Women up to 21% more likely to support political killings than men: NCRI poll

A recent survey has found that women are more likely to tolerate political violence than their male counterparts, and that overall, the majority of Americans are able to justify the killing of sitting political figures.  

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers surveyed 1,055 American adults for the poll and asked them if it was justified to murder President Donald Trump and socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. 

In regard to Trump, 67 percent of those left-of-center said it was justified to murder the sitting president, while 58 percent of centrists and 43 percent of right-of-center respondents said the same. On the question of Mamdani, 54 percent of right-of-center respondents, 54 percent of centrists, and 40 percent of left-of-center respondents said murdering him was justified. Overall, 66 percent of respondents "endorsed some level of justification for murdering either or both Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump."

NCRI found that women were more likely than their male counterparts to support murdering the sitting political figures, finding a 15 percent gap between men and women in regard to Trump, and a 21 percent gap between them in regard to Mamdani. 

The figure was "striking" to the NCRI, with the institute writing, "Most striking is an unexpected rise in tolerance for assassination rhetoric among women under conditions of high social media exposure and perceived national decline. This is not a claim about blame or disposition. It is an empirical signal that something fundamental in the moral environment has shifted."

"This shift matters because women have historically played a stabilizing role in civic and social life. Across cultures they are more strongly associated with norms of care, harm avoidance, and social cohesion. When even groups long linked to moral restraint begin to show elevated tolerance for political violence it suggests that the erosion is not ideological but structural. The environment itself is failing to reinforce basic moral boundaries," the NCRI added.  

The NCRI also found that respondents’ justification of killing Trump "was strongly correlated" with a justification of killing Mamdani, "pointing not to purely partisan hatred but to a broader, generalized acceptance of political murder as a legitimate political tool." The NCRI said that the support for assassinating political figures "was consistently linked to pessimistic beliefs about America’s future trajectory and to heavier consumption of social media, suggesting that despair and online echo chambers may be fueling a shared tolerance for extreme violence on both sides of the political divide."

This comes around a year and a half after Trump, who was then on the campaign trail for the 2024 presidential election, faced two assassination attempts, one in July that saw his ear shot as he was on stage for a rally in Pennsylvania, and one in September that was foiled as he was playing golf at his golf course in Florida.