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.

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.

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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .