Robert Pape

Because the more support there is for political violence, the more people will simply look the other way.

They'll discount what they see.

And this is what I mean by the era of violent populism, which is once we have tens of millions of Americans supporting political violence for their own causes, this can then create spirals.

You can see it on the debate.

Is this a mostly right-wing phenomenon, a left-wing phenomenon?

Well, we have all the cases here, and the cases are, let me just go over the last 12 months.

So we saw in June 2025, the assassination murder of a Democratic leader in Minnesota.

You saw the assassination murder of Charlie Kirk a few months later.

We also have Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania.

We, of course, have multiple President Trump assassination attempts.

So what you are seeing is clearly the rise of political violence on both sides.

But the really important thing to say about this is not just that it's rising on both sides, but it's now starting to spiral.

That's exactly right.

And we have conducted 20 nationally representative surveys of Americans over the last five years.

We conduct them at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, and we started doing it in the summer of 2021.

And then the most recent one was in the end of January of this year.

So we understand quite a bit about the attitudes of Americans on political violence.

So for most of the years of the Biden administration, so this would be from, say, 2021 to the end of the Biden administration, our surveys found 10% of the body politics supported political violence to restore Donald Trump.

to the presidency.

And then we did focus groups and we did further survey research.