Poll: Nearly 1 In 3 Say Political Violence May Be Necessary To Right The Country

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Hi, this is Joe.

I'm here with my dog Liberty.

We're about to step foot on Wingersheek Beach in Gloucester, Massachusetts for the first time in 24 weeks since the city has lifted the summer dog ban.

This podcast was recorded at 12.08 p.m.

on Friday, October 3rd, 2025.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but Lyddy and I will be enjoying the real beach season.

That's such a good feeling.

You say Liddy or Liberty?

Libby.

I think, well, the Liberty was the name, and then Libby is the nickname before.

Well, there is nothing more freeing than being with your dog on the beach and throwing a ball.

Yeah, on the day that the rules have been lifted, right?

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

I'm Elena Moore.

I cover politics.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.

And today on the show, we're talking about what is on Americans' minds, courtesy of a new NPR PBS News Maris Poll that is out this week.

But first, we are also on day three of the government shutdown, and I want to start there.

Elena, can you just give us a quick recap of where things stand?

Is the government any closer to reopening?

I mean, short answer, no, they're not.

Most lawmakers were not in the Capitol yesterday in observance of the Jewish holiday.

But in the last few days, basically, there have been multiple failed votes in the Senate.

The Senate is expected to vote for the fourth time today on these stopgap measures.

The vote is expected to fail.

The issue here is that senators need 60 votes in order to advance this spending bill.

And the Republicans control the Senate, but they don't have 60 senators.

They need more than a handful of Democratic senators to vote for their plans, and they don't have that.

A lot of Democrats want Republicans to extend health care subsidies that are going to expire at the end of the year.

Republicans say we can have a conversation about that, but we have to fund the government first and then we'll come back to you.

A lot of Democrats aren't sure.

So it's the same kind of back and forth.

There's a lot of blame game going on and GOP leaders say they're just going to keep putting their stopgap measure on the floor for a vote as they would hope things, you know, pressure Democrats to change their mind.

Right.

And we got into like the politics in an episode on Wednesday.

but Domenico, I am hoping to go back to a little bit to the poll of how do people feel about who to blame on the shutdown at this point?

Well, marginally, they give Republicans more of the blame.

In a poll that we took with Maris College over five days last week before the shutdown, 38% say that Republicans would get most of the blame.

27% say Democrats.

31% say that they would blame both parties equally.

How entrenched are those numbers?

That's one of the things I've been wondering, because a lot of the polling was taken right before the shutdown actually went into effect.

Like, how many of those people are actually movable as politicians are kind of trying to win the messaging game at this point?

You know, 31% is a pretty significant number.

That's the percentage of people that they're going to be targeting as far as who blame both parties equally.

41% of independents say that they blame both parties equally.

So I think that's a really important key group of people who both parties are going to be targeting when we're talking about the messaging.

Well, and Elena, I feel like there is also an interesting divide here on age, right?

Because Gen Z voters are more likely to be these people who blame both of the the parties equally.

What do you make of that?

Honestly, I think that tracks with a lot of what I've heard talking to young voters around the country for years.

They feel like very disenchanted with government all around.

And they also just don't overwhelmingly identify with a political party.

So that kind of made sense to me.

I hear a lot of people talk about issues over party, wanting to see really like authenticity and people kind of win them over.

So in some ways, I feel like that was kind of a continuation of like maybe what a lot of young voters think right now, which is I don't trust anyone.

Diving a little deeper into this poll, Dominico, what are the big takeaways for you?

Well, I think it's going to be really important, like I said, with the messaging because nobody's really trusted in Washington.

You know, Trump gets his lowest approval rating ever at 41%, at least in this second term for him.

Republicans in Congress at 35%.

Democrats in Congress are even worse, at 25%.

And as Elaine is talking about, younger voters being the people who seem most annoyed with politics or most arms distance from it, they're a key part of Democrat space.

And it's a big reason why only 48% of those who identify as Democrats approve of Democrats.

Republicans, 77% of Republicans approve of the job that they're doing in Congress.

So that's a big deal.

Also, we haven't talked much about vaccines and the National Guard, which is a huge, you know, obviously topic that's been in the news, but we've had such a fire hose of news lately, it hasn't been something that we've been able to talk about.

But, you know, you had people pretty split on whether or not they wanted the National Guard in their communities.

You had a big split, though, between Democrats strongly saying they don't want them in their communities, Republicans saying they strongly do want them in their communities to fight crime.

Vaccines, it's interesting because we've seen so much about RFK Jr., the Health and Human Services Secretary, sort of downplaying the efficacy of vaccines.

And more than eight in 10 people say that they think that children should still be required to be vaccinated before they go into schools.

Yeah, that was a takeaway.

I feel like this poll showed so many things that were just like so clearly like half the country feels this way, half the, but it feels like on vaccines, it's still the vast majority of people want their kids to be vaccinated before going to schools.

Yeah, there were a few things in this poll that were overwhelming as far as what people thought should be happening or what the trends in the country are.

And I know we'll talk about some of that a little bit more later.

But when it comes to the Epstein files, I think it's interesting because more than six in ten people disapprove of how the Trump administration is handling this.

And that might be because three-quarters of people or more say that they think that the Epstein files should be released in full.

And that includes a majority of Republicans who think that the Epstein files should be released in full.

But I think there's a difference between how Republicans feel, they think,

what they think should happen in having those files released versus how they think the Trump administration is handling it.

A plurality of Republicans, 45%, approve of how Trump is handling it.

But there's a significant percentage who are saying that they're not sure or that they disapprove.

But I think that that difference between how Republicans are seemingly allowing the Trump administration some time and space to be able to get to a place where they will release the files shows a difference between how they feel versus how the rest of the country feels, which is more hotly disapproving than Republicans are.

I do think it's interesting, though, on the Epstein stuff, Dominico.

Like so many of these questions, we saw Democrats and Republicans so diametrically opposed on answers.

But for this, yes, a plurality of Republicans say they approve of the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files, but still, you know, a quarter say they disapprove.

And then compared to, you know, independents, 69% say they disapprove.

88% of Democrats say they disapprove.

And I think, especially right now with the shutdown and

it's always interesting to me that the Epstein conversation is kind of looming in the background throughout it all for months now, over the entire summer.

And so I think once Congress is able to reopen the government, it'll be really interesting to see if lawmakers keep talking about this because as we see in this polling, voters are.

Yeah, it makes sense.

I mean, Democrats are hitting this because they're seeing these same numbers that basically say this is a crack in the Republican Party, essentially, right?

And especially with independence.

It is, but it's, I think, again, I think Republicans are allowing Trump some time and space before they're saying, we're really annoyed that he isn't doing this.

Plus, you've seen Trump really kind of put up a lot of distractions to try to keep his base in line on other culture war issues or whatever else.

And I guess I find it hard to believe, right, that, I mean, we always go back once elections come around.

It's still just going to be economy, things that actually really matter to the day-to-day people, as opposed to I find it hard to believe that a huge amount of people are really going to change who they're voting for based on this.

Am I crazy on that?

Yeah, I feel like in the ads that we see from Democratic candidates, Epstein is going to be included.

And then the ads from Republican candidates, it's going to list off Trump's wins and it's going to talk about Democrats not having power.

So it's going to be part of the like political media machine.

But I think we're starting to see some of the messaging for next year take shape and I think some of that Democrats are going to be focused on health care and the economy.

And I know that we'll talk a little bit more about health care, but I think that for Republicans, they're really just trying to,

Trump seems to be wanting to keep his base in line and have them be able to go out to vote.

So he's going to be talking about crime and immigration.

Yeah.

All right.

We're going to take a quick break and more on some really interesting stuff in this poll in just a moment.

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And we're back.

And we've been talking about a new NPR PBS News Marist poll that's out this week.

And a key takeaway from this poll relates to political violence.

Domenico, lay out what this poll found.

Yeah, it was a real eye-opener.

I thought, I mean, 30% of people now are saying that Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track.

It's really kind of stunning.

And the driver of this is Democrats.

They went from 12%

saying that Americans may have to resort to violence to now 28%.

Still, Republicans are higher.

At 31%, they went up from 28%, a marginal increase.

Independents, we're also seeing a quarter of them also saying this.

So really kind of fascinating that we're seeing this much of a jump.

I have to say, though, we have to temper that a little bit because you're still seeing that 70% of people don't think that that will be necessary.

77% of people think that violence is a major problem in the country.

And in other polling, when you ask people about specific acts of violence, if they'd be in favor of murder or they'd be in favor of bombings and things like that.

Those numbers go way, way down into the single digits.

So I think you're seeing a lot of the reflection here is about frustration, about the threats that people feel, about what they're trying to protect also, as opposed to what they are in favor of people going and doing.

One thing that stood out to me in this poll is kind of how differently people perceive the idea of political violence, Dominico.

Can you explain that a little bit?

Aaron Powell, and who's under threat, right?

And who is being targeted?

Because when we asked, are you more concerned about politically motivated violence against public officials or against protesters we had a dead-even split 49 said against public officials 50 said against protesters and you can imagine that the political divide is really really sharp democrats 70 said that they were most concerned about violence against protesters for republicans 74 said violence against public officials independents split down the middle wow 48 50 48 on public officials 50 on protesters well within the margin of error well and Elena, this fear and this tension that is so clearly building is really apparent with young voters, too, right?

Yeah, I would say so.

I mean, there's been a lot of emphasis from lawmakers and just even reflected in our poll that, yeah, voters under 45 are more likely than older generations to agree that Americans may have to resort to violence to get the country back on track.

Folks under 30 in our polling are most passionately agreeing with that, though it's still a small amount.

You know, 17% of people under 30 say they strongly agree.

And I think this requires a bit of contextualizing.

Obviously, that's a striking finding.

But when you think about being an American under the age of 30 and the political shaping that they've had over the last two decades, I think it adds some layers here.

If you were born in the 90s, early 2000s, and you're coming of age as a young adult right now, your political consciousness and awakening has been defined by acts of either violence, divisive rhetoric, from school shootings to January 6th to the assassination attempts on President Trump to Charlie Kirk's death.

I think a lot of young people across the political spectrum, I don't think it's fair to take that finding away and say they support this.

Rather, they are used to it.

And I think that it's something to really think about because we also know that young people are very concerned about mental health issues.

We know they're very concerned about gun violence and being involved in a mass shooting.

And we also know that a lot of these acts of violence in recent years have been carried out by younger people.

And so I think this is a really complicated issue that both sides of the political spectrum are trying to spin one way or another.

And it's just really, really messy.

I thought it was interesting because in the poll, when you look at younger people, there's a huge divide.

I mean, those under 45 are 20 points more likely to say that they may have to resort to violence violence than those over 45, which is really stunning and way outside the margin of error.

As are people who are black and Latino who feel that way as compared to whites.

I think that's a huge divide.

Also want to note that as Elena talks about the sort of environment that younger people have grown up in and these active shooter drills that they're more involved in and all of that, when you look at the numbers on guns in this poll, it's really fascinating because when you look at controlling gun violence or protecting gun rights and which is most important, almost six in 10 people said that controlling gun violence was more important than protecting gun rights.

And certainly those 18 to 29 were the most likely to say that.

70%

said that it was more important to control gun violence over protecting gun rights.

I also thought there was another notable crack in the Trump base because a really key group among Trump voters are whites without college degrees.

Men who don't have college degrees, majority of them were saying that you had to protect gun rights.

But a majority of women who didn't have college degrees said that it was more important to control gun violence.

Well, Domenico, an overwhelming majority of those polled say the United States has gone too far in restricting the right to free speech as well.

Can you break that down for us?

What did the poll find when it comes to free speech?

Yeah, you know, when we talk about the idea that there are overwhelming numbers of people who are feeling a certain way, well, 79%, almost 8 in 10 people, think that the country has gone too far in restricting restricting the right to free speech.

That's not the government, that's society in general, right?

And we've heard for years about conservatives who feel like their rights to say what they want to be able to say have been restricted, whether it's online or on campuses.

Now, with everything that's happened, with Jimmy Kimmel being taken off the air,

after government pressure, affiliate pressure,

you're seeing Democrats now saying that they also feel that the right to free speech is under threat, obviously for different reasons, but both sides saying that they feel like you just can't say what you want to say.

And we know Trump ran on that, by the way, in 2015, 2016, except then he was calling it being too politically correct.

I think there's still a divide on what's acceptable speech in the country or not.

And once again, if you look at our numbers in this poll, the group that feels the most strongly about this is people under the age of 30.

That's what I was going to bring up.

And I genuinely don't understand that because this is also young voters have grown up with social media in a way.

Obviously, no other generation has.

And that is, isn't that the equalizing force when it comes to speech?

Like every single person or most people have access to be able to put their speech out there.

What you can argue about content moderation and things like that.

But I would have, I guess, assumed that young people would feel more empowered or like they have more ability to speak their mind than older generations.

Yeah, but the devil's advocate of that, and I think something Trump and a lot of young conservatives like the late activist Charlie Kirk capitalized on is they were penalized for doing that.

If you look at some of the recent events that have happened in the last year from Kirk's assassination, his big message was debate.

You shouldn't be, as he would say, canceled for having opinions that may not have been, as he would argue, politically correct.

But then at the same time, I think about earlier this year when the Trump administration really zeroed in on speech on campuses, where we saw young people who were taking stands on the war in Gaza, who were not U.S.

citizens, either lose their ability to study in the United States or feel really silenced.

And then on top of that, go back even further and you just look at the protest movements of these last few years and how divisive those were, how politicized those were.

So I agree with you, Miles.

I think there's a lot of space for these things,

but not everyone is receiving them the same way.

And a lot of it's about politics.

I mean, flatly, right?

I mean, because right now I think Democrats feel like they are most under threat when it comes to free speech.

Just looking inside the numbers, 91% of Harris voters said that the country's gone too far in restricting speech.

66% of Trump voters say that.

That would have been much higher under the Biden.

I don't think we polled on that specific issue really a few years ago, but I can only imagine that

it's night and day.

And one thing that they mostly agree on is that the government should not play a major role in restricting speech or defining what kind of speech is acceptable or too extreme.

Only 15% say that the government should play a major role.

44% say a minor role.

The other 4 and 10 say no role at all.

So most Americans are saying, kind of keep your hands off my speech because right now it doesn't feel very free.

Okay, well, let's leave it there for now.

And when we get back, it's time for Can't Let It Go.

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And we're back, and it's time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just cannot let go of, politics or otherwise.

Dominica, why don't you get us started?

I want to talk about a way to get out of traffic tickets.

Ooh,

you can use it.

It's brand new.

Get your pen and paper.

And yeah, take notes.

All you have to do is not drive.

Oh, I'm so for this.

Oh, my God.

In Northern California, there was a Waymo, which is a self-driving car that illegally made a U-turn ahead of a DUI checkpoint.

And the cops went to pull the car over and found no one in the car.

So they couldn't give a ticket because they said that their citation books, quote, don't have a box for robot.

Whoa.

That's right.

No driver, no hands, no clue.

And I'll finish that.

No ticket.

Bada bang.

Have you you ever had a motorcycle?

There can't be that.

Wait, we need to fix that, though, right?

I mean, you can't just not have, you cannot have robot cars that are also lawless.

Yeah.

Yeah, we can just program.

Terrifying.

We just terrorize neighborhoods.

Yeah, that's very futuristic, Dominico.

No tickets if you can't have a driver.

Miles, what about you?

What can't you let go of?

Okay, so what I can't let go of is last night, one of my best friends was actually the guest star on Law and Order SVU,

which was really, really cool.

Are you friends with Marishka Hardigan?

No, I'm friends.

Her name is Molly Griggs, and she married my childhood best friend.

And I was all excited to watch, obviously, like all day.

I had been excited.

The double-edged sword of your friend starring in Law and Order SVU, because I was all pumped.

And then like the first line of SVU was like, and just so you know, this is for the show about the most heinous crimes of all time.

And I was like, oh, gosh.

I didn't even think about the fact that like, my friend, some horrible stuff is about to happen to my best friend.

What was the scene?

Wow, I can't.

I don't want to go.

No spoilers, A and B.

I'm not going to talk about highlighting.

I mean, it's R and R S V U.

You can use your imagination.

You didn't watch it.

I don't think you watched.

I did.

I watched it.

I watched it.

She cried a lot.

There were bad stuff that happened to her, but they did get the guy.

Justice was served.

But I just want to say, Derek, in Lawn Order SPU, I'm not a fan of what you did to my friend.

Elena, what can't you let go of?

It's October 3rd.

That's Mean Girls' Day.

Today is Taylor Swift's new album's release day.

I have already listened multiple times, and I have thoughts.

leave your thoughts in the comments.

That's not what she's gonna get to.

There's also a lot of great reality TV on right now that's really giving me life.

But look, I know my audience.

And by that I mean I know my studio audience.

And I know when it's time to talk about a winning team.

And last night we saw some classic Yankee baseball in the best way possible, beating the Red Sox, sending them back to Boston.

Bye-bye.

And unfortunately for Dominico, the Mets did not make it, which was sad.

And he doesn't want my sympathy, but I was sad.

My mom is a Mets fan, as I've said, also born in Queens, like you.

But you have to just be happy for New York.

That was a good game.

We don't have to.

No, I'm like, this is, this stinks.

This is like the worst.

This is like, I feel like we should have just punished her by not responding at all.

And just by hating styles to it.

But I will just say this is why no one likes Yankees fans.

I just said that.

Because they get too giddy about winning.

And, you know, like my brother, for example, my dad's a Yankees fan.

My brother's a Yankees fan.

As soon as the last pitch happened, when the Mets lost, I I get a phone call.

I see it's from my brother, who, by the way, doesn't always answer his phone.

And

I pick up, I'm like, hi.

He goes, oh, what happened?

He goes, oh, it's so disappointing, huh?

I thought you guys got Soto and that you're going to, the whole thing, everything's going to change.

And I just looked at my phone.

I looked at my phone,

found the red button, and turned it off.

Oh, wow.

You did the clean hang-up?

Yep.

And I said to him later, I was like, I'm sorry.

I don't need that energy right now.

Yankees fans always try to do this.

And I'm just like, I'm sorry.

She gets to say what she wants now.

I said to my daughter and my wife, I said, we can't talk trash for at least another day.

I'm not talking trash.

But they will, and it is what it is.

I'm not talking trash about the Mets.

I will only talk trash about Boston.

All right, and that's a rest.

For today, our executive producer is Matoni Maturi.

Our editor is Rachel Bay.

Our producers are Casey Morrell and Brea Suggs.

Thanks to Krishna Dev Callimer.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

I'm Linda Moore, I cover politics.

And I'm Domenico Montanero, Senior Political Editor.

And thank you for listening to the MPR Politics Podcast.

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