‘Our nation is not well’: Voters fear what could happen next

Before Saturday, when Butler, Pennsylvania, became the latest stunned backdrop for the nation’s political fury, Mayor Bob Dandoy thought of his town as a place that had learned to work around party lines. A Democrat in a Republican stronghold, he had campaigned on consensus.

“I’ve never seen a Republican or Democratic pothole,” Dandoy, 71, a retired high school English teacher, would tell voters. “Or a Republican or Democratic playground. Or a Republican or Democratic fire that the fire department needs to put out.”

He was at dinner with his family Saturday when a City Council member texted. One spectator was dead at Donald Trump’s campaign rally on the farm show grounds, two more were critically injured. The former president’s right ear had been grazed by a bullet. The gunman, an isolated 20-year-old with an AR-15-style rifle, was fatally shot by the Secret Service. All this, in the town of about 13,000 where Dandoy has lived “all my life.”

Since then, national discord has descended on Butler with such force that this week it crashed the town’s website. E-mailers charged that the city failed to protect Trump, maybe even wanted him to be a target. Callers demanded that the city admit that Trump’s supporters staged the shooting. The mayor has tried to remind everyone that Butler is a community that accomplishes good things, that has worked through disagreements together. And yet, he said, the trauma has been overwhelming.

“People are in a state of shock,” he said. “And I can’t lob a platitude or give a speech and say everything is fine.”

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, that unease is not limited to Butler. In interviews from the West Coast to the Deep South, Americans across party lines say they are deeply apprehensive, and not just because of last weekend’s attempt on a presidential candidate’s life.

Roiled by culture wars, reeling since the pandemic, broiling under biblical heat and besieged by disinformation, voters and community leaders say they already are on edge in ways for which their experience has not prepared them. The Gaza Strip. Ukraine. Migrants. Home prices. Climate change. Fentanyl. Gun violence. Hate speech. Deepfakes.

And overlaying it all is a nonstop barrage of political hostility and vilification, and the sense, for a third straight presidential election, that something essential is broken in our politics.

“It’s like this dark cloud is looming over us, and it’s just not ending,” said Fredes Asuncion, 34, owner of a small business in Sacramento, California.

“It’s time for us to have, no pun intended, a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting,” said the Rev. Jamal Bryant, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, calling the shooting an “unrolling of the moral code of the country.”

Brent Leatherwood, leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm in Nashville, Tennessee, said he had heard from several conservative church leaders since the shooting, their concerns a chorus he echoed. “Our nation is not well,” he said.

National polls do not yet fully reflect the shooting Saturday or President Joe Biden’s call the next day to “lower the temperature in our politics.” Nor do they yet factor in the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, named Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate. On Saturday, Vance, without evidence, wrote on social media site X that Biden campaign rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Trump campaign advisers have said that the former president — whose tenure opened with warnings of “American carnage” and was capped by the Jan. 6 insurrection — will call for unity Thursday when he speaks at the convention. Yet they have also said that Trump would focus on “what I did and how I’m going to do it again.”

There’s no missing the nation’s deep ideological, cultural and partisan divisions. Polling shows Biden and Trump locked in a tight race. Neither turmoil over the president’s age and mental acuity nor Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts over hush-money payments has inspired that much change.

Nearly two-thirds of American adults told The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in December that democracy itself could depend on who wins the November presidential election. Eighty-seven percent of Democrats said Trump would weaken democracy if he were reelected, and 82% of Republicans said the same about Biden.

At the same time, voters have bristled at the fall ticket — a majority told the Pew Research Center that if they could, they would replace Trump and Biden. They disapprove, decisively, of the Supreme Court and Congress.

And even before the shooting in Pennsylvania, Americans “were barely on speaking terms with each other,” noted Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian who teaches at Columbia University. The result, he said, has been a national mood that has been “unstable, restless, uncertain, irritating and anxious” since the 2016 election.

In May, a Marist poll found such dug-in disdain that many Americans considered a second civil war likely or very likely in their lifetime.

Since the shooting, political leaders across the spectrum, including Biden, have condemned political violence. But they are undercut by partisan fury.

“Democrats wanted this to happen,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted. A state senator from Tennessee wrote, and then deleted, a post saying that “the extremism from the MAGA regime has brought us to this moment.” On Facebook, a field director for Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., wrote, and then deleted, “please get you some shooting lessons.” Thompson’s office disavowed it.

In Tennessee, the Democratic mayor of Nashville, Freddie O’Connell, said that in recent days, a rainbow crosswalk painted in honor of the city’s LGBTQ+ community had been defaced. White supremacists waving Nazi flags had made repeated appearances downtown. “My biggest fear,” he said, “is that social fabric, even at the local level, continues to deteriorate.”

In Wisconsin, Dan McNeil, 71, a Democratic school board member in the farming town of Barron, called the situation “scary.” “You walk into a place in town, and it is, like, ‘Whose side are you on? Are you a liberal Democrat or a Trumper?”

An hour away in St. Croix County, Scott Miller, 42, who said he is a member of the local Republican Party, wondered if it was already too late: “These corporations are putting out millions and trillions in profits, donating unlimited amounts to politicians,” he said. “How can the average person compete?”

In California, Frank Xu, 46, of San Diego, expressed deep disillusionment in the dysfunction he saw in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting, a far cry from the political and civic wonderland he embraced when he moved to the United States in 2005 from China. Like many young Chinese in the 1980s and 1990s, he said, he had been conditioned to stay out of politics and to be suspicious of political officials and their motives. A Republican, he had organized against affirmative action in his state, wide-eyed at the difference one person could make in this country.

Then came the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, which left him wondering whether to leave his presidential ballot blank in November. He has leaned back toward voting for Trump since the shooting. But like many other naturalized citizens, he has been viscerally reminded of the instability and violence he sought to escape in the United States.

Garen Wintemute, an emergency physician who directs the California Firearm Violence Research Center at the University of California, Davis, said Americans who are not extremists urgently needed to become more assertive.

In a national study that is now in its third year, two-thirds of Americans in 2022 and three-fourths in 2023 rejected political violence as never justified, and even among those who condoned political violence, a vast majority said they would not commit it themselves. Many people not only recoil from political fights but avoid politics entirely, Wintemute noted.

“Americans in the middle have been acting like spectators at a train wreck, but we’re all on the same train,” he said. “And if the train goes over a cliff, we’ll all go with it.”

Like any unhealthy behavior, he said, political violence can be largely deterred if a majority explicitly rejects it.

“A person’s decisions about their health behaviors are powerfully influenced by what their family, friends, communities, clergy members and so forth say and do,” he said. “We need to say, I will not accept political violence. I will not be part of it.”

That goes for the candidates, Naftali, the presidential historian, said.

“Where we go now will depend on a number of factors,” he said. “But if previous cycles of political violence tell us anything, one of those factors will be how our leaders — and I define that broadly — explain to themselves, and to us, where we are and where we are going. And one of the most important voices will be the voice of the victim himself.”

He said Biden had already made the traditionally appropriate gestures, calling Trump to wish him a speedy recovery and making a televised address deploring the attack and insisting that “we can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”

Now, he said, it is Trump’s turn, even though history shows that he often ramps up rhetoric, rather than tones it down.

“I’m not naive,” he said. “Not everybody can be changed. But when we think of where we go from here, we have to keep in mind that Donald Trump has it in his power. Because he was the victim, and because of the devotion of his followers, and because his convention is first, his will be the loudest and most influential voice in determining the direction the country takes at this inflection point.

“Sometimes it takes a crisis for Americans to break a stalemate,” he added. “Of course, I thought that crisis would be Jan. 6. And that obviously wasn’t enough.”

In Butler, Dandoy said he wished the candidates would transcend the toxicity of the past three election cycles.

“Harry Truman was president when I was growing up,” he said. “Then Dwight Eisenhower. Then JFK. Inspirational men. Where are they now? Where are Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill settling things at the end of the day with a hidden bottle of Irish whiskey? I want leaders to step up.”

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