INSTITUTE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

The Consequences of Violence Against Elected Officials

Laurel Harbridge-Yong explains how threats and violence have changed the way politicians approach their jobs

People leave flowers and notes at a memorial for Rep. Melissa Hortman outside the Minnesota State Capitol.

Early in the morning of June 14, a man dressed as a police officer entered the home of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and fatally shot her and her husband, Mark. The gunman also shot and injured Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their home just nine miles away. 

The assassination of a state legislator marks the latest incident in a deeply troubling rise in political violence. These incidents range from threats against elected officials to direct attacks such as an arson at the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in April and an assassination attempt on President Donald Trump at a campaign rally last July.

To better understand the cost of threats and violence, IPR political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong and Alexandra Filindra of the University of Illinois Chicago interviewed over 100 state and local elected officials about how these events impact them and their staff. They also surveyed the public to gauge attitudes toward attacks on officials and whether people see them as justification for future violence.

Harbridge-Yong spoke to IPR about some of their early findings and her thoughts on whether the U.S. has entered a new era of political violence.

How Elected Officials Think About Threats and Violence  

Implicit threats against politicians are fairly common, according to interviews Harbridge-Yong and Filindra conducted with elected officials and surveys by Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative and Civic Pulse that they’ve reviewed. While outright violence is rare, elected officials regularly experience harassment, and many have experienced some form of threat. And most officials in the interviews could point to a colleague or someone else they knew who had experienced threats or violence.

“Even for officials who thought they were not being impacted that much, they would talk about the ways in which their colleagues were being impacted,” Harbridge-Yong said.

Rising threats have made elected officials think twice about working on controversial issues. Politicians are also reconsidering how they interact with constituents, if they need more security, and how comfortable they are with their phone numbers and addresses being publicly available.

“The staff in particular bear a fairly substantial burden,” Harbridge-Yong explains. “For offices that do have staff, the staff represent a first line in interactions with constituents, and so they are often the ones that face vitriol from the public.” This can affect staff members’ mental health, how long they stay in the job, and whether they consider running for office themselves.

Some elected officials suggest that the threats and anger have made them less likely to stay in office, while others worry about who would replace them if they left.  Harbridge-Yong says that their interviews show some evidence, aligning with others’ findings, that threats and violence may impact women and racial minorities differently and possibly in more harmful ways.

“The stories that people have told range from things that are bothersome to things that are extremely disturbing,” she said.

The Cost of Threats Against Elected Officials

In the last three months, data from Civic Pulse’s quarterly surveys with local elected officials reveal that almost half said they'd been insulted, nearly a third said they'd been harassed, a sixth had been threatened, and 1% experienced a physical attack. While physical attacks against elected officials are rare, Harbridge-Yong says anxiety about experiencing an attack is much higher: When asked if they were worried about physical attacks, 12% of elected officials said yes.

“That makes sense because the consequence of that is obviously so much greater than the consequence of the others,” she said.

Harbridge-Yong notes that even if threats don’t lead to physical violence, they can still negatively impact politicians. For example, in 2022 former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger shared voicemails his office received while he served on the Jan. 6 committee in which people said they hoped he died and threatened to harm his family. Much of the backlash came from the far right. And Jenny Durkan, the former mayor of Seattle, decided not to run for re-election in 2021 because of the threats she faced from the far left. 

Harbridge-Yong says while ideological extremism may be driving some violence, certain incidents may have nothing to do with political identity. Many elected officials speculated that frustrated constituents who didn’t get the help they wanted from their office became angry and lashed out with threats or harassing behavior. 

“A lot of the officials that we spoke to thought that it was occurring for non-partisan, non-ideological reasons,” she said.

The Public’s Response to Political Violence

Harbridge-Yong and Filindra also conducted two experiments to understand how the public responds to news of threats and violence—especially when it’s directed at a leader from their own party. When people read about different incidents including a town hall, a nonviolent protest, and protests where there were threats or violence against an elected official, there was little evidence that made people dislike the other party more. They also didn’t increase people’s feeling that violence is justified, which Harbridge-Yong says is a hopeful sign for American democracy.

They found similar results from data collected from May to November of 2024. The survey data they gathered from 75 respondents each day allowed them to see how people viewed political violence before and after the Trump assassination attempt.

“We found that the Trump assassination attempt did not increase people’s—or specifically Republicans’—justification for violence,” she said. In this case, Republicans were the most relevant group to track since the victim was from their party.  

After the assassination attempt, they did see changes in how people thought about threats to elected officials. Republicans were much more likely to believe the elected officials were legitimately concerned about political violence and were not raising the issue for more self-serving reasons.

A New Era of Political Violence

Harbridge-Yong says it’s hard to say whether political violence has risen to a different level than in the past because we don’t have good data over many years tracking threats and attacks. Surveys from groups like Civic Pulse have only started asking elected officials about political violence in the last several years. 

“The high levels of political animosity and what are referred to as meta-perceptions— basically people’s beliefs about the other side and their beliefs that the other side is willing to support violence—we do have evidence that those are high,” Harbridge-Yong said. “We don't have strong overtime measures on these but combined with the anecdotal evidence, it does suggest that we're at a worse point now than we were ten years ago.”

Laurel Harbridge-Yong is professor of political science and IPR associate director and a fellow. 

Photo credit: Flickr, Chad Davis 

Published: July 8, 2025.