Political Anxiety in Red and Blue

What Partisans Fear about the Upcoming Election

At a rally in a Pennsylvania town its MAGA mayor, Jondavid Longo, refers to as “blood-red Trump country,” Donald Trump, the GOP’s apostle of political blood lust, gets bloodied by an attempted assassination. While he walks away with a minor injury, a bystander dies instead. Two others are severely wounded. It is an odd echo of those unmasked Trump fans who, years earlier, perished or ended up tethered to ventilators because they attended a rally presided over by the pandemic minimizer-in-chief. MAGA martyrdom has been the sad fate of more than a few of his worshipers.

Trump, on the other hand, always seems to endure. Even fate appears to have granted him immunity. He will live to lie and threaten murder and mayhem another day. After a bullet grazed his ear, his first instinct was to raise his fist, apparently in photo-op defiance of all those liberals and deep-staters he claims are determined to persecute him. Shortly after being whisked away by Secret Service agents, he posted on his social media platform, “I will never surrender.”

Finally, his story of being the crucified savior of his flock seems to find momentary confirmation. Doubtless, he will turn his near-death into an entrepreneurial opportunity, a chance to generate the next bad-boy campaign tee-shirt meme for MAGA swag emporiums across the country. Of course, the reality is the inverse of his crucifixion narrative; his devotees died for him, just as they have always done.

As an avid promoter of violence against tribal enemies and unfettered access to the ballistic machinery to carry it out, it is ironic but perhaps inevitable that he would become the target of it. Before the end of his first term, the former president’s name had been explicitly invoked by at least 54 perpetrators of assault. Since then, he has been the apparent inspiration behind many more violent incidents, including murder.

Thanks, in part, to Trump’s incitement, the specter of partisan barbarism looms large in the public imagination. An Amazon search turns up well over a dozen books examining the possibility and consequences of a second American civil war. While weirdly apolitical, a major Hollywood movie graphically depicts the sanguinary horror show that such a conflagration would entail. If Trump loses, he promises a “bloodbath,” and if he wins, “retribution.”

A Supreme Court majority recently ruled that presidents are now kings who can remove dissidents to political dungeons or place their heads on spikes, depending on the leader's passing whim. Goodbye, rule of law. Hello, the law of rulers. A growing number of Americans plan to flee the country if their partisan tribe loses the election.

Dread is the affect of the moment. Residents of blue and red regions of the country seem to be flooded with uncontainable political anxiety. According to a recent survey, around 40% of Americans acknowledge feeling increasing fear in the face of the upcoming elections. In another, it was 60%. An American Psychiatric Association poll found those surveyed more anxious about the election (73%) than they were about gun violence (69%).

Those two concerns might be hard to disentangle, as MAGA militias may find reasons to shoot people perceived as enemies whether Trump wins or loses. Anecdotally, I can attest to the growing apprehension bordering on panic among several of my patients. Whether in their nightmares or waking lives, they are haunted by visions of the future dystopia that the wrong electoral victor could wreak.

As a clinician and an observer of political culture, I think citizens on both sides of the political chasm are riven with fear about the election’s outcome. However, what frightens them varies starkly depending on which political tribe they are aligned with.

Liberal Panic

Democrats and left-leaning independents, those whom I would group in the liberal pro-democracy coalition, objectively have a lot to worry about. The plans for the right-wing counter-revolution against voting rights, racial equity, health and safety protections, social security, presidential accountability, and women’s bodily autonomy have been laid out explicitly in the Heritage Foundation’s now-infamous Project 2025 document. However, this is not just aspirational; it is now being enacted by the MAGA majority in the Supreme Court. They are not waiting for Trump to ascend to the throne. What liberals fear has already begun unfolding.

Trump’s vow to jail or execute political opponents, create immigrant internment camps, plunge the nation into debt to pay back billionaire campaign donors with tax cuts, degrade the quality of the air, water, and food supply through radical deregulation, and punish any woman who fails to surrender her uterus to the state are promises that will be carried out. Unlike his first administration, there will be no “adults in the room” to impede his actions. As the MAGA justices have ruled, presidents are henceforth sovereigns accountable to no one.

Trump-World Terrors

The fears of those in the MAGA tribe are quite different. I would include under that heading the entire Republican Party, its voters, associated think tanks, billionaire benefactors, and multiple armed terrorist and militia groups (some of whom, like the Proud Boys, are even running for political office). They have been disproportionately affected by a development unfolding for decades in this country: the ever-growing geographical and informational self-segregation of political partisans.

Over many decades, we have seen a dramatic increase in the growth of what researchers call landslide counties. Those are counties where one of the two presidential candidates won an overwhelming majority of the votes. There has also been an increase in neighborhoods where residents rarely or never encounter members of the other party.

Correspondingly, partisans have confined themselves to information ghettoes, ideological media silos that tend to view news like any other commodity; it has to make the consumer feel good. This often translates into telling people what they want to believe. It is essential to emphasize that these developments have not been symmetrical between partisan tribes, as I document in my book. Liberal citizens are likelier to live in a neighborhood with a mix of partisan residents. They also tend to be exposed to a broader range of media outlets, including centrist and center-right information sources.

The upshot for conservatives is that they are fed a steady diet of lies, conspiracy theories, and demonizing stories about liberals, immigrants, and non-white people unmodulated by any disconfirming information. Living in a manufactured state of perpetual terror about criminal invaders, mosquito drones carrying Covid vaccines, cannibalistic pedophiles in high office, and swarthy immigrant hordes seeking to replace them and steal their jobs, it is no wonder conservatives believe they can never have enough high-capacity military weapons.

Of course, real and sometimes overwhelming changes are occurring – climate disasters, breathtaking technological innovation, pandemics, terrorism, cultural upheavals, and scientific discoveries that subvert various reassuring beliefs. Unfortunately, the fear generated by that reality is being displaced and projected onto those right-wing fantasy targets I just listed because it has utility for those who stand to benefit economically and politically.

The assassination attempt against Trump will be a political godsend for him, someone whose whole campaign story has been about his putative victimization and brave retaliation against it. It was aided enormously by the reliably stenographic news media, which uncritically repeated Republican framing of the event, including the non-stop broadcast of Trump’s triumphalist fist-shaking. They are helping the GOP construct an inspiring and reassuring narrative for the base and those credulous undecided voters who long for a salvific hero.

At last, the evil forces that strike fear in the heart of MAGA have taken concrete form in the now vanquished body of a flesh and blood perpetrator. Of course, the story of a lone gunman, especially one who is a local kid registered as a Republican and whose AR-15 was likely purchased for him by his Libertarian father, will not satisfy. If there isn’t a larger conspiracy of villains behind him, it must be invented. It may frighten Trump’s true believers, but it will also be a tale that contains their anxiety. Fantasies of malevolent cabals have always been a useful way to create order out of terrifying uncertainty and chaos.

In prior electoral contests, the stakes were relatively short-term. Concerns were centered around who would be empowered to set policy and the country's direction for the next few years. To say the stakes now are existential has become the pundit cliché du jour, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The question that terrifies both sides is which group will exterminate the other. However, with the singular exception of that lone assassin, one side has far more guns and the willingness to use them.