New Survey Finds Significant Support for Political Violence Ahead of Election

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well, now, only a few days left until the U.S. election, as you know, and the extremely tight race between Harris and Trump is keeping people on their toes, especially after January 6th. Many fear the outcome this time could lead to another seismic event of political violence. University of Chicago professor Robert Pape is an expert on the topic, and he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss how future attacks could be prevented.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Bianna, thanks. Professor Robert Pape, thanks so much for joining us again. You have been studying political violence and you’ve been, you know, rolling out these surveys since 2021 about people on both sides of the aisle who are, well, more open to the idea of political violence to get what they want. I mean, what’s the latest survey that you have and why do you think — you’ve stated that there is a, quote, “serious risk that another January 6th could happen during this election cycle,” why?

ROBERT PAPE, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: So, our most recent survey is September, just about a month ago. September 16th is when it came out of the field. And we found that 6 percent of American adults, that’s the equivalent of 15 million American adults, support the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency. And 8 percent of American adults support the use of force to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president. Now, these numbers matter because support for political violence can nudge volatile actors who are, for their own psychosocial reasons, on the edge of violence over that edge and take action. And this can happen because that support for political violence, I just identified, often shows up in social media. It often shows up in social media posts. And so, we shouldn’t be — and these numbers actually have been fairly stable over the last year. So, we shouldn’t be surprised when we see volatile actors attempt to assassinate Nancy Pelosi, as happened, attempt to assassinate Barack Obama. That is an assailant who tried to get into his house with guns and weapons in his vehicle in June 2023, or to assassination attempts against Donald Trump. In all of these cases — although, there’s lots of details about the individual attackers that are different, in all of those cases, they were seeking to do what they believe would be popular for their audience.

SREENIVASAN: Professor, violence has been part of political systems. So, if you are able to look back at the line of longer arc of political violence in American history, what is the moment that we’re in today? Why is it so concerning?

PAPE: Well, you’re quite right that the moment we’re in today is not unprecedented in our history, but we are in a historically high period of political violence. And those cases, I just discussed as a cluster, and there are more. You would have to go back to the 1960s and ’70s, that is 50 years ago, to find other high points that look like this. Now, why are we in this historically high period? Well, as in the 1960s, periods of social change and radical social change often correspond with periods of high political violence in societies. That is that common pattern. Well, what is the social change that we’re going through today? Well, the big historic social change is we’re going from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy truly multiracial democracy. In 1990, 77 percent of Americans were non-Hispanic white. Today, that number is 61 percent. In about 10, 12 years, that number will be 50, 49 percent. We are going through the period, the transition period. It’s about 20 years. It started about 10 years ago. And that corresponds with the rise of Donald Trump and also the virulent opposition to Donald Trump. And that also corresponds with the rise of this period, I call the era of violent populism in America. And that era of violent populism is unfortunately likely to be with us for a number of years because it — yes, Donald Trump is a cause, but he’s also a symptom of this era that we’re going through. And it’s not simply a matter of this one a lead or that one a lead or this election or that election, things have been getting worse steadily as we are going through this historic transition to a genuinely multiracial democracy. And that is enormous social change, bigger social change than the 1960s.

SREENIVASAN: If this demographic shift is playing out, and if it’s one of the reasons that people are feeling so anxious. You know, I can understand why it feeds into this racist idea of the Great Replacement Theory, right? And I’m wondering whether the subset of the population whose greatest anxieties are about being replaced, if you will, are those people more likely to want political violence than people who might see the pattern but don’t subscribe to it as strictly.

PAPE: Inside of our body politic today, as I just told you, there are 6 percent of Americans that support the use of force to restore Donald Trump, and they also heavily believe in that Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory, as you’re — as you just said. However, the other 8 percent are also supporting violence against Trump. And the way to think about this is that you have a portion on the right who wants to slow down or reverse this transition to a multiracial democracy, and you have a portion on the left that wants to continue and accelerate that shift for fear it will never happen. You see, the left is responding to the rise of Trump and it’s responding and not just like, well, it’s OK if he wins, we’re just going to — no, it’s responding in quite serious ways that we have not seen in our lifetimes. And the reason is because the fear is if Trump wins, this will actually keep minorities as second-class citizens pretty much forever. And that is a daunting prospect for many people on the left. Now, the risk is — of violence is greater on the right, although we have seen violence on the left. The reason it’s greater is because of Donald Trump. He has demonstrated that he is willing and will stoke violence to egg on a mob to seize the Capitol to stop the certification of an election that goes against him. No other political leader in our history, nearly 250-year history, ever did that. So, it’s not — there is essentially combustible material. So, Hari, you can think of political violence as like a wildfire. There — you need combustible material, that’s how we know we’re in wildfire season. We can measure the changing size of dry combustible material and measure it quite scientifically, but what we can’t measure scientifically are the triggers because those are unexpected lightning strikes or campfires left unattended or cigar butts thrown out of a window. Well, in the case of political violence, those triggers are someone like Donald Trump, who’s actually triggering and setting off and igniting that combustible material. And the most extreme case, of course, was on January 6th, where he brought that combustible material to Washington, D.C., and then he threw matches right into that crowd to ignite them against the Capitol. And then, once they were in the Capitol, he ignited them further to attack his own vice president, Mike Pence. So, that — we’re in a wildfire season. The most dangerous triggers are on the right, but we just need to recognize it is a wildfire season where there are combustible material on both sides.

SREENIVASAN: To carry this analogy further, if I go to a national park, we have an infrastructure in place where there’s a sign that says wildfire season, wildfire risk, extreme, high, low, right? I mean, it’s sort of out in the open. We understand it. But we don’t necessarily seem to have that sort of an infrastructure built into our conversation. What can we do in the political system to create a vehicle for not just these opinions to be shared, but them to gather weight?

PAPE: We know that incendiary rhetoric can be a trigger on that combustible material. But calming rhetoric is the water that can help calm down the fire. Well, where that calming rhetoric should come from is our senior political leaders. And what that would look like is with senior leaders would say all political violence, not just violence by the other side, but all political violence is illegal, immoral, and anti-American. And the leader who’s been doing that the most is President Biden. For several years, we have found in our data strong support for political violence to restore a woman’s right to abortion. 10 percent of the public supports that. That’s a lot of people. That’s 30 million people. Well, why aren’t we seeing more violence in that regard? One of the big reasons is President Biden. What President Biden has been doing is, from the day of the Dobbs decision, June 22, 2022, what President Biden has been doing is condemning the Dobbs decision, but also having big fat paragraphs that condemn political violence, even if it would come from the left. And he then says, take that anger you all feel and redirect it away from violence and toward voting. So, he’s not trying to tell people to not be angry, he’s trying to tell people to redirect that anger into voting and change the result in the democratic way. Well, that is extremely valuable. And he’s been saying that not just about the issue of abortion, but he also in his Oval Office address right after the first Trump assassination attempt, said the very same thing for 15 minutes in front of the country as a whole where he condemned all political violence.

SREENIVASAN: So, for our audience, this is not just a caution if President Trump wins, it seems what you’re talking about and the underlying trend that you’ve documented through your surveys is more structural in nature, that we need to prepare as a country for the prospect of almost an increased season of political violence that may show itself in different ways.

PAPE: What we are seeing is the working out of what you would expect when there is significant support for political violence in the body politic, these volatile actors are then going to be nudged over the edge and this is happening more and more and more, and we need to recognize that the roots of this are actually located in this structural change in our country. And it’s one of the most dramatic social changes that any country has gone through, Hari, and this is not going to be — this change to a multiracial democracy, this doesn’t happen in a year, it’s — we’re going through the 20-year transition period now, we’re about halfway through it, and this corresponds — it started about 10 years ago, it started to really see the cusp of the change, that’s when Donald Trump’s came on the on the scene, meteoric rise. And also, the issue of immigration became meteoric. Yes, there were people like Trump before in the ’90s, Pat Buchanan, almost exactly the same rhetoric, by the way. And also, the issue of immigration, yes, that’s been around. But notice those issues have dominated our politics in the last 10 years, and that’s happening not simply because of social media or polarization, it’s happening because of this structural change that we’re going through as a country. And so, we have to prepare for this. And we need our political leaders to step up and recognize that part of their leadership now is condemning political violence wherever it comes from, even if it comes from their own constituents.

ROBERTSON: When you talk to these police chiefs and different authorities, what do you tell them? I mean, because right now we’ve got the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have sent warnings saying that domestic terrorists want to sow violence and chaos throughout this election process. Just this week, we’ve had ballot boxes in Washington and Oregon catch fire after incendiary devices. And I wonder, how do you tell them to prepare?

PAPE: The key elements I identified are what will determine the outcome of elections. And what will determine the outcome? Well, the leaders themselves, obviously, and also the election officials. And this is absolutely crucial to understand. So, the threats against the election officials, for example, these aren’t disconnected, isolated events from all that — those other acts of political violence, I just pointed out, they are just another dimension of the political violence around the outcome of elections, and specifically around the outcomes related to Donald Trump. Because Trump isn’t just a political leader, he’s representing for not only his people, but the folks who disagree with Trump, this return to and keeping frozen in time, this white majority democracy. And as a result, then you can expect the violence will be very focused around what will determine his success or failure, and that is resulting of the counts of the election the mail-in ballot boxes that are now being burned. It’s not — there’s not local. What’s local is national. And so, that is something I’ve been warning about in detail with many, hundreds of these officials. And the organizations themselves now are reacting.

SREENIVASAN: The last election took several days to sort through before there were kind of calls made by media institutions and so forth. So, if this election is just as close, what happens in that period where there is an uncertainty?

PAPE: The uncertainty, as you’re explaining it, works against us and for more violence, because that uncertainty equates to the possibility and even probability of more triggers. So, those triggers could come with more conspiracy theories on social media, for example. Now, will there be conspiracy theories even if the election is completely clear and so forth? Very likely so. So, this is also why it’s incredibly important to have transparency as we go forward. And this is also incredibly important this time around, this election that we recognize that the security of the central ballot tabulation centers after November 5th are itself. This itself is a serious problem. And I mean, the physical security, not the cyber security. So, we need to recognize that last time, in 2020, the main violence occurred on January 6. Well, precisely because it happened last time on January 6th, we need to worry about what we might call a January 6th type event happening more at the state level or bad actors seeking to not just harm election officials, but physically destroy ballots in states where the election is decided by a percentage or two. Because if you could destroy, say, 2 or 3 percent of the physical ballots in a state, say Pennsylvania, and if Pennsylvania is dispositive of the election, well, see how you can throw the whole election into chaos. And so, that is something that this year is a particularly sensitive problem.

SREENIVASAN: Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, Robert Pape, thanks so much for joining us.

PAPE: Absolutely. Thank you, Hari.