Fears of political violence rise in a divided nation before election

Crowds of people, some waving the U.S. flag and blue Trump signs, stand at the Capitol, with smoke seen at an upper level

Oct. 30, 2024 3 AM PT

Some political violence has been driven by the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which holds that there is an organized effort to replace America’s white population with minorities.
The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was unprecedented, but the country has experienced acts of political violence before.

America is restless, armed, divided and angry.

Days away from one of the most defining elections in its history, the nation faces the growing specter of political violence. Donald Trump since July has survived an assassination attempt and an apparent attempt.

Many of his supporters have disavowed the election system — some poll workers are wearing bulletproof vests — and have threatened force to return him to power. A percentage of those opposed to him, according to a recent poll, have conversely said that force is justified to keep him from the White House.

The deadly uprising at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, still resounds in the nation’s consciousness, and the hostilities that provoked it have not subsided. The recent months of campaigning have been volatile and rancorous, underscoring a changing American narrative in which a white, mostly Christian majority is shrinking in the face of a growing multiracial population.

These frictions have intensified in an age when lone-wolf gunmen, driven by racist manifestos and desires for publicity, have attacked shopping centers, supermarkets and schools. A growing mistrust of the country’s institutions has officials concerned that violence may erupt at voting centers in battleground states in an election that is all but certain to be contested before and after Nov. 5. Some Republicans — echoing the “Stop the Steal” mantra from four years ago — have recently peddled misinformation and filed lawsuits questioning the election’s integrity.

“The fact that election workers need to be worried about their security is incomprehensible and unacceptable,” FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said in a statement last week. His comments were made a day before a man wearing a MAGA hat was arrested for allegedly punching a poll worker in Bexar County, Texas.

Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats based at the University of Chicago, has studied political violence for decades. He describes the time we’re in as a “wildfire season.” The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

America is fractured. The political rhetoric is fierce. What most concerns you about the possibility of political violence in this atmosphere?

America is not just politically divided. We’re in an era of what I call violent populism. Violence is becoming an all too normal part of our politics.

You see this in a variety of ways. You can date the beginning of it to 2018 and see how it has been growing. We had the Tree of Life shooter in Pittsburgh, killing 11 Jews. The shooter wrote [in] a manifesto that he was driven by the conspiracy theories around the Great Replacement [that there is an organized effort to replace America’s white population with minorities].

In 2019, you had the El Paso shooter, killing 23 Hispanics. In 2022, you had the Buffalo shooting, 10 African Americans are killed. That shooter detailed in a 150-page manifesto explaining he was driven by the Great Replacement theory. These are acts of political violence of the first order. Then in October of 2022 we had the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi. Then the two Trump assassination attempts.

This spate of political violence is historically high. It’s not just polarization. We are in an era of violent populism.

You mentioned the Great Replacement theory. What are some of the other animating causes of this violence?

We’ve been conducting surveys every three or four months since June 2021 of Americans’ support for political violence across the spectrum. The more there is lack of confidence in the legitimacy of the elections — the more people believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president — the more likely are people willing to support the use of force to restore Trump to the presidency.

If there are questions about the legitimacy of the election we’re about to have, then we have to worry that this will correspond with a significant increase in support for political violence. The radical wings could well experience that again.

The cause that doesn’t get enough attention is the historic transition from a white-majority democracy to a white-minority, multiracial democracy. This is the big environment in which this era of violent populism is occurring.

In 1990, about 77% of the American public was non-Hispanic white. Today, that number is 61%. We’re going through a tipping point.

What you are seeing is determined [people] on the right who want to stop that transition and possibly reverse it. This points to the rise of Donald Trump and why immigration is such a dominant issue. At the same time, you’re seeing determined [people] on the left that want to continue and accelerate the change to a multiracial democracy.

In our current survey, 6% of the American public — the equivalent of 15 million adults — support the use of force to restore Trump to the presidency. Eight percent — the equivalent of 21 million — support the use of force to prevent Trump from becoming president.

We have the fodder for the significant continuation of political violence. We are in a wildfire season.

A lot of focus has been on threats faced by election workers. How prevalent and dangerous is this dynamic?

It’s very immediate. The violence of Jan. 6, 2021, tells us we have to take seriously mounting threats against election workers.

It’s not just election day itself, when people are used to worrying about brawls and fighting at local precincts. But it extends to afterwards during the actual counting and certification of votes. We have to be worried again that for the [election] losers political violence is a way they don’t lose. We’re not seeing enough yet from the governors in the swing states — Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia — to help diminish the risk of political violence.

If rhetoric can increase political violence, it can also help decrease it, to pour water on the wildfire.

It would be helpful if the governors of these states got together and made a joint statement condemning political violence and doing this before an act of violence happens. If not, the election workers are left to fend for themselves.

The nation has seen spasms of political violence throughout its history. We had the anarchist bombings of the 1970s and other periods of unrest. How does today fit into that historical context?

Jan. 6 was truly unprecedented — to have a mob of American citizens storming the Capitol to stop the certification of an election. But we have had acts of political violence before.

You have to go back to the 1960s and ‘70s to find anything like what has happened over the last seven or eight years. The last time we had an assassination attempt against a president was Ronald Reagan in 1981. We also had a tremendous amount of violence in the first part of the 1920s, which was the era of the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan. Membership went from a few hundred thousand to 6 million.

We can’t take our eyes off what’s happening in this country. I gave it the name violent populism because it’s not a civil war or normal populism. It’s something different.

What has been Donald Trump’s impact on the growing fears of violence?

Trump is both the cause and the symptom. He has risen so powerfully and quickly to the top of American politics. He is still catching people by surprise. He has been the victim of two assassination attempts. There is very likely a rally-around-Trump effect after these attempts.

So many people will tell you at his rallies, “Trump took a bullet for the country.” That really changed their position. Trump is becoming ever more deeply a part of the idea of “Making America Great Again.” Some people read into that and think it means stopping the white majority from transitioning into a multiracial one.

A lot of the violence is coming from lone wolves or single assailants. Why is that?

Lone-wolf political actors are often volatile people on the edge of violence for their own psycho-social reasons.

However, the perception many of them have is that a significant part of the public supports their goals. That can nudge them over the edge. It’s not the case when you hear, ‘Well, that lone wolf was mentally ill and this has nothing to do with politics, it’s about mental illness.’ These are not alternative explanations. They are mutually reinforcing pictures of how you get political violence.

The most common thing you see in all these lone wolves is a desire for publicity. Sometimes they bring cameras with them.
The person who tried to assassinate Nancy Pelosi was arrested and 10 days later he was interviewed on a San Francisco radio station. The very first thing he says is that he wants to apologize to the country for failing to kill Nancy Pelosi. He thought he was acting for a popular cause.

It doesn’t appear that this election will ease or lessen the threat of political violence. Where are we headed?

No matter who wins, the problem of violent populism is going to persist for years. It could well become worse before it gets better.

Ultimately, I believe we will be heading for a softer landing after an eight- to 10-year period, but it’s not going to be over on Nov. 5.