Support of political violence has soared among American voters in recent years

Associate professor and editor Yascha Mounk posted the chart of the findings on Twitter Thursday afternoon, tweeting: "Holy s**t. Over the course of three years, the number of Americans who say that they feel justified in using violence to achieve their political goals has gone up from 8 percent to over 33 percent."

The openness to political violence has dramatically grown since President Donald Trump office, with the poll revealing in November of 2017 that just 8 percent of the populous believed political violence was justified, steadily increasing until the poll was conducted again in September of 2020, where 33 percent of Democrats believed political violence was justified and 36 percent of Republicans believed it was justified.

The largest jump occurred between December of 2019, where 16 percent of Democrats and 15 percent of Republicans believed political violence was justified, to June of 2020, where 30 percent Democrats and Republicans expressed their view that political violence was justified. The poll conducted in June took place less than a week after George Floyd died in Minneapolis, Minnesota—sparking the manifestation of political violence, leaving a staggering amount of vandalism, arson, burglary, burning, looting, assault, and murder as a result.

The study completed between 2017 and 2019 was conducted by YouGov and the Voter Study Group and had a sample size of nearly 6,000 respondents. The margin for error was reported to be between 1.5 and 3 percentage points. The survey in June and September of 2020 was conducted by Nationscape with roughly the same amount of participants, including a margin for error of 2.1 and 2.0 percentage points respectively.