying to imprison him. Now they have tried to assassinate him. So kind of conflating the political efforts against Donald Trump with the shooter himself.
You had Mike Collins, the congressman from Georgia, suggest that Joe Biden ordered the hit or at least using language that Joe Biden ordered the hit. He was basically he quote tweeted a quote from Biden from a couple of days ago, which was certainly not a helpful quote. But basically, Biden said, we have to put Trump in a bullseye. Yeah. Collins quote tweeted at saying, quote, Joe Biden sent the orders.
So I think this is the type of rhetoric, obviously, that people when say people are concerned about retaliation, this is the type of thing they are worried about. And then there hasn't been to like in terms of official figures on the left, there hasn't been much.
kind of irresponsible behavior. But there was one story about a Democratic donor and strategist who basically was pushing the idea that the shooting was staged, which obviously is a baseless allegation as well. This is also going to be something that's very difficult to measure public opinion of as well, right? You'll probably see polls over the next couple of weeks asking, you know, that'll claim, oh,
20% of Democrats think the shooting was staged. 20% of Republicans think that Joe Biden ordered the shooting. That's going to be very hard because a lot of people probably won't have even entertained that notion until they see it on a survey question. And maybe they'll be like, oh, yeah, that's plausible. So again, don't take those numbers at face value. That said, I think it is safe to say there will be some minority of people on each side thinking conspiratorially about this. And that is dangerous. And anytime somebody in a position of power is
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Sadly, Jeffrey, this isn't the first time our country has been through something like this. The last serious assassination attempt on a president or presidential candidate happened in 1981 when President Reagan was shot. But of course, there is a history of successful assassination attempts, as well as there are different organizations that track political violence in America and have noted that
Well, there's no question that political violence has a long history in U.S. politics and the politics of other countries. Four presidents have been assassinated. Wow.
while in office, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. A number of others have had close calls. For instance, Reagan, as you said, Gerald Ford, within like a month, had two attempts on his life in 1975. In 1835, Andrew Jackson may have been the first president where there was truly an attempted assassination. Basically, I think
the attempted assassins gun kind of failed to go off correctly and Jackson like hit him or some of the people around him, like took the guy out. You know, there's just, there's a long history of targeting of notable figures. Cause you know, you can even go beyond that and think about, you know, 1972 Alabama governor George Wallace was running for president again as a, you know, a very conservative Democrat. And he was shot by an assassin. He didn't die, but he was paralyzed.
So there's just a long history of this stuff. But I think it's also good to take a step back and think about it sort of more broadly, because.
Obviously, the high profile assassinations or assassination attempts of major political figures will loom over things. But just more broadly, political violence in this country, especially in the 19th century, whether you're thinking about like anti-Catholic riots by know nothings in the 1840s and 1850s or in the lead up to the Civil War, violence in Congress even happened.
where famously South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks caned Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner after Sumner had made a speech criticizing pro-slavery forces.
This happened in the Senate chamber of the United States, right? And beyond the Civil War, you get into the Reconstruction period and after Reconstruction where there's tons of violence, particularly in the South, against black voters and Republicans in general. In that neck of the woods, you have a coup in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, famously, where an elected government was overturned by white supremacist violence.
Following World War I, you have the Red Scare and the aftermath of the creation of the Soviet Union and fear about communism. There's just all this history of this. It's not to say that we're in the same sort of situation now, but it ebbs and flows historically. I looked at some data on this and the late 19th century saw a lot of political violence. It ebbed off a bit, then you get closer to kind of the World War I, right after World War I period, it shoots up again in terms of number of events.
And then it ticks down and you have another increase in the 60s and 70s, but not to the extent that we saw sort of in those two earlier periods. But looking at some more recent data, you know, it is possible that it's ticking up again. Does that mean it's going to be a new thing like it was in those previous? We don't have people going around getting lynched anymore, thankfully. But just thinking about sort of could we be back on another –
it's sort of gone up again, period. It seems entirely possible based on data from, for instance, the global terrorism database. And look, the political situation here is we just saw an assassination attempt on a Republican presidential candidate. There have been notable other events. Steve Scalise, Louisiana representative, one of the Republican leaders in the House was nearly killed in an assassination attempt.
in 2017. So there's certainly potentially we don't again, we don't know the motivations about the Pennsylvania shooter yet, if we ever will know sort of the full picture. But obviously, attempts on a conservative figure's life would make you think of sort of, you know, far left violence. But far right violence has been the more common thing in
in sort of recent years in terms of what the origin point of this is. I mean, that doesn't make any of this okay either way. To sort of try to put full context on what's been happening in recent years, that's just sort of how things have been. But obviously, this is an extremely high profile case of a conservative politician being targeted by somebody.
Yeah, Jeffrey, just to add on to that, there was a really excellent Reuters article from last year that looked into the rise of political violence recently. They identified 213 cases of political violence just since January 6th alone. And that did kind of
range from things like property attacks to actually people being killed. But what was really interesting about that article was that it did note that a lot of the violence in this apparent spike today is aimed at people, whereas a lot of the violence in the 70s was aimed at property. And obviously that is
very concerning. And you mentioned the congressional baseball practice shooting against Steve Scalise. There was also Gabby Giffords' attempted assassination, I think in 2011 was it. You had the foiled kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer. You had the attack on Paul Pelosi. So there has been this increase in recent years against people. And we got lucky on January 6th, frankly, you know, in terms of a member of Congress could easily have been killed, you know? Yeah.
And we've seen that increase even before January 6th. So our colleague Kaylee Rogers and I wrote about this using data up through 2021. And you see an increase in particularly far right extremist violence starting really around the 2010.
Yeah. And like, I just, I don't know, it's so hard when I think about this, because I think about it in the context of everything that Jeffrey said, and our country's unfortunately long history with political violence. And on one hand, it is...
comforting in a way to know that we have gone through periods of this in the past and eventually they ebbed and things settled down. On the other hand, obviously, we're living through, it looks like we're living through one of those periods right now, and that is kind of cold comfort. And you also think about kind of what is the cost, right? Like, obviously, the most prominent example of political violence in American history is the Civil War. But
That ruined millions of people's lives. This doesn't necessarily mean our country is doomed. We have endured periods like this before, but it's still depressing as heck. And it also, I would imagine, shapes...
our politics, like the threat of violence, even. I mean, for example, I think this is pretty notable in all of the numbers that we've collected over the weekend. The Brennan Center report that 43 percent of state legislators have experienced threats. So it means that today in America, doing politics, working in politics for many people means having to think about the threat of violence in some ways, probably. I mean,
I should say I'm at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee as we speak. I mean, I'm in a hotel room, but I've been out on the grounds around the Fiserv Center Forum earlier today. And I mean, the police presence is remarkable.
really incredible. You know, there's a soft barrier and a hard barrier. I mean, my hotel is even within the soft barrier. Arriving last night, I had to, you know, get dropped off a ways away and walk to the hotel because a car couldn't even come to this hotel, which is not even next, right next to the Fiserv Forum. Just to paint a picture a little bit, and you see there's a river right out in back of the hotel. There are police boats all along the river that are
at such a high-profile political event, the threat of violence is in our minds just seeing how much security is here. And of course it's in our minds because there was an assassination attempt against the leader of the Republican Party. But you have to imagine that this affects...
the work that lawmakers do if they are fearing violence, and maybe even people, Americans' own participation in politics. If going to a rally, if going, you know, if going to see your preferred presidential candidate speak means, as you saw on Saturday, bullets spraying through the crowd, you know, that probably goes into consideration. May I have your attention, please? May I have your attention, please?
This is security manager for ABC News. Due to police activity, please stay in the hotel unless otherwise authorized. Thank you. So...
I kind of can't believe that that happened at the same time as I was talking about the, you know, threat of violence and how it shapes our participation in politics. But again, it as just witnessed from that message that I think folks could probably hear through my microphone. It's real.
Yeah, and it's not just lawmakers in that Reuters Ipsos survey from August 2023 that I was mentioning earlier, two thirds, 66 percent of Americans say that they're very or somewhat concerned about violence committed against people in their own communities because of their political beliefs. So, I mean, already it's regular Americans are already feeling this.
And, you know, to your point, Galen, about it affecting politics and affecting the people in politics, you know, I'm reminded of Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who recently resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives, who was seen as a
a real like potential star in his party for a while. A lot of people thought he'd run for Senate, but now he's out of Congress and, you know, it was in the aftermath. He had death threats and apparently like a swatting targeting of his family decided he didn't want to be there anymore, you know? And so were you taking somebody, I mean, regardless of what you think about Gallagher's politics, were you taking somebody who could have been a potentially good leader for the country or whatever? Like, you don't know, but like,
Are you pushing people out who you would like to represent us, would like for us to have doing the job of representative government? Right.
And so like what kind of people is the political realm attracting? I think we have talked in other podcasts about not necessarily getting the best and brightest here sometimes. And so is this going to make that even harder? Yeah. I mean, Jeffrey, one of the things that I was wondering as you were listing periods in American history where we've seen more or less political violence, is there something that unifies those times? Is there a trend that's clear in terms of
If we want this to become a period where political violence is on the decline, what kinds of structures might we have in place or what kinds of values might we engender in society? I don't know if there's an easy answer. Sometimes there have been sort of major destabilizing events. The Civil War and the aftermath of the Civil War and sort of the lead up to the Civil War was obviously one of the most unstable periods in U.S. history, I would say.
And then at the same time, in the aftermath of World War I, you had like a lot of social change that was happening. So the threat of that perhaps played a role in the actions of some. Rachel Kleinfeld, who is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, she had an article on political violence a while back where she said sort of four factors elevate the risk of election-related violence.
And that's a highly competitive election that could shift the balance of power. We have that. We do have that. Partisan division based on identity. We have that. Electoral rules that enable winning by exploiting identity cleavages. We may have that. Possibly.
And then four, weak institutional constraints on violence, particularly security sector bias toward one group. That I think is probably the most open-ended, we don't know if we have that. But the point is we do have some of the ingredients that could raise the temperature. And I think Nathaniel, as you pointed out, sort of an environment where you view the other party as more than just like the opposition, but as like a threat, right?
could certainly produce an environment where there could be more interest among some, especially on the extremes in embracing violent behavior. Yeah. And to that point is a survey from CBS News and YouGov in September of 2023 said when
Voters were asked the biggest threat to the American way of life. That was the question. 34% said the biggest threat to the American way of life is from other people in America, not foreign threats. The only thing that was higher than that was economic factors like inflation and so on. But I mean,
That's a third of Americans saying the most dangerous thing is other Americans. Really makes you miss the Cold War, right? And I think given that, it is worth saying that across a bunch of different surveys that try to ask Americans their perception of reality, people have a pretty caricatured view of who they share the country with, right? Yeah.
Broadly speaking, Americans are not super political. They are not hyper-partisan. Their number one identity is not a political party or association with a particular political candidate. It is...
Basically, you know, the survey data that we've talked about on this podcast and looked at before, it's somewhere in the range of like 85% of Americans are not motivated by the kind of partisanship that you see if you turn on the news on any given day. They're focused on the real life issues.
things of bringing the kids to school and making dinner and whatever. I don't want to also caricature that. However people live their lives, that's what it is, and it's not politics. And on top of that, I think people have caricatured views of even when we get into the partisanship, what the other party believes or what the other party is willing to do for power or so on and so forth. And that's dangerous. I think it's hard sometimes for people to
on both sides of the aisle that like, oh, you actually have a caricatured view of the people that you're maligning. But in large part, both sides of the aisle do. It's worth keeping in mind because our...
Civility and peace is somewhat dependent on having a true sense of reality and treating people kindly accordingly. That's always some of my favorite polling is when you ask folks like, you know, what percentage of Americans believe this or want that or whatever? And Republicans and Democrats alike just have like a wild perception of what they're, you know, quote unquote enemies, but what should just be political opposition belief.
All right, we have a long week ahead and we got lots more podcasts to record. I'm not sure I should say as I sign off here. There has been other breaking news this morning that Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida has dismissed the Trump documents case. We are also expecting in a matter of hours to find out who former President Trump's VP pick is next.
I think it's important that we talk about this in a, you know, give it the space that it needs. And we will talk about those other things on future podcasts, you know, be on the lookout for them, whether they are later this evening or tomorrow. But before we sign off, any closing thoughts on this event and political violence more broadly as we've been discussing it?
I guess I'll close with one more like note of hope in the polling. APNORC released a survey from March just this year asking people about what factors were important to the U.S. identity. And across the political spectrum, mostly we agree.
We agree that a democratically elected government is important to the U.S. identity. We agree that mixing of cultures and values from around the world is important to the U.S. identity and our shared culture and values is important to us. We agree that the ability of people living here to achieve the American dream is important to our identity. The things that are dividing us are not at the core of our core values. We are more united, I think, than people think we are. So hopefully...
This event can bring some calming down to the rhetoric that we've been seeing at some of the high levels. And we can focus on what makes us Americans. Mary Radcliffe for president. All right. Well, I think that's a good place to leave things. So I'm going to do exactly that. Thank you, Mary, Nathaniel and Jeff. Thanks, Galen. Thanks, Galen. Thank you, Galen.
My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. And thank you to all three of you, Shane, Cameron, and Jayla, for working over the weekend to find a whole bunch of data and help us look at lawmaker reactions and so on. I really appreciate it.
You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.
