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Americans Bracing for Violence after Election Day

October 26, 2024

In an election cycle dominated by threats of violence — whether assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris’s repeated claim that Trump is a “threat to democracy” — it should be no surprise that a majority of Americans anticipate violence following election day.

According to a Scripps News/Ipsos poll released this week, over 60% of Americans believe that violence on or after November 5 is “somewhat” or “very likely.” Concerns of violence are higher among Democrats (70%) than among Republicans (59%), but highest among battleground state voters (72% in Wisconsin, for example).

Roughly three-quarters of Americans (77% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats) said that they would ultimately accept the results of the election, even if the candidate they voted for were to lose. The majority of voters from both parties said that their favored candidate should “challenge the results legally and accept court rulings” if he or she loses the election, but over 40% of Republicans said that if their candidate lost, it would be due to widespread election fraud. In fact, both Republican and Independent voters have little faith in voting methods other than in-person voting. Only one third of Republicans and less than half of Independent voters said that ballot drop boxes are secure, while trust in mail-in voting was only slightly higher (38% among Republicans, 51% among Independents).

Thus far, there have been two confirmed assassination attempts against Trump, following news outlets like the New Republic comparing the 45th president to Adolf Hitler and Harris and other Democrats pointing to January 6, 2021 in an effort to describe Trump as a “threat to democracy.”

Just this week, in an article discredited by the sources cited, The Atlantic again compared Trump to Hitler. Harris then proceeded to repeat the debunked claims from behind the seal of the vice president. The Trump campaign and others have argued that the rhetoric being used by Harris and her Democratic allies is “directly to blame for the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump…” Following the assassination attempts, a poll revealed that over a quarter (28%) of Democrats said that the U.S. would be “better off” if Trump had in fact been killed.

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.



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