{"id":989,"date":"2025-10-22T07:08:04","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T11:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/?p=989"},"modified":"2025-10-22T07:08:04","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T11:08:04","slug":"half-of-republicans-arent-sure-how-violent-the-no-kings-protests-were","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/half-of-republicans-arent-sure-how-violent-the-no-kings-protests-were\/","title":{"rendered":"Half of Republicans aren&#8217;t sure how violent the No Kings protests were"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1365\" src=\"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/54862576562_2dae88ccf9_k.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-990\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/54862576562_2dae88ccf9_k.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/54862576562_2dae88ccf9_k-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/54862576562_2dae88ccf9_k-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/54862576562_2dae88ccf9_k-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve been traveling this week, so the amount of attention I&#8217;ve been able to pay to the world around me is diminished, no doubt to my benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That said, the poll result below <em>did<\/em> come to my attention, and I thought it was worth elevating. In short, YouGov asked Americans whether last weekend&#8217;s almost-entirely-peaceful protests were mostly peaceful or mostly violent. And most Americans correctly said that they were mostly peaceful, because they were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"min-height:407px\" id=\"datawrapper-vis-fSY4D\"><script type=\"text\/javascript\" defer src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/fSY4D\/embed.js\" charset=\"utf-8\" data-target=\"#datawrapper-vis-fSY4D\"><\/script><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/fSY4D\/full.png\" alt=\"Do you think that the &quot;No Kings&quot; protests held on Saturday, October 18 were\u2026 (Grouped Bars)\" \/><\/noscript><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>But the results among Republicans do stand out. Twice as many said they were mostly peaceful as said they were mostly violent \u2014\u00a0but, again, there&#8217;s no evidence of significant violence <em>at all<\/em>, much less nationally. Still, 1 in 8 Republicans think the protests were mostly violent, a claim that you might be forgiven for allowing to color their complaints about the rampant violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. Those, too, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/2020\/10\/16\/this-summers-black-lives-matter-protesters-were-overwhelming-peaceful-our-research-finds\/\">were mostly peaceful<\/a>, but incidents of violence have been amplified for years \u2014 including in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/how-trumpworld-inflates-the-perceived-danger-of-the-left\/\">recent Fox News coverage<\/a> \u2014\u00a0in an effort to cast all of those events as dangerous and illegitimate. Now that sentiment has bled over into last week&#8217;s events, which are perhaps described by Republicans as <em>violent<\/em> simply because (like the 2020 protests) they understood to be <em>hostile<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course, we must also note that 50 percent of Republicans say they <em>aren&#8217;t sure<\/em> how violent the protests were. This may be a function of limited coverage among media outlets most consumed by Republicans. Or it may be a function of the pattern \u2014\u00a0present among both parties \u2014\u00a0of feigning ignorance instead of conceding an inconvenient point. If you are a Republican who opposes the protests and knows they weren&#8217;t violent, you might simply say &#8220;man, who&#8217;s to say&#8221; when prompted to evaluate what unfolded. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The real tell here will be how the protests are viewed in the future. It took time for the 2020 protests to become summarized as uniformly violence-soaked and wantonly destructive, just as it took time for other false narratives about American politics to take root. When your perceptions of the world are uniformly filtered through a partisan lens, what you see necessarily diverges from reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Photo: A No Kings march in New Jersey. (Jeffrey Hayes\/Flickr)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been traveling this week, so the amount of attention I&#8217;ve been able to pay to the world around me is diminished, no doubt to my benefit. That said, the poll result below did come to my attention, and I thought it was worth elevating. In short, YouGov asked Americans&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=989"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":992,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions\/992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}