Michael Barone analyzes Democrats’ responses to recent shocking revelations that Virginia’s candidate for attorney general once openly supported the death of a Republican opponent and his children.
Not surprisingly, the Democrat nominee for governor, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, and the state’s two Democrat senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, condemned his words. …
… But neither Spanberger, Warner and Kaine, nor any Democrat officeholder or candidate, so far as I am aware, has withdrawn their endorsement or called on him to quit. He should be “accountable” for his words but not so accountable as to lose their endorsement for an office for which his words suggest he is temperamentally unsuited.
Perhaps they hope he can still win the election—he’s been ahead in polls—and then will conveniently resign to be replaced by what seems likely to be a Democrat-majority legislature.
The more chilling possibility is that these politicians recognize that for many Democrat voters, for a large part of the party’s core constituency, his words weren’t repugnant at all. Social media traffic rife with regret at the failure of the assassination attempts on President Donald Trump and the glee expressed at the successful assassination of Kirk suggests that some large share of core Democrat voters feel that way. If you really believe the other side’s leader is Hitler, you might be happy if he is shot dead.
An outsized appetite for political violence is suggested in the results of a Skeptic Research Center poll of 3,000 adults in August and September. An alarming 34% agreed that “violence is often necessary to create social change,” including 44% of those rated as very liberal and 27% of those as very conservative—a significant leftward tilt.
Violence is likely to be seen as necessary more by the young than the old, more by men than women. Among the youngest Gen Z respondents, the gender difference almost disappears: 48% of male and 41% of female Gen Zers see violence as necessary for change. This seems in tandem with the plentiful visual evidence showing women prominent among anti-Israel and antisemitic violent protesters.
