Last weekend’s mass shooting in El Paso has refocused the nation’s attention on the threat of white supremacism. As South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg tweeted after the massacre:
The El Paso killings, along with shootings over the past year of religious minorities in Pittsburgh; Poway, Calif.; and New Zealand, are all part of a larger trend in white-supremacist violence. U.S. hate crimes increased in 2015, 2016 and 2017, the most recent years for which FBI data is available. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported a 35 percent increase in extremist-related murders in 2018.
The ADL also reports that Americans are now more likely to be killed by white supremacists than Islamist terrorists. Over the past decade, right-wing extremist killings have outnumbered those by Islamist extremists about 3 to 1 in the United States.
Yet while there is a widespread and bipartisan consensus that Islamist terrorism poses a serious threat to the United States, there is an enormous and growing partisan divide over how serious to treat threats from white supremacists.
The growing split between Republicans and Democrats over the threat posed by white supremacists
According to an April 2018 YouGov/Economist Poll, 85 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats said that the Islamic State poses at least a somewhat serious threat to the United States. But that bipartisan agreement over Islamist terrorism does not extend to threats from white-supremacist violence.
Immediately after such violence in Charlottesville (Aug. 12, 2017), Pittsburgh (Oct. 27, 2018) and New Zealand (March 15), Quinnipiac University asked nationally representative samples of Americans if they thought white-supremacist groups posed an immediate threat to the United States.
Even after those three high-profile incidents, the graph above shows that fewer than one-fifth of Republicans said that white supremacists pose an immediate threat to the United States. Meanwhile, the share of Democrats who said white supremacists are an immediate threat increased from 58 percent in 2017 and 2018 to 70 percent in March 2019.
Data from three YouGov/HuffPost Polls conducted over a similar time period also shows an increasing partisan divide over the seriousness of white nationalism. In these polls, the growing divide was driven by fewer Trump voters saying they do not see it as a threat.
The figure above shows that 87 percent of self-reported Hillary Clinton voters surveyed in August 2017 and March 2019 said that white nationalism poses a serious threat to the United States. However, the share of Donald Trump voters who said white nationalism is a serious threat declined from 33 percent in 2017 to 21 percent in 2019.
Consistent with those results, the figure below shows that Republicans overwhelmingly see the news media as a greater threat than white supremacists. According to an August 2017 Fox News Poll, 69 percent of Republicans said that the news media is a greater threat than white supremacists. Only 12 percent of Democrats thought that the news media is a greater threat.
Could El Paso change things?
These large and growing partisan divides are not surprising. Republicans are generally less concerned by racism against racial and ethnic minorities than Democrats are. And those beliefs have been reinforced by Trump’s rhetoric and actions as president.
Trump has repeatedly minimized the threat of white-supremacist violence. Earlier this year, he responded to a question about whether he saw white nationalism as a rising threat by saying, “I don’t, really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.” As such, the Trump administration has reportedly diverted resources away from fighting domestic right-wing terrorism.
Americans’ concerns and priorities are heavily influenced by the issues emphasized by their preferred political party’s leaders. Unless Republican leaders in general and the president in particular focus on the threats posed by white-supremacist ideologues after the El Paso shooting, Americans will remain divided over how to combat the rise of right-wing domestic terrorism.
Don’t miss anything! Sign up to get TMC’s smart analysis in your inbox, three days a week.
Read more:
Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes
Most Americans thought Trump encouraged white supremacists — even before El Paso
Terrorism does increase with immigration — but only homegrown, right-wing terrorism