More than two and a half years after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a new study estimates that about 12 million Americans would support violence to restore former President Donald Trump to power.
But support for violence is not limited to the far right.
After the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, 22 million Americans now say force would be justified to restore abortion rights.
Meanwhile, one in 10 American adults believe the US government is run by Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
These are just some of the latest findings from the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST.
Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats and professor, has been conducting Dangers to Democracy polls to survey American adults’ attitudes about the use of political violence and their support for conspiracy theories .
(Credit: CPOST)
The questions and answers below have been condensed for length.
WTTW News: Your latest poll from April found that two and a half years after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, you estimate that about 12 million Americans still believe violence is justified to restore Trump in power I guess the good news is that the number is down from a high of 20 million, but it’s still a very large number.
Robert Pape: The good news is that it has gone down. The bad news is that the entire drop happened a year ago and has been flat ever since.
Tell us a little about how you came up with the survey. America is so diverse, what gives you confidence that you’re polling a cross-section of the American public about how they feel about these issues?
So that’s the beauty of working with NORC (National Opinion Research Center), which is the leading academic polling agency on the planet. This is one of our crown jewels at the University of Chicago and it’s been going since the 1940s. What NORC does is they have a panel of 50,000 people that they update every month. This panel of 50,000 is representative of adults in the United States of America. So that’s true for demographic factors, geographic factors, that’s true for religious factors, ideological factors. So these surveys are not, like, $5,000 surveys, think of them as the $50,000 survey. So you have a really representative look at the country.
Your poll also found that 142 million Americans, or 55% of American adults, do not believe that elections solve America’s most fundamental problems.
That’s what you’re seeing here. So you ask the question, how can you have a disturbing number of people support the force to restore Trump?
Well, you look in the context of the country’s confidence in democracy, we have a deep distrust of American democracy in the body politic. The use of force to restore Trump is not an outlier. It’s an extreme fringe, but it’s not a fringe.
It’s what’s missing when the media is trying to interpret Trump’s impeachment. They just don’t understand how mistrustful Americans have become of democracy.
What is your level of concern as we head into the 2024 election?
That we are in a precarious moment for our democracy. And it’s because there are millions of Americans who support the use of force rather than agree with the election results. But there are also many more Americans who are deeply suspicious of democracy in general.
Our national debate is not making Americans more confident in democracy. It’s not just the polarization of politicians, it’s the boiling of our media. It is the media’s lack of capacity to have deep and substantive coverage. And that is a big problem here for our democracy.
There is a great, deep underlying distrust of American democracy that is leading to strong support for conspiracy theories, political conspiracy theories, and support for political violence that is disturbing.
Note: The findings of the CPOST Dangers to Democracy polls, which are conducted every three months, are being published by the guardian. The research is funded in part by the Pritzker Military Foundation, the Anti-Defamation League and William and Penny Obenshain.
