Every time a rioter smashes another Starbucks’ window, a conservative voter is born. This has been America’s general reaction to the violent protests by the left over the last half century, according to a new study by Princeton University.
Omar Wasow, an assistant professor at the Department of Politics at Princeton, found that hostile protests result in a far-right swing in the nation’s politics. This dates back to the Nixon administration and the Weather Underground domestic terrorist attacks.
The coalition of “New Deal” voters that won the Democrats the White House in seven out of nine elections fell apart when Richard Nixon came onto the scene. He was able to campaign on law and order after violent protests erupted during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
This was also true of the violent radical Black Panther attacks during the late 1960s. The Black Panthers had a counter effect on the Civil Riots movement, which was largely non-violent.
“I find that black-led protests in which some violence occurs are associated with a statistically significant decline in Democratic vote-share in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections,” Wasow wrote. “Black-led nonviolent protests, by contrast, exhibit a statistically significant positive relationship with county-level Democratic vote-share in the same period. Further, I find that in the 1968 presidential election exposure to violent protests caused a decline in Democratic vote-share.”
So the effects of Black Lives Matter and the violent protests after Trump’s inauguration may upend all the efforts of the non-violent protests against the new administration.
