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Americans are worried about a potential spike in political violence in the coming years, with majorities expecting such attacks to increase, while more than half of Americans told pollsters they expect a political candidate to get assassinated within the next five years. Fears of rising violence are bipartisan, a new poll from Politico and Public First found, with 53 percent of 2024 Kamala Harris voters and 51 percent of Trump voters expecting an assassination soon. Around 61 percent of recent Harris voters and 50 percent of recent Trump voters foresee a spike in violence overall. The poll, taken after the September assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, reflects a national mood that’s both concerned about — and, to a degree, accepting of — political violence. The Politico poll also found that 24 percent of respondents think political violence is sometimes justified, a figure that jumps to more than one-third for those under age 45. The results are similar to an October NPR / PBS News / Marist poll, which found that 28 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans thought political violence might be necessary to “get the country back on track.” Between the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the 2024 election, there were at least 300 cases of political violence, a 2024 Reuters analysis found, the largest surge in such attacks since the 1970s. Targets have included politicians and officials tied to both parties, ranging from multiple shooting attempts against Trump during the 2024 campaign, to a firebombing attack in April on the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. Since 2016, there were nearly three times as many partisan-driven attacks and plots in the U.S. as in the previous quarter-century, a 2023 Center for Strategic and International Studies paper concluded. While the Trump administration has been quick to blame the left for the trend, the nature of the problem is far more nuanced than that, Shane Burley, an author and journalist who writes about fascism and right-wing political movements, recently told The Independent. He pointed to a variety of “profound social changes” as driving the surge, including deep partisanship, economic dispossession, ideological and geographic segregation, virulent online conspiracy theories, poor mental health infrastructure, and dissolving social structures such as unions. There’s also been an injection of violence directly into our political process itself, whether it’s the Trump administration sending masked ICE agents and National Guardsmen into largely Democratic cities to carry out immigration enforcement, or the increasingly common presence of armed militiamen and ideological street gangs at protests. “People engage in violence when they are not part of a stable social system,” Burley told The Independent. “Gun violence is really a symptom of a real larger social problem that you’re going to have to deal with holistically, and that’s really unfortunate because we are nowhere near dealing with those problems in a holistic way.” Left-wing attacks and plots have been on the rise recently, though a large body of research shows that right-wing extremists and jihadists have killed far more people than those associated with any other political cause in the U.S. since 9/11. Complicating matters further, many incidents don’t map neatly onto one political ideology, especially given the frequent presence of mental health crises among those who commit such acts.
