The surprising reality of political violence in America

When former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated in Pennsylvania in July, a Dartmouth College political scientist named Sean Westwood happened to be in the middle of a research project asking Americans about political violence.

At the time, many feared that the shooting would lead to a growing appetite for more violence.

But Westwood and his colleagues found the opposite. In the weeks after the attack, Americans' support for partisan violence, and murder specifically, diminished - and fell most sharply among Republicans who identify with Trump.

Americans are still exceptionally hostile about people who disagree with them on politics, but "an assassination attempt did not inflame the tensions," the authors write in a forthcoming paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Two unsuccessful attempts on Trump's life, a daily...