Despite a tumultuous election year and deepening political divisions, Americans' willingness to actually commit political violence has not increased — a finding that offers a measure of reassurance about the health of U.S. democracy during one of its most strained periods in recent memory.
A large nationally representative survey led by UC Davis Centers for Violence Prevention, which polled more than 8,000 adults from mid-2024 to mid-2025, found that personal willingness to damage property, threaten others, injure someone, or kill someone for political reasons remained essentially flat across this contentious year. In fact, willingness to kill someone for political motives declined slightly. The findings were published in the journal Injury Epidemiology.
The research, directed by Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician and violence prevention expert, tracked year-over-year shifts in attitudes toward democracy, civil conflict, and the use of force to advance political objectives. While the survey did identify a modest increase in the proportion of Americans who view political violence as justified under at least some circumstances—rising from 32.3% to 35.6%—this shift in abstract belief did not translate into action or readiness to act.
"What stands out is not a dramatic escalation, but a pattern of relative stability," Wintemute said. "Across the political spectrum, the large majority of Americans continue to reject political violence, even during a period of intense political strain."
The data reveal important nuances when examined by political affiliation. MAGA Republicans were more likely than strong Democrats to believe political violence is usually or always justified to achieve at least one objective (52.2% versus 32.1%), and they were more than three times as likely to expect being armed with a gun in a situation they viewed as justifying violence (16.9% versus 5.6%). Yet even among MAGA Republicans, the percentage actually willing to kill someone remained low at 1.5%, nearly identical to strong Democrats at 1.4%.
Interestingly, from 2024 to 2025, attitudes shifted in opposite directions across party lines. Strong Democrats showed small increases in some measures of perceived justification for violence, while MAGA Republicans showed small decreases on several of those same measures—a pattern that suggests movement rather than entrenchment.
A small uptick was observed in Americans' beliefs that the country may experience civil war in coming years, though support for civil war as "necessary" remained unchanged. Only 9.3% of strong Democrats and 3.8% of MAGA Republicans strongly agreed that the U.S. will experience civil war in the next few years.
Wintemute emphasized that looking at single demographic groups can distort the picture. "The data show modest movement in multiple directions. What's consistent is that extreme positions and personal readiness to commit violence remain limited to a small minority across all political affiliations. Entrapment in a spiral of escalating political violence is not inevitable in the United States."
The distinction between believing political violence is justified and actually being willing to commit it matters profoundly. It suggests that while Americans may grow more cynical about democracy and more willing to rationalize extreme measures, their actual threshold for violence remains high. That gap between thought and action—between bitter ideology and willingness to act on it—may be precisely where democratic stability lives.