Could political violence determine the outcome of this year’s elections?

Editor’s note: The headline of this piece has been changed to reflect that the finding of one-third justifying political violence was from 2022.

It’s an election year. Donald Trump and other Republican Party leaders have refused to commit to accepting November’s results. Trump has referred to those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 as “warriors.” 

There is growing concern that this year’s elections could lead to — or even be decided by — political violence.

My colleagues and I treat violence, including political violence, as a health problem. That’s not a conceptual stretch. Political violence on a large scale could kill and injure thousands of people and have a broad array of adverse effects on American society that would persist for generations.

The best approach to intervening in such problems starts with getting into the field and understanding them better. Beginning in 2022, our group has conducted a large, annual, nationally representative longitudinal survey of Americans’ support for and personal willingness to engage in political violence.

Many of our findings are deeply concerning. In 2022, nearly one-third of participants (32.8 percent) considered violence to be usually or always justified to advance at least one political objective. 

Some groups were much more likely than others to endorse political violence: Republicans and MAGA-supporting Republicans in particular; those who endorse QAnon, the white supremacy movement, Christian nationalists and other extreme right-wing organizations and movements; and firearm owners — but only by a small margin, unless they owned assault-type rifles, had bought firearms during the COVID pandemic or regularly carried loaded firearms in public. 

With 2023’s results, the list grew to include racists, sexists, xenophobes, homophobes, transphobes Islamophobes and antisemites.

In most cases, participants who were more supportive of political violence were also more willing to commit it themselves. Here’s just one example: 8.8 percent of firearm owners who regularly carried loaded firearms in public, but only 0.5 percent of owners who never carried, thought it very likely or extremely likely that, at some time in the future, they would shoot someone to advance a political objective.

Consider the implications of that finding. Regular carriers accounted for 9 percent of all firearm owners in our survey, and in 2021, firearm owners accounted for 28.8 percent of all adults in the United States. It follows directly that large numbers of armed individuals who are at least potentially willing to engage in lethal political violence are in public places across the U.S. every day.

We also asked about civil war. In 2022, 13.7 percent of participants strongly or very strongly agreed with the statement that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.” 

We were astonished by this and probed further in 2023. Only 5.7 percent of participants believed that civil war was coming (2023 wasn’t an election year), but of those who did, 38.4 percent agreed strongly or very strongly that “the United States needs a civil war to set things right.”

Conducting and reporting this research can feel, at times, like taking a long look into the abyss, but not all the news was bad. 

Two-thirds of our participants in 2022 and three-fourths in 2023 rejected political violence as never justified — not just in general, but for one specific objective after another. Of the participants who considered violence justified in at least one instance, the vast majority (about 70 percent in 2022 and 60 percent in 2023) were unwilling to engage in it themselves. These findings provide grounds for hope and directions for a way forward.

To begin with, let’s acknowledge that our drift toward violence this year will not correct itself. On the contrary, as the elections approach, the stakes become clearer and the rhetoric intensifies. By-any-means-necessary thinking will almost certainly increase.

But this isn’t a time for planning to emigrate; it’s a time to mobilize. The great majority of us who reject political violence need to make our opposition known, over and over and as publicly as possible. We need to create or join movements that do the same. People pay attention to what their family, friends, coworkers, social media contacts and well-known public figures say.

We must pay attention to what others say, too, and be mindful of the admonition, “If you see something, say something.” Any one of us could become that person who’s best positioned to talk someone back from the cliff or alert authorities when acts of political violence are being planned.

Our task is to ensure that violence doesn’t determine the outcome of this year’s elections — that 2024 isn’t the year when the term “battleground states” takes on a new and bloodier meaning. 

It begins with each of us making and acting on this commitment: Not if I can help it.

Garen Wintemute, M.D., M.P.H., is a distinguished professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, Davis and director of the California Firearm Violence Research Center.