Nearly six in 10 swing-state voters say they fear violence if Donald Trump loses the election, a startling impression that the former president has arguably fomented.
A new Washington Post-Schar School poll of 5,000 registered voters, conducted in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, found that 57% of respondents are “very” or “somewhat” worried that Trump’s supporters will become violent if he loses. Two-thirds of respondents are not confident Trump himself would accept such a loss. And should he win the election, almost half of swing-state voters—45%—believe Trump would “try to rule as a dictator.”
By comparison, more than two-thirds of voters believe Harris would accept defeat, and only 31% think her supporters would resort to violence. The findings come on the heels of a similar national poll from CNN, which found that only 30% of registered voters believe Trump will concede the election if he loses.
Trump has done little to reassure voters that he’ll play by the rules or rein in his supporters. The former president did, after all, incite rioting at the US Capitol after the 2020 election. Since then, he has continued to falsely claim not only that that contest was “stolen,” but that Democrats are also rigging the 2024 election. Between March and October, one analysis found that Trump made or shared at least 268 Truth Social posts that alleged his opponents were cheating in some way, including by importing undocumented immigrants to vote for Kamala Harris or fabricating court cases against him.
Trump himself has also raised the specter of post-election violence, threatening to use the military against “far-left lunatics” and railing repeatedly against his political opponents, whom he has branded “the enemy within.” During an October 15 interview with Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait, Trump twice side-stepped requests to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, instead insisting that there had been a peaceful transfer of power after the last election.
Officials across the country are bracing for the possibility of violence, both next week and into the new year. Last May, more than 90% of local election officials surveyed by the Brennan Center for Justice said they had increased security since the 2020 election. The federal government has already designated January 6, 2025 a “National Security Special Event,” which confers the same protections and precautions as a presidential inauguration. Writing on the International Crisis Group website Tuesday, Michael Wahid Hanna—the think tank’s US program director—argued that these and other countermeasures implemented after the Capitol riots have lowered the threat of post-election violence. At the same time, he warned, Trump and the Republican Party have gleefully embraced election denialism—and with it, “the prospect that violence may be a tool for getting the party’s candidate elected.”
