Earlier this week, I noted that a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, which found that 34 percent of Americans believe violence is justified against the government, was purposely misleading. There are many other garbage polls out there, including this one from CBS News, which offers a slate of narrowly crafted questions meant to elicit politically helpful responses. But a new Bright Line Watch poll featured in the New York Times this morning notes that responses on political violence are often misleading “due to respondent inattention and questions that required respondents to select a single option disavowing violence,” and:

. . . our best estimates of public support for political violence, threats, and harassment are substantially lower than past research found. When we exclude inattentive respondents, first ask attentive respondents a binary question, and provide them with a specific definition or example where appropriate, reported support is 9% for threats, 8% for harassment, 6% for non-violent felonies, 4% for violent felonies, 4% for violence if the other party wins the 2024 election, 4% for violence on January 6, and 5% for violence to restore Trump to the presidency. These figures are much lower than we estimated using the original scale in October 2020.

Political violence, as we saw a year ago or in the summer of 2020, is a threat, either from ideologues, idiots, or those taking advantage of the chaos. Mobs act like mobs. But the ongoing campaign by the Democratic Party establishment to convince us that everyone but a small fraction of Republicans (or even Trump voters) condone that violence — or that “every day is Jan. 6” — is part of a cynical partisan campaign to create enough political pressure to ram through the unconstitutional nationalization of elections and the destruction of Senate norms.