The Surprising Reality of Political Violence in America

After two apparent assassination attempts against Donald J. Trump, it’s easy to think our politics are becoming more violent. The research is not so clear.

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The site of former President Donald J. Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa., in July, where a gunman attempted to assassinate him.

When Donald J. Trump was nearly assassinated in Pennsylvania in July, a Dartmouth political scientist named Sean Westwood happened to be in the middle of a research project asking Americans about political violence.

At the time, many feared that the shooting would lead to a growing appetite for more violence.

But Mr. Westwood and his colleagues found the opposite. In the weeks after the attack, Americans’ support for partisan violence, and murder specifically, diminished — and fell most sharply among Republicans who identify with Mr. Trump.

Americans are still exceptionally hostile about people who disagree with them on politics, but “an assassination attempt did not inflame the tensions,” the authors write in a forthcoming paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Two unsuccessful attempts on Mr. Trump’s life, a daily barrage of violent threats against public officials of all stripes and finger-pointing from both parties have fueled the impression that the country’s politics are spinning out of control.

But some common assumptions about political violence in America are not reinforced by recent data, according to several new studies.

Instances of extremist violence have actually declined in recent years by some key measures. Although some Americans continue to say they approve of political violence, support for the most serious types of violence has not increased amid election-related tensions this year.

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