Election Day took place November 5 this year. However, weeks and sometimes even a couple of months before this day we started to see support for the presidential candidates. Ads, signs, and social media posts were all forms of promotion to get out and vote. But there is also a different side to elections: the aggressive and hostile point of view. That brings me to my question: Has election behavior gotten too aggressive?
This question can be approached in different ways. However, there is one clear answer, and that answer is yes. Elections and the behavior surrounding them has gotten too violent over the past few elections. Yes, there has always been competitive views around Democratic and Republican parties, however, ever since 2016 there has been a spike in threats and aggression involved in the election. This can be blamed on a few reasons such as, aggression towards government officials, having a more intense party divide/identity among people, the spreading of wrong information or conspiracy theories, protesting violence, and because of people listening to leadership.
As one can see, there are many reasons to blame the rise of political aggression. By putting all of these together the United States can be seen as becoming more violent especially during election times. This aggression all starts with the political parties. As time goes on the divide between the parties has become more evident. People are becoming more consistently one-party, leading to those people also having an increase in dislike toward the other party, which directly leads to overall aggression. Political parties that people choose are linked to their personal lives/beliefs. Meaning that occasionally when someone is a part of the opposite party they can see it as that person having opposite morals as them, and it is often hard for people to see the other side of things and not only their side and what they believe. This automatically leads to dislike towards someone. This starts the political aggression, since people are primarily against each other.
This attachment to a specific political party leads to the other part of the aggression, which is the point of listening to leadership. In this election it was Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. When people become so attached to a party they begin to listen to whatever their party candidate says without fact checking or having any second thoughts. This causes misinformation and conspiracy theories. By having misinformation against the other party this can cause even more aggression, since something true is not spread so it causes even more hatred towards the other candidate, leading to hatred towards the party overall.
For example, in a Greater Good Magazine article, it states, “There are many, many studies—starting with Stanley Milgram’s classic electric-shock experiments—which show that people are much more likely to inflict pain on others when an authority figure tells them to.” This is showing that when people begin to see, for example in this election, Trump and Harris, as leaders, they’ll believe what they say and want to do what they say. If they create images of the other party then people will begin to see them as that. For example, if Trump creates a negative image of Harris and the Democratic party, then Republicans will begin to see them as the image that Trump would say, and vice versa with Harris and the Democratic party. This will simply create false narratives and ideas of the other party. People will hear these things and believe them solely because the leader of their party said it. They will begin to have a depiction and a specific connotation of the opposite party, this image will naturally be very negative, since one party is going to try to make the opposite party look as bad as possible. So people will begin to be hostile towards other people associating with the opposite party. Aggression will be directly coming out of this as well and is why election time will automatically become more spiteful to the other party because of an image created by the party leader.
To continue, another point to look at is the aggression towards government officials. People have gotten far too comfortable with making threats and aggressive comments towards the people in government. A recent example was the assassination attempt towards president-elect Trump. To summarize the event, Trump was in Butler, PA doing a campaign rally. A 20-year-old male shot eight rounds from a rifle. This killed one and injured two others in the audience. Trump grabbed his ear and took cover while the Secret Service team shot the attacker. This is an example of how behavior towards government officials has become extremely hostile over time. A statistic on PedMed Central states, “…The American Journal of Political Science (6), 60 other articles and books, and 40 news articles that, together, have garnered over 2,281,133 Twitter engagements—asserts that large segments of the American population now support politically motivated violence. These studies report that up to 44% of Americans would endorse hypothetical violence in some undetermined future event.” Almost half of Americans would encourage violence politically. It has become more normalized over the years, and continues to grow.
These are only a few of the reasons as to why election behavior has become too violent over the years. To summarize the reasons for increased political aggression: the increasing divide between political parties, listening to leadership and believing whatever they say, and the aggression specifically towards government officials. In the future years I believe that politics and election behavior will continue to get more aggressive. We have seen an upward trend in violence over the past few elections in specific, and this will only continue.
To fix this people can begin to research things the candidates say, rather than automatically believing it. This way it can eliminate the chance of spreading false information. Researching things is important, especially because you never know what is true and what’s not. Another solution is for people to dislike or anger if someone has a different opinion, if they’re not being disrespectful about it. Overall, election behavior is going to continue to be more aggressive over the next election cycles. However, people should not just accept this reality. Instead they should try to make it so that it won’t come to this.
