Consultants Struggle With How to Ease Political Tensions

Political consultants are grappling with a difficult question in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination: How to defuse political tensions.

Kirk was cut down by an assassin’s bullet at a Utah college campus this week during a stop on his “American Comeback Tour.” The attack was mostly met with bipartisan condemnations of political violence and calls to dial back rhetoric demonizing political rivals.

But Kirk’s murder also prompted a wave of partisan fingerpointing. Republicans – including President Donald Trump – were quick to accuse the so-called “radical left” of inciting violence against conservatives, while Democrats were quick to argue that the political right bore responsibility for other recent attacks, like the assassination of a Minnesota Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in June.

When it comes to actually reducing political tensions, some consultants said that they’re stumped. 

“I think there’s a broad acknowledgement that there’s a problem. But political consultants themselves aren’t the ones that set the tone. The reality is, our electeds are mad, voters are mad and the bases of both parties want to see that their leaders can fight,” said one strategist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the situation. 

“If the goal is to rile up the base – to get people to keep giving money, keep paying attention – I think there’s this idea that this hyperbolic rhetoric kind of works,” the strategist added.

For all the talk of calming tensions, another consultant said, it can be difficult to abandon rhetoric that animates voters. 

“When you’re trying to convince people how important this moment is, using phrases like ‘existential threat’ is effective,” the consultant said. “And I think there’s this idea that the other side is going to use that kind of language no matter what, so we can’t let ourselves fall behind.”

But, the consultant added: “There’s a difference between trying to persuade people with words and physically attacking someone. That’s never acceptable.”

An Ongoing Challenge

It’s not the first time that the political world has faced calls to lower the emotional and rhetoric temperature. In an interview this week with CBS News Los Angeles, Matt Klink, a California-based public affairs consultant, recalled the pleas for civility after the unsuccessful attempt on Trump’s life at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa. last year. It wasn’t long after that that the political rhetoric ramped back up, he said.

“Sadly I look at the Butler assassination on July 13 of last year — it took about 48 hours for the rhetoric to go back to where it was,” Klink said. “I think that the desire of political candidates and political parties to galvanize the base overcomes the reality that they need to temper their remarks.”

Polling is clear that most Americans have little appetite for political violence. Still, the issue looms increasingly large for candidates and political professionals, some of whom have had to confront threats and harassment first hand. 

A poll of local Democratic candidates released earlier this year by the Pipeline Fund, a group that provides funding and support to progressive candidates, found that 60 percent had faced some sort of harassment on the campaign trail. Roughly one-third of them stopped campaigning alone as a result, while 20 percent said that they had either called law enforcement or installed home-security systems.

The Federal Election Commission also moved last year to expand the use of federal campaign funds to pay for security measures in an acknowledgement of the growing threats of violence against candidates.

“We are in a stage where the security of the people that serve us, the security of the people that run for office, is paramount right now,” FEC Chair Shana Broussard told Campaigns & Elections in an interview this summer. “That’s obvious by what recently happened in Minnesota. It’s obvious by what happened to the president during the campaign. These are just very sad events that are going along and coinciding with a time in this country where we’re trying to understand how democracy and transparency and free speech all work together.”