There’s a myth, fed partly by the media, that assassination attempts boost politicians into the stratosphere in surveys. Many conservatives, and some liberals, are claiming that the election is already over as a result of what happened to Trump.
Is that the case? I look at the evidence from surveys across studies and find that, if a bump in the polls does occur, it’s temporary at best.
Back in 2005, conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg wrote a column for the Jewish World Review titled “The People, Not So Much,” about how people may have felt about JFK, which helped fuel the myth about assassinations and public opinion in American politics.
“John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960 with 49.7 percent of the vote,” Goldberg wrote. “This is as close as we get to a historical fact… By 1963, 59 percent of Americans told pollsters they voted for him. And after JFK’s death, 65 percent claimed to have done so (much like the huge numbers of French who remembered fighting for the resistance only years after the war ended…)”
This feeds into the myth that sympathy for the victim shows up in political surveys.
I looked at the cases since JFK was assassinated, both for candidates and presidents, to see if assassination attempts boost public opinion, and lead to electoral victories. Here are some results.
In the Cobb County Courier, I investigated the case of George Wallace, who won two primaries (Maryland and Michigan) the day after he was shot. That impressive showing, succeeding beyond The South, feeds into the myth of one’s success after surviving an assassination attempt.
But doing a little more digging showed that Wallace performed better before being shot. He won Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina by much wider margins than subsequent state victories. He won every delegate in Alabama, of course. But after taking Maryland and Michigan the day after being shot, he only managed to win Texas at their state convention, netting only 32 percent of the vote against the likes of George McGovern and Hubert H. Humphrey. In the end, Wallace finished third in the popular votes, never getting more than 30 percent in any subsequent primary (and only topping 20 percent twice after being shot). He didn’t fare any better in 1976.
I also looked at presidents who survived assassination attempts. There were six cases, three involving Republicans and three involving Democrats, in an article for Raw Story. I also looked at their Gallup polling numbers before the assassination attempt, and afterward. The average polling number for the president before the attempt was 46 percent. After the attempt, it was 48 percent.
Not only that, but the president’s party did not do so well in the subsequent election. Ford lost in 1976. Reagan’s party lost in 1982 (and Reagan’s approval rating dipped to the upper 30s by late 1982 and early 1983). Clinton and the Democrats were hammered in the 1994 election. We’ll see what happens to Biden in 2024 after an attempt by a neo-Nazi to crash through a White House barrier a block away in 2023.
You can see plenty of movies (Bob Roberts, Machete, Shooter, Most Wanted) where assassination attempts are faked by politicians to gain votes… but it only seems to work on the silver screen, as survey evidence and voting examples show.