A series of high-profile incidents of political violence — targeting members of both major political parties — have grabbed the nation’s attention.
Earlier this month, a gunman shot two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers in their homes. State Rep. Melissa Hartman and her husband were killed, and state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were injured.
In April, a man who allegedly “harbored hatred” for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro set fire to the Democrat’s home while he and his family were sleeping inside.
President Donald Trump faced two assassination attempts during his 2024 campaign. A former Coast Guard officer who identified with Antifa, a far-left antifascist militant movement, was also arrested earlier this month for issuing violent death threats against Trump.
In October 2022, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked by an assailant who broke into their home looking for her.
And on January 6, 2021, rioters descended on the US Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, threatening to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence for allowing it to move forward.
It might feel like, based on the severity and frequency of these headline incidents, American political violence is surging. Members of Congress appear to think so: Lawmakers from both parties are now asking for more funding to enhance security and investigate and prosecute more threats made against them.
But while there are signs in the data that indicate political violence is indeed on the rise, depending on how you define it, it’s challenging to determine exactly by how much.
“It’s more anecdotal than anything else,” said Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “There’s some data to back up that the tensions are increasing and creating a more volatile environment, but to say it’s increased by X amount since 2023 is a little trickier.”
A volatile political environment and changes in social media policies that have caused misinformation to spread more quickly appear to be what’s driving the increase, at least in part. But understanding the root causes requires ascertaining the scale of the problem in a way that researchers have struggled to capture comprehensively.
Is political violence actually rising significantly?
There are all sorts of difficulties associated with measuring political violence.
First, there’s the definitional dilemma of what incidents to include when counting acts of political violence. For instance, some might count arrests for disrupted plots; others might not.
Then, there is the challenge of actually gathering the data. Some sources may overly rely on media reports in an era when local news is under-resourced and might not reliably record every incident. And in the US, individuals unaffiliated with armed groups have become the primary perpetrators of political violence. That makes political violence even harder to track because perpetrators are often interacting in fragmented, low-transparency spaces online, from private chats to forums, rather than congregating in a single organized group.
Despite the difficulties with measurement, some sources — particularly those looking at specific forms of political violence — suggest that overall levels of political violence have increased in recent years.
US Capitol Police have been recording concerning statements and direct threats made against members of Congress, their families, and their staff since 2017, seeing significant spikes after the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.
Researchers at Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative also recorded a similar spike in threats to local officials in 2024.
In 2025 so far, they identified more than 170 total incidents across nearly 40 states, with national issues such as LGBTQ+ rights and the war in Gaza being major bipartisan drivers. About a quarter of them involved hate speech. And in a sign of how political discourse has devolved, about 20 of them involved local officials threatening or harassing each other.
However, researchers acknowledge that they are only scratching the surface and that a broader analysis of the threat environment must begin well before anyone reaches the point of directly threatening to harm someone or actually harming them.
“The data only looks at the point at which people successfully conduct acts of violence,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “I think we need to start far earlier in the process and far more holistically to really capture the root causes of this issue, which is rhetoric.”
Why is political violence on the rise?
American political violence looks different now than it did during major periods of political upheaval in the past.
In the 1970s, it was driven predominantly by far-left, anti-war groups such as the Weather Underground, which were primarily engaged in the destruction of property. But the nature of political violence, as well as its perpetrators, has changed in the decades since.
“I think the modern iteration of mainstream right-wing political violence is targeting individuals, mass violence, targeted assassinations, which I think takes on a very different tenor than the destruction of property,” Lewis said.
There are several reasons for this shift, with the proliferation of conspiracy theories and hate speech online being a major one.
Content moderation on mainstream social media sites was never a complete cure for that, but studies have suggested that it was a mitigating factor. Twitter (now X), Meta, YouTube, and others have scaled back content moderation staff or rolled back policies designed to root out misinformation that might motivate political violence. In the months after Elon Musk bought X and implemented those policies, hate speech on the platform rose by 50 percent, according to a study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Southern California.
“I think that we really need to recognize the fact that there is a significant subset of people, especially online, especially on these social media platforms, that do not share our common understanding of reality,” Lewis said. “If you spend your weekend on Twitter, which I would not recommend doing, you would genuinely say that the suspect [in the Minnesota shootings] shot these Democratic politicians because they went against the leftist, Marxist party line.”
In truth, federal prosecutors have declined to state a specific motive. But if anything, the evidence suggests he identified with the far-right rather than the far-left: His friends described him to Fox News as a Trump supporter, his social media posts embraced extreme anti-abortion views, and he had a hit list of 45 elected Democrats.
There’s also, according to researchers, a cultural shift — and not a healthy one.
People also now seem more willing to see political violence as a solution to the policies and beliefs they disagree with, regardless of party affiliation, Keneally said.
During the 2024 presidential election, polling from NORC and the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats found 7 percent of Americans agreed that the “use of force is justified” to help Trump claim the presidency; 10 percent said it was justified to prevent him from doing so.
Now that Trump is president again, many communities feel under threat from his policies, which may make them more accepting of political violence. A March Scientific American survey of predominantly Democratic voters at two major protests found that about a third said political violence may be necessary to “save” America. It’s worth noting that these respondents aren’t representative of Democrats overall, but it shows that acceptance of political violence isn’t just a right-wing phenomenon.
“We’re in a very pretty difficult position in the country right now,” Keneally said. “I think this combination of this changing political environment, social media, and people feeling like they don’t have any other solution is making it at least feel like it’s worse.”
The post Is political violence on the rise in America? appeared first on Vox.
