Is the U.S. in a new era of political violence? Experts say it’s complicated

May 12, 2026

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Is the U.S. in a new era of political violence? Experts say it’s complicated

Researchers who study political violence say that the U.S. is in a period of more intense political rhetoric, but there have been far darker periods in the nation’s history

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

Douglas Rissing/Getty Images

A cluster of high-profile political attacks in the U.S. spotlight the nation's extreme divisions—but they don't necessarily signal a broader uptick in politically inspired brutality, experts say.

Politicians, pundits and ordinary Americans are increasingly worried about political violence. The latest round of concern was sparked on April 25, when a 31-year-old man stormed the Washington Hilton hotel in Washington, D.C., during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where President Donald Trump was in attendance. Secret Service agents arrested the armed man before he could get to the ballroom where the event was being held. He has since been charged with attempted assassination of the president—which would represent the third serious attempt on Trump’s life since 2024. The man has pled not guilty to this and related charges.

The alleged assassination attempt follows a string of other political attacks in 2025: an arson attack on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro; the murder of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband; and the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. This spree has created a shared sense that political violence is on the rise.

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In a 2025 Pew Research Center poll conducted after Kirk’s assassination, 85 percent of respondents said they believed political violence was increasing in the U.S.—largely because of partisan rhetoric, polarization and an “unwillingness” to engage with others who hold different views. Yet according to some researchers studying political violence, it’s unclear whether recent attacks constitute a new era of political violence. And understanding the motivations for these attacks can be challenging—which makes studying these trends difficult, experts say.

The attacks are “troubling” and may warrant a review of how to best protect the president, says Joseph Young, a professor at the University of Kentucky, who studies political violence. “But it doesn't suggest this bigger issue that we’re descending into civil conflict or something.”

“It’s certainly discomforting to see the assassination attempts that have occurred in the past 18 months, but it is also the case that this is a relatively calm part of American history,” adds Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College. “We have a bit of myopia when we look at political violence in this country.”

U.S. history is marked by political conflict

The history of the U.S. is littered with acts of political violence. For example, during the late 1800s and early 1900s, multiple presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley—were assassinated. The 1960s and 1970s saw the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Harvey Milk and others, as well as hundreds of bombings by radical political groups such as the Weather Underground.

In 1970 alone, there were more than 120 “incidents” of political violence—such as assaults, assassinations and bombings—according to Dartmouth’s Polarization Research Lab, which tracks political violence in the U.S. Last year there were 10 such incidents.

“We should have concerns about how politics is practiced in the U.S., but it would be a profound mistake to say, based on a limited number of incidents, that we are now in a new violent era,” Westwood says. “We just can’t say definitively.”

And while there are ebbs and flows of political violence over the course of American history, he adds, it’s difficult to say for sure what caused them.

The challenges of studying political violence

Part of the difficulty in tracking political violence is that it’s not always clear what motivated the perpetrators. For example, some of the individuals who were involved in political attacks in recent years were not registered to vote and gave scant reasoning for their behavior, Westwood says. In the case of the Correspondents’ Association dinner, the attacker allegedly left a note that laid out a plan to target Trump administration officials, “but that's the exception, not the rule,” Westwood s