WASHINGTON — Roughly two out of three Americans believe that the harsh rhetoric used in talking about politics is encouraging violence, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in the days following the killing of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk.
The three-day poll, which closed on Sunday, revealed a nation unnerved by partisan divisions and worried over a spike in political violence that has also included the June slayings of a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband.
Some 63 per cent of respondents to the Reuters/Ipsos poll said the way Americans talk about political issues did “a lot” to encourage violence. Some 31 per cent said the country’s approach to political discourse was giving “a little” boost to violence and the rest saw no impact or didn’t answer the question.
Republican President Donald Trump, himself the target of two assassination attempts last year, has attacked political rivals over the incident, saying on Thursday that “we have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”
Kirk, whose Turning Point USA political organisation helped mobilise young voters to support Trump in the 2024 presidential election, was speaking at a college campus in Utah when a sniper fatally shot him in the neck. While Kirk said he aimed to foster civil discourse, he was known for inflammatory comments denouncing civil rights legislation and gay people.
The man accused of murdering Kirk was captured a day after the shooting and is expected to be formally charged on Tuesday, when he is scheduled to make an initial court appearance. He remains in custody in a Utah jail.
A clear majority of Americans — 79 per cent — think people in the country have become less tolerant of viewpoints different from their own in the last 20 years, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Some 71 per cent of respondents said they agreed with a statement that “American society is broken,” while a similar share — 66 per cent — said they were concerned over the prospect of violence committed against people in their community because of their political beliefs.
Political violence is showing signs of increasing, experts say. In the first six months of the year, the US experienced about 150 politically motivated attacks — nearly twice as many as over the same period last year, according to Mike Jensen, a researcher at the University of Maryland, which has tracked such violence in a terrorism database since 1970.
The Kirk shooting appears to have caught the attention of more Americans compared with the Minnesota killings, the Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
While 68 per cent of poll respondents said they had read, seen or heard “a lot” about Kirk’s killing, just 26 per cent said the same of the June slaying of Democratic Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding of Democratic Minnesota state Senator John Hoffman and his wife by a Christian nationalist.
The nationwide poll was conducted online and surveyed 1,037 US adults. It had a margin of error of about three percentage points.
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Americans believe harsh political rhetoric is fuelling violence, poll finds
