Half of Americans expect a civil war ‘in the next few years’

A study released Wednesday found that about half of all Americans expect a civil war to occur “in the next few years.” 

Researchers from the University of California-Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and the California Violence Research Center reported that 50.1 percent of survey respondents said they at least somewhat agree that a civil war will happen soon, while 47.8 percent disagreed. 

About 14 percent said they “strongly” or “very strongly” agree that a civil war is imminent, while 36 percent said they somewhat agree. 

The results come as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection is set to hold its final hearing of the summer on Thursday. The committee will release its report on what led to the Capitol attack, including possibly recommending any charges against individuals involved, later this year. 

The researchers said the study’s results may also signal reasons for concern about the future of American democracy. 

Two-thirds of respondents said there is a “serious threat” to the country’s democracy, and almost 90 percent said it is “very” or “extremely” important for the United States to remain a democracy. 

But more than 40 percent said having a “strong leader” for the country is more important than having a democracy. Almost 1 in 5 said they agreed “strongly” or “very strongly” with that statement. 

Almost 20 percent said they agree strongly or very strongly that violence might be justified to protect democracy if elected leaders will not, while more than 15 percent said they agree strongly or very strongly with using violence to save “our American way of life,” which is “disappearing.”

More than 20 percent said using political violence is at least sometimes justified in general. 

A quarter of respondents said violence is at least sometimes justified to stop an election from being stolen.

More than 10 percent said violence would be at least sometimes justified to reinstall former President Trump into office this year. 

Trump has consistently insisted that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him despite a lack of evidence and has engaged in efforts to overturn the results of the vote at the state and federal levels. 

The researchers wrote that their findings are consistent with many of the polls taken on this topic in the past two years. 

“The motivating premises for this survey were that current conditions in the US create both perceived threats and actual threats to its future as a free and democratic society,” they wrote. “The findings bear out both premises.” 

A Yahoo News-YouGov poll from last month found that almost half of all Americans believe the country will “cease to be a democracy” in the future. 

The recent study was conducted among 8,620 respondents from May 13 to June 2. The results, the researchers said, are “subject to sampling error and bias” due to nonresponses and other factors. Each result was calculated with a 95 percent confidence interval.