The insidious way violence is changing American politics — and shaping the 2024 election. (includes a bad word, but not as much as the one above)
In early 2021, Richer was an Arizona Republican official who regularly attended local party events. At the time, he was the newly elected county recorder of Maricopa County. The job was a new level of prominence — he was now the most important election supervisory official in the state’s largest county — but going to Arizona Republican events was routine: the kind of thing that Richer, like any state politician, had done hundreds of times before.
But at one event, the crowd heckled and harassed him. When he tried to leave, they dragged him back in, yanking on his arms and shoulders, to berate him about the allegedly stolen
2020 election. He started to worry: Would his own people, fellow Republican Party members, seriously hurt him?
Across the board and around the country, data reveals that threats against public officials have risen to unprecedented numbers — to the point where
83 percent of Americans are now concerned about risks of political violence in their country.
As a result, the threat of violence is now a part of the American political system, to the point where Republican officials are — by their own admissions — changing the way they behave because they fear it. For Richer, the price back in 2021 was high — and enough to prevent him from safely participating in his own party’s politics.
Brave Republicans at all levels of government, from local officials like Richer to Sen. Mitt Romney (UT), have been warning us of the dangers going into 2024.
Data has shown extraordinary levels of threats against
mayors,
federal judges,
election administrators,
public health officials, and even
school board members. It’s hard to know how large the increase is for many of these local positions because no one has been keeping records for all that long. In the past, there was simply no need.
The unique importance of Republican-on-Republican violence
Broadly speaking, Democrats have safety in numbers from the far right: Because the party in general opposes Trump and Trumpism, individual members’ anti-Trump positioning is less likely to attract ire from his supporters. By contrast, individual Republicans who dissent from the Trumpist line immediately get singled out in conservative and far-right media — attracting the sort of attention reserved for a handful of “most hated” Democrats such as Reps. Nancy Pelosi (CA) or Ilhan Omar (MN).
For all these reasons, threats of violence are likely to be uniquely effective on Republicans when issued from their own base. The threats work, more than anything else, to
disciplineelected Republicans — to force them to toe whatever line the Trumpists want them to walk, or else.
“They say ‘it’s never been this bad before.’ Well, on the one hand, it has,” says Freeman, the Yale professor. “On the other hand ... I’m talking about the lead-up to the Civil War.”
