It’s a measure of the division and tolerance for violence in the United States that civil war is highly likely no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election — and has even been the subject of a hit dystopian thriller. While the election results are unlikely to actually lead to civil war, there are a range of plausible scenarios for political violence that are nevertheless alarmingly likely.
The conviction of former President Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records has led to an upsurge in threats against the judiciary and opponents, intensifying the conflict. “It’s time to shut the left out. This can’t be solved by voting,” was a typical reaction tracked by Reuters on right-wing news site Gateway Pundit. “Our justice system is being used as a weapon against the American people. We have no choice but to take matters into our own hands,” far-right media personality Stu Peters said on his Telegram channel.
Meanwhile, our assessment suggests that the country’s far-left is also escalating its extremist threats. Recently, a call to “Fuck Independence Day” was posted on an anarchist website, heralding a July 4th day of action targeting the ports of Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, New Jersey, and Baltimore. Further calls to “Close the Gates and Escalate” have circulated on social media over the Gaza war this summer and fall on both college campuses and in communities across the country. At a pro-Palestinian demonstration at the White House in June, one protester held up a decapitated portrait of President Joe Biden, while the crowd chanted “revolution.”
These would-be violent extremists represent a microcosm of America’s political climate, which has become increasingly accepting of violence. In a survey conducted last year, 23 percent of Americans agreed that “things have gone so far off the rails that true American patriots may be forced to resort to violence to save the country.” A more recent poll similarly found that 28 percent of Republicans strongly agreed or agreed that “Americans may be forced to resort to violence to get the country back on track,” while 12 percent of Democrats agreed with the premise.
Among American gun owners, these sentiments are even more prevalent: According to a University of California, Davis survey, “about 42% of assault rifle owners say political violence is justified, rising to 44% of recent gun buyers, and a staggering 56% of people who always or almost always carry a loaded gun in public say political violence is justified.”
So as the United States approaches the November election, the risk of violence will increase. This is not surprising. Historically, violence has actually been fairly common in the United States, especially during election season. During Reconstruction, much of the white supremacist violence against freed black men and women was intended to intimidate voters and ensure that racist Democrats remained in power in the Deep South.
More recently, there was an assassination attempt on the Speaker of the House of Representatives during the 2022 midterm elections, in which the Speaker’s husband was seriously injured. The 2020 elections were of course the trigger for the terrorist attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the ten days leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, there were no fewer than four far-right terrorist attacks, most notably the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. A mail bomb circulated that same week shows that threats against politicians are becoming especially frequent in the Trump era.
Despite these disturbing patterns, 2024 seems to offer even more fertile ground for radical reactions to the electoral landscape. Trump’s lawsuits, combined with assertions from both parties that (in Trump’s words) “if we don’t win this election, there will be no next one in this country,” give the election existential implications.
The United Nations Development Programme, in its study of electoral violence around the world, has concluded that “a common cause of electoral violence is often the incredibly high risks of important political positions being gained and lost.”
Making the threat even more serious is the range of locations and individuals extremists may target during election times. But how does violence differ at different stages of an election campaign? Before an election, extremists are more likely to target politicians on the campaign trail, trying to intimidate them into changing their policies or dissuade them from running in the first place. For example, presidential candidate Nikki Haley requested Secret Service protection during the Republican primary, and leading Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher suggested he was forced to retire due to threats against his family.
Based on past experience, the election itself is likely to be marked by armed threats at polling places and intimidation of election officials: Threats against public officials are likely to hit an all-time high in 2024, according to a database analyzed by scholars Pete Simi, Gina Ligon, Seamus Hughes, and Natalie Standridge, which first spiked in 2017, the year of President Trump’s inauguration.
In the weeks following the upcoming elections, depending on the outcome, extremists are likely to turn on government representatives, especially on the many ceremonial days surrounding the transition of power, such as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. That attack is unlikely to happen again: law enforcement is much better prepared this time, and the group that led the attack has effectively been dismantled with sedition and conspiracy charges targeting its leaders.
Following the trend of the past decade, white supremacists and anti-government extremists are the most likely to launch attacks, but far-left violence cannot be ignored. For example, repeated stabbings targeting right-wing political leaders in Germany and harassment and violence targeting American Jews on US university campuses have highlighted the presence of a more militant political left that has historically been quite tolerant of violence, including in the United States. These violent extremists frequently make armed threats, especially against politicians, never more severe than the lone shooter who targeted a Republican team practice for a congressional baseball game in 2017 or the far-left extremist in California who brought a weapon and threatened Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home in 2022.
Salafi jihadists, emboldened by recent successes in Afghanistan, Iran, and Moscow, may also seek to exploit a particularly divided American climate to push themselves back into the national consciousness. FBI Director Christopher Wray has suggested that the FBI is increasingly concerned about “the possibility of coordinated attacks on U.S. soil similar to the ISIS-K attack seen in March at a Russian concert hall.” The Department of Homeland Security has similarly warned that “threat actors” are likely to “focus on the 2024 election season,” with foreign adversaries using influence operations to further divide the American public and create new sources of division and violence.
Could the violence lead to a civil war? Trump and many of his allies have repeatedly warned that another election defeat, coupled with upcoming court rulings, could spark a civil war or lead to revolution in the United States. For example, a Truthsocial post shared by Trump suggested that 2024 could be similar to 1776, “except this time the fight is not against the British but against Communist Americans.” This threat is a reversal of Trump’s previous warning that there would be “bloodshed” in the United States if he lost.
But expert opinion is not prophecy. Despite warnings from scholars, policy experts, journalists and others, the likelihood of a civil war in the country is actually low. Currently, the geographic divisions between potential warring factions are broader, not just north and south, but urban and rural, depriving potential rebel movements of the geographic safe haven they need to be drawn into a nationwide conflict. But growing political rhetoric and threats are almost certain to lead to some level of violence.
Making the threat even more serious, the Biden administration has little legitimacy among most die-hard Trump supporters, who still believe the 2020 election was stolen. The fact that these conspiracy theories have a firm grip on many mainstream Republicans means that any response by the Biden administration, whether it be sending additional law enforcement or National Guard forces to polling places or trying to educate the public about the veracity and integrity of US elections, will be seen as illegitimate.
In other words, the United States finds itself in a security dilemma, where any defensive measures designed to protect the electoral process would likely in fact be interpreted as offensive attacks, attacks aimed at ensuring the recurrence of electoral fraud. As the aforementioned protests at the White House demonstrate, Biden has little legitimacy in the eyes of the far-left, meaning that this particular movement would likely not be satisfied even if the Democrats won the election.
Responses must focus on education and law enforcement preparedness. In particular, the Biden administration should promote educational tools to reassure Americans about the resilience of our election system against hacking and fraud, as well as pioneer digital literacy measures that could help protect Americans from disinformation and conspiracy theories shared online, including through artificial intelligence.
In particularly high-risk areas, including battleground states, the administration should also consider increasing law enforcement presence to deter violent actors from targeting such locations. But preventing violence would require a bipartisan commitment to accept the results of the election and publicly commend the integrity of the election and its many officials, which at this stage seems entirely unrealistic.
Americans are thus left in a political climate characterized by existential rhetoric and violent threats, with few tools by which the government can effectively counter these accusations. The threat, therefore, may not be a new civil war, but rather a complete breakdown of the democratic electoral system that has defined the country since its founding.
