How worried should we be about political violence?

Plus, moving beyond deplatforming & content moderation

“As Kristen King’s husband lay dying in their yard from three gunshots to his head, the 911 operator asked her: Did she know who killed him – or why?

Sobbing, King identified the shooter as her neighbor in the small Ohio town of Okeana. ‘His name is Austin Combs,” she stammered. “He’s come over, like, four times confronting my husband because he thought he was a Democrat.’”

-Reuters, “Political violence in polarized U.S. at its worst since 1970s,” Aug. 9, 2023

Political violence — force or violence with a political motive, goal, or message — is spiking in the United States. Americans are angrier, more inflamed and quicker to hurt or kill over politics than anytime in at least a generation. 

This trend could have profound consequences for democracy. Election workers, fearful for their safety, are retiring in droves. There’s a spike in hate crimes reminiscent of the post-9/11 era. Threats of violence against public servants — legislators, prosecutors, judges — may already be warping our politics in dangerous ways (in private, Republican senators admit fears for their safety played a role in Trump’s 2021 impeachment acquittal). 

Despite all that, it can be difficult to judge the systemic impact of political violence. Beyond individual instances of tragedy, beyond the headlines, how exactly is political violence impacting our institutions? Getting a handle on these questions is the first step to reducing the damage that political violence is causing.

Tracking the impact of political violence 

Our colleagues at Protect Democracy partner with the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute on the Violence and Democracy Impact Tracker, or VDIT. The Tracker estimates the impact of political violence across eight pillars of democracy – things like freedom of expression, voting access and how legislatures operate. It pools expert insights and surfaces the top vulnerabilities to watch. In other words, it’s a warning system for impacts we should be worried about. (For more on how the index works, click here. All you really need to know is higher scores = higher impact.) 

Since VDIT first began collecting data in July of 2023, there has been one single overwhelming takeaway. For nearly a year now, more than half of experts have assessed that political violence’s impact on elections signals significant backsliding and a high potential for the breakdown in the future. 

There are other important impacts on things like individual liberties. But, above all, we should worry about political violence when it comes to our elections. 

What’s more, we’ve seen how violence targeting elections can metastasize into threats against other public officials, especially those ensuring accountability for the initial violence. Think: threats against judges overseeing cases connected to January 6th. For the first time since its inception, threats to public officials rank amongst VDIT’s top five issues to watch out for. 

So what can be done? 

Short term: use the law to deter violence

For now, some of the most effective responses to political violence been through the legal system. Legal tools provide accountability for past violations and help deter future violence. This can be both criminal (prosecution by the government) and civil (lawsuits by private actors). 

Some examples: 

Voter intimidation law is often about preventing violence (or threats of violence) from effectively disenfranchising voters. For example, in 2022, a group then-known as Clean Elections USA was surveilling and harassing voters at ballot drop boxes in Arizona. Some were wearing masks and carrying guns. The Arizona League of Women Voters sued (Protect Democracy represented them) and won. The Court ordered the defendants to immediately halt the intimidating conduct.

It worked. What could have escalated into a dangerous and potentially violent situation was diffused. (Read more about the case here.)

Or, in 2020, you may remember the ‘Trump Train’ that harassed and intimidated campaign workers and volunteers on a Biden-Harris campaign bus driving on I-35 in Texas. Scary stuff. 

But what you may not have heard is that the campaign volunteers and bus driver sued — and the case has been largely successful so far. Two defendants settled and publicly apologized (the rest are proceeding to trial). A snippet of one of their apologies: 

“Looking back, I would have done things differently. I do not feel that I was thinking things through at the time, and I apologize to the occupants of the bus for my part in actions that day that frightened or intimidated them.” 

And it wasn’t just the attackers that faced accountability. In a separate lawsuit, the City of San Marcos and Texas police officials settled with the bus riders for refusing to protect them against the ambush. The terms included compensation, acknowledgment of “subpar police conduct” and mandatory training of the police force. In other words, accountability for both the attack and for law enforcement’s failure to respond to the attack.

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A similar dynamic is true for the cases filed to hold those accountable for the campaign to overturn the 2020 election. Defamation lawsuits have imposed consequences for those who intentionally or recklessly told lies about the election. The January 6th Select Committee conducted an unprecedented national accountability and reckoning process. According to the Department of Justice, 749 people who participated in the criminal activity on January 6th have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences.

All of these legal consequences have helped do what legal consequences are supposed to do. They make recurrence less likely. 

But that’s not the end of the story. Just because the law is a powerful hammer does not mean every way out of this crisis is a nail. The courts alone won’t de-escalate the threat posed by political violence.

No easy solutions for the long-term

No one has all the answers to political violence — it is deep-seated in our culture and politics — but here are some ideas that are proactive, not just reactive: 

• Write and talk about the threat honestly: For a stellar example of reporting that illuminates the threat of political violence without sensationalizing, see Joseph Tanfani, Ned Parker and Peter Eisler’s “Judges in Trump-related cases face unprecedented wave of threats” in Reuters. No politics — it focuses on the institutions that make our democracy function and uses the stories of individuals to provide a fact-based overview of the issue as a whole. 

• Strengthen protections against violence before bad things happen: We can make key institutions — like elections — less vulnerable to violence. These include strategies like emergency and de-escalation plans, better law enforcement coordination and simple protections to election workers’ safety and personal information. See the Committee on Safe and Secure Elections for more. 

• Undo the electoral structures that are inflaming our politics: You knew it would end up here. There’s a growing body of evidence that finds that countries (like ours) that use winner-take-all electoral systems are more prone to pernicious, “us-versus-them” polarization than countries that use proportional representation. See political scientist Jennifer McCoy.

In the end, though, much of this crisis is caused by an autocratic faction that is beating the drums of intimidation, hatred and violence from the top down. The only real solution for political violence is for politicians to no longer see violence as a legitimate tool. 

That’s going to take time. And we’re going to have to hold the line. 

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How social media can be helpful, not hurtful

A subtext in this political violence trend? The internet. Online radicalization often fuels offline extremism. 

So how can tech platforms work to mitigate online election threats, which often escalate to voter intimidation and other forms of political violence? 

Nicole Schneidman, Protect Democracy’s technology policy strategist, has ideas for how they can proactively manage these risks. (Hint: it goes beyond deplatforming & content mitigation.) We had a conversation earlier this week about her new report: The Shortlist: Practical Ways Platforms Can Prepare for the U.S. 2024 Election.

A highlight:

Nicole: U.S. elections and tech platforms have become increasingly intertwined. This is something we all see happening on our own feeds. Social media is both a critical tool — it’s how candidates and election officials communicate with voters — but can be a vector for election subversion narratives. 

This double-edged nature of tech isn’t new, but the role of tech platforms is even more critical today. Believe it or not, the threat landscape is worse than in 2020, as challenging as that election was. Election officials face threats and harassment and political violence is more likely. Platforms absolutely will be sources and channels for election information this cycle and in this threat environment, their choices are more critical than ever. 

So bottom line – we’re not asking [the platforms] to do everything. We’re just asking them to take simple, meaningful steps that can be fully executed before voting begins.

Read the full conversation here. 

Or read her full recommendations: 

For social media platforms 
For messaging platforms 
For generative AI platforms

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What else we’re tracking:

• The Right to Vote Act was reintroduced Tuesday. This bill would create a statutory right to vote in federal elections, which would be a big deal. (Not-so-fun fact: the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee your right to vote. See Rick Hasen’s excellent book.)

• How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority are two of the must-reads for anyone in the democracy movement — and they’re increasingly mainstream. One of the authors — and Protect Democracy advisor — Steven Levitsky was on the Daily Show this week. 

• The Supreme Court should clear the way for a pre-election Trump trial, writes law professor Kate Shaw. “[Delaying] its decision more than a few weeks will be actively and aggressively undermining the American public’s ability to cast meaningful and informed votes for the office of president.” (Delay check: 93 days. And counting)

• Bright Line Watch is a group of political scientists monitoring threats to and the resilience of our democracy. Their survey reports are perpetually illuminating. The latest version, which compares the views of experts and the public at large on Trump’s legal proceedings and the presidential election, is no different. For example, many of the experts’ biggest fears for our democracy in a second Trump term (firing Jack Smith, investigating Biden, etc.) are distinctly popular with Republican voters. Yikes. Read more here.

• From bad faith government lawsuits and investigations to new state laws restricting speech in the workplace, there’s a troubling trend in the United States. The civic space — the groups, communities, networks, discourse and ties that hold civil society together — is slowly but surely closing. The Carnegie Endowment’s Rachel Kleinfeld has a must-read new report on how to keep our society open, free and expressive.

• Per NYT: “Lacking evidence or the votes to support impeachment charges against President Biden, Republicans are considering criminal referrals against him and his allies instead.” Protect Democracy has a framework to help distinguish an appropriate application of the rule of law from weaponized investigations. We’ll let you make the call on this one. 

A reminder for anyone diversifying their own tech platforms: Protect Democracy is on Threads and LinkedIn. 

See you next week.