Millions of Americans believe that violence against their political opponents can be justified
Researchers led by Sean J. Westwood of Dartmouth College, in a paper titled “Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence,” argue that “documented support for political violence is illusory, a product of ambiguous questions, conflated definitions, and disengaged respondents.” Often, pollsters were just capturing people expressing their partisan tribalism.
So in a new YouGov survey of 2,750 Americans conducted in November, a group of political scientists known as Bright Line Watch took another whack at it.
When they asked more finely calibrated questions aimed at getting around the ambiguity of the word “violence” — which could mean anything from sending threatening messages to overthrowing the government by force — they found that the number of Americans who supported political violence was closer to 4 or 5 percent.
They also divided respondents into two groups: those who identified strongly with their party and those who didn’t. Slicing the numbers that way gives you 9 percent support for the Jan. 6 violence among the most hard-core Republicans and 6 percent for less-partisan Republicans.
Even that lower number is not so reassuring when you map it to the U.S. population as a whole. The bottom line, said Kalmoe: “Millions of Americans — and perhaps tens of millions — think that violence against their partisan opponents is at least a little bit justified.” [Continue reading…]