The attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has raised renewed concerns about the risk of political violence in the United States. Polling shows that most Americans reject violence, but they are worried the problem is getting worse. Is public opinion responding to real changes in the risk environment, or is there a perception gap? There hasn’t always been data to answer that question.
Bringing together a multi-disciplinary network of information-sharing partners like Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), a global conflict data project, and the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute, our team at Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) has helped to build a new system for monitoring political violence around the country in real time. Sustained analysis across a range of indicators has allowed us to establish a shared reference point to map out the risk environment and measure changes in key trends from year to year.
The data confirms what Americans are feeling: after a series of fluctuations since the heights of 2020 and 2021, political violence is back on the rise. And the threat isn’t confined to Washington, D.C.
2025 saw a serious escalation in the risk environment, from high-profile assassinations to aggressive federal immigration operations around the country. Incidents of targeted violence rose by at least 34 percent. Threats against public officials spiked, with a 58 percent increase for members of Congress alone. Leading community safety practitioners reported that the demand for de-escalation support is reaching its highest point in over a decade.
Research shows that election years are often linked to even greater risks of violence across multiple indicators, including attacks on politicians and acts of intimidation at polling places. Against these headwinds, the start of a pivotal midterm season is precisely when policymakers and philanthropic organizations need to fortify America’s early warning systems to ensure communities and law enforcement can continue to track and respond to emerging threats.
But that’s not what’s happening. The federal government has moved in the opposite direction, slashing resources for critical agencies, academic institutions, and interventions aimed at improving community safety and election security. This is a dangerously counter-productive policy, at just the moment when society clearly needs more, not less, support for violence monitoring and prevention programs.
Leaders in state and local government and the philanthropy sector are recognizing the need to fill this breach, but many efforts have been tentative and scattered. It is vital that these stakeholders build a cohesive strategy to reinforce this country’s essential monitoring and response infrastructure before more damage is done.
2025: A Bellwether Year for Political Violence
At the start of 2025, BDI assessed that the stage was set for it to be a bellwether year for political violence in the United States. This prediction was unfortunately borne out.
Although estimates vary significantly by source and methodology, available data sources indicate that political violence increased in 2025. According to the latest data from START at the University of Maryland, “there was a 34.5% increase in total [terrorism and targeted violence] events” in the first eight months of 2025 relative to the same period in 2024.
START’s research finds that the events of 2025 “do not fit neatly into any one ideological category.” These findings are echoed by comparable data sources. For example, a September 2025 analysis of complementary datasets on additional indicators, including the Prosecution Project (tPP), finds that “extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”
Last year’s events included multiple high-profile attacks on public figures and officials, such as the arson at Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence in April; the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. in May; the shooting of two Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses in June, resulting in the death of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband; the assassination of activist Charlie Kirk in September; and the fatal ambush targeting National Guard members in Washington, D.C. in November.
The risk environment has been exacerbated by aggressive federal immigration operations. At the start of 2026, federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in two separate incidents in Minnesota. The shootings followed a yearlong escalation of federal operations, coupled with an increasingly militarized response to political opposition and civil disobedience. Updated analysis of Gun Violence Archive data from The Trace has identified “24 incidents in which immigration agents shot at people since Trump’s operations began last year … [and] another 44 incidents in which agents held bystanders, protesters, or other people at gunpoint under questionable circumstances.” With the deaths of Pretti and Good, at least six people have been killed in these confrontations, and another 13 injured.
In the aftermath of high-profile assassinations and shootings, threats against public figures and even private citizens have surged, compounding the chilling effects of violence. The U.S. Capitol Police reported an increase in “threat assessment cases” against members of Congress for the third year in a row in 2025, with a 58 percent rise from 2024. BDI documented multiple spikes in threats and harassment against local officials last year, with the largest recorded in September after the Kirk assassination. Results from our survey of local elected officials with CivicPulse, a non-profit research organization, show that 75 percent of officeholders are now less willing to engage in key political activities like working on controversial issues or running for higher office due to concerns about hostility.
Extremist groups have contributed to the rise in threats. Seeing the Trump administration as an ally on issues like immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, particularly after the January 6 pardons, many organized non-state actors who are historically prone to violence — like the Proud Boys — made a tactical shift from physical mobilization to online actions in 2025, focusing on doxing and digital targeting of their political opponents. Despite the overall decline in street-level activity, however, multiple extremist groups demonstrated reserve capacity to mobilize around flashpoint events, such as the Kirk assassination. September 2025 saw the highest rate of activity by these groups since May 2024, when they had engaged in counter-protests during college demonstrations over the Israel-Palestine conflict. While many of these actors may continue to lay low as the administration advances their policy priorities on the ground, this combination of online targeting and strategic remobilization will likely remain a persistent threat throughout 2026 and into the election period.
In the face of these trends, people around the country came together to stand up against attacks on their communities. In 2025, demonstrations surged to their highest level in five years, driven chiefly by peaceful protests against government violence and rights violations. ACLED recorded almost 20,000 demonstrations last year, marking a 77 percent increase compared to 2024 and the highest yearly total since 2020. Despite the risk environment, violent or contentious activity was reported at just 0.5 percent of demonstrations, as organizers around the country maintained strong norms of non-violence. At the same time, tensions have escalated around federal immigration deployments, where authorities have increasingly deployed “less-lethal” munitions. As the response to incidents like the Minnesota shootings continues to unfold, it will be important to monitor further shifts in the threat landscape for protest activity, including changes to federal deployments and friction between local and federal authorities tasked with policing demonstrations.
The Risk Environment Ahead of the 2026 Midterms
Many of the risk factors identified in 2025 have continued to intensify in 2026, from the Good and Pretti shootings to the assault of Rep. Ilhan Omar in Minnesota and the killing of an armed intruder at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, alongside tensions over the war in Iran and a new series of anti-AI attacks. The shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a sign that the threat environment could be on a trajectory to escalate further as the country approaches the midterms.
Political violence is a year-round problem, but research consistently finds that election periods are correlated with heightened risk. For example, BDI data shows that threats and harassment against local officials have surged during election years. Most of these incidents target election officials and poll workers, but we’ve also recorded an uptick in threats against judges over election-related issues. In 2024, for example, judicial officials in Fulton County, Georgia, were targeted after ruling on cases impacting ballot processing for the election. At the federal level, the U.S. Marshals Service documented more than 560 threats against judges in the 2025 fiscal year, up 10 percent from the previous fiscal year. So far in the 2026 fiscal year, through mid-April, the agency has tracked another 275 incidents.
While local officials and community leaders worked hard to ensure that the 2024 election was safe and secure overall, the spike in threats, bomb scares, and other forms of hostility caused significant challenges for election administrators. Survey research from organizations like the Bipartisan Policy Center and Issue One has found that turnover among election officials has increased in recent years, due in large part to rising hostility, fear, and stress – trends that are mirrored in the wider population of local elected officials surveyed by BDI and CivicPulse.
The federal government may also take direct action to influence the election in ways that raise the risk of violence, including by deploying agents involved in the administration’s deportation operations to election sites, prompting lawmakers in states like California to propose legislation that would ban immigration enforcement personnel from activity near polling stations. These potential points of tensions between federal and state or local authorities ahead of the midterms, as well as federal cuts to election security agencies, underscore the need for reliable, objective monitoring support.
Responding to Attacks on America’s Early Warning Systems
For years, BDI and a wide array of non- and bi-partisan partners have worked to improve political violence tracking in order to build the infrastructure for a data-driven early warning system that could accurately monitor threats across the political spectrum. That infrastructure is now in jeopardy.
Over the past year, the federal government has moved to eliminate programs designed to collect data on important risk factors and cut financial support for research into effective interventions. For example, START’s T2V dataset, which was “developed in direct response to the FY2020 National Defense Authorization Act” passed during the first Trump term, was forced to discontinue its data collection program when the administration cancelled its funding in early 2025. This is a key source used by BDI and other partners to track multiple types of political violence and extremist activity, and its discontinuation will prevent full year-on-year analysis of threats to both the government and targeted communities going forward.
Cuts have also been announced or are under consideration for a range of federal agencies and projects, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which plays an important role in election security, as well as the DHS Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships and the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which supports the National Fusion Centers that operate as data-sharing and threat analysis hubs for local law enforcement. Even the FBI has faced cuts amid reports that agents have been pulled from core responsibilities and local law enforcement assistance to aid in immigration operations. This drawdown compromises the country’s ability to understand and respond to conflict.
Sustained, timely, and publicly accessible data collection on political violence and related risk factors is essential for early warning and early action to counter threats. For example, community leaders were able to draw on years of research into risk factors for violence and confrontation in protest contexts to help them safely prepare for 2025’s “No Kings” demonstrations. In many cases, this included constructive coordination between organizers, risk mitigation practitioners, and local law enforcement to create a shared framework to de-escalate potential disruptions. This type of evidence-based, advance preparation enabled stakeholders to get out ahead of security issues, navigate points of tension, and uphold the right to peaceful protest. Without datasets like ACLED and START T2V, the ecosystem will not be able to track key month-to-month or even year-to-year trends to inform these critical planning and response efforts.
As the federal government steps back from supporting violence monitoring and prevention, however, state and local governments are working together with research and community partners to step in.
With their help, independent third-party research projects can strengthen and grow existing programs to plug these holes and make data more widely accessible to both policymakers and civil society leaders. Effective models range from data collection initiatives focused on threats, political violence, and protest events established by groups like BDI, ACLED, tPP, and CCC, to complementary datasets with a targeted focus on specific types of activity and policy issues, like the Gun Violence Archive, a repository of gun violence incidents, and the Deportation Data Project, which provides access to data on government immigration operations.
Backed by diversified funding sources, these types of proactive monitoring approaches can provide a centralized repository of information on risks and needs that allows for consistent, locally informed planning, even when there are major shifts in the national political landscape. Independent open-access data collection and monitoring support can also reduce overreliance on federal agencies when they pose safety concerns for local communities.
In the current risk environment, with the midterms on the horizon, the administration’s anemic approach to violence prevention is short-sighted. It’s weakening a system that is designed to track and respond to the types of attacks the country just witnessed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
A quick reaction by the authorities averted a potential disaster at the dinner, but counting on the last line of defense is not a long-term strategy. It’s imperative that leaders at all levels, across the political spectrum, take concrete steps to reinforce America’s monitoring and early warning infrastructure now, before the next crisis emerges.
