America's Shared Voice

Across the political spectrum, people were horrified by the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, and the resulting rhetoric has further polarized political sentiment.

With the Reunited States theme still present in the minds of Battery Powered members, we reached out to grantee More In Common for their insights on the gap between perceived and actual support for political violence in the U.S.—and what we can do to be part of the solution. Here's what they shared.

While awful and disgusting, the attempted assassination of President Trump is not the beginning of another Civil War. And yet, it feels of a piece with a deep unease within our republic, an unease that doesn’t augur a civil war, but which is leading to some unknowable, looming degradation of the nation that’s difficult to describe but easy to feel.

Today, while very few Americans are actually willing to commit political violence, we vastly overestimate our political foes’ willingness to do so. These so-called perception gaps—the difference between what we think some other group believes and what they actually believe—are likelier to cause a cycle of violence than any group’s actual commitment to violence.

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not themselves support political violence. According to 2024 data from the Polarization Research Lab, 3.9% of Democrats and 3.3% of Republicans support partisan violence—a number that’s far too high, but is still a small minority of the country as a whole. But we vastly overestimate our political foes’ support for political violence. 

In results similar to our own findings around the 2020 election and consistent with a snap poll we ran in the immediate wake of the attempted assassination on President Trump, the Polarization Research Lab recently found that "Americans incorrectly think support for partisan murder is 21-24 times larger than reality. Democrats think 45.2% of Republicans support partisan murder—a view that is 20.6 times larger than reality. Similarly, Republicans think 42% of Democrats support partisan murder—a view that is 25 times larger than reality". These “perception gaps” can themselves fuel political violence by creating an enemy where one doesn’t exist.

Thanks to support from Battery Powered, More in Common is beginning a project to promote a unifying narrative of our shared beliefs through the 2024 election season and beyond, a project that will focus on exposing and closing our most sinister perception gaps.

In the meantime, what might you do to help heal our divides? It begins by taking responsibility for reducing these perception gaps. It’s not enough to simply acknowledge the obvious: that you’d never consider killing someone over a political disagreement. Whatever your politics, you can confidently say that you don’t think the vast majority of your political opponents are willing to commit violence either. That may not feel true in our current environment, but it is true.

That’ll certainly help to reduce the risk of political violence, but what about the threat that’s more ineffable—the sense that we’re rotting from the inside, without a cure to stop the spreading infection of polarization and distrust?

This Tuesday, we asked a standing focus group of a representative sample of Americans “Who would you say is most responsible for the shooting?” As of penning this article, we received 130 responses. Encouragingly, most respondents held the individual shooter responsible. Surprisingly, several candidates blamed the media. Diego, a 37-year-old Traditional Liberal from Florida, said “I think media in general for causing such division and putting it in people’s heads that you have to be one way or another or hate one candidate over the other.” Some on the left blamed the right: Candy, a Millennial Democrat said that “Trump [is responsible] because he deserved it.” Some on the right blamed the left: Kyle, a 57-year-old Traditional Conservative from Pennsylvania responded that he held “The left wing kooks” responsible, “who insist on painting Trump as a fascist and a narcissist.”

This is a single focus group, and it’s inaccurate to ascribe cherrypicked responses to broader trends. But it is a useful tool to both challenge and provide life to your intuitions. Reading the responses, one is left with a sense that the country is filled with people who don’t trust one another.

The work of rebuilding trust isn’t as simple as the work of putting the lie to perception gaps. It begins with rebuilding trust in your own communities—something that can only be done in person and over time. And so, beyond acknowledging that your political opposites don’t want to kill you, the most important thing you can do is to get involved in the institutions that give shape to your community’s life—become a coach, become more active in your church, invest more time in the Battery. Politics is not a place to build the roots of trust that support the tree of our nation.

Jason Mangone is the Executive Director of More in Common US. If you’re interested in learning more about their work, you can reach Jason at [email protected].