Land of the Free, Home of the Afraid

A new global survey finds a record share of U.S. adults naming politics – not crime or illness – as the single largest threat to their personal safety.

The finding comes from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk poll released this week, conducted by Gallup throughout 2025 across 140 countries and territories. When asked an open-ended question, 10% of U.S. adults cite politics as their top personal safety risk, up from 6% in both 2021 and 2023 and 10 times the global average. Other countries with high percentages of personal safety concern include Slovakia, Russia, Myanmar, and Israel – all at 5%.

According to the poll, there is no statistically significant difference in concern over politically-motivated safety threats by gender, age, or education level in the U.S. Democrats and Republicans point fingers at each other for the heightened sense of safety risk.

A January 2026 study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 73% of Democrats attribute the cause of political violence to right-wing groups, while 72% of Republicans attribute responsibility to left-wing groups.

Others describe the polarization itself as the danger. “I would say political extremism,” one independent respondent told Gallup pollsters about the cause of rising concerns about personal safety in politics, describing people who are “fanatical about their position” and could be violent.

Average Americans are not alone in their concerns about increasing political violence. Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett testified before Congress on July 14, largely to discuss rising politically-motivated security threats. Barrett described bringing home a bulletproof vest after the 2022 leak of the Dobbs opinion and being the target of a swatting incident this spring. “The threat level is really high,” she told lawmakers.

“It is increasingly dangerous to be a Supreme Court justice these days, and it’s appalling to me that some of the rhetoric is coming from public officials on both sides of the aisle who should know better than to levy personal and political attacks against the judiciary and the court specifically,” lamented Sen. Susan Collins during the hearing. The court’s security budget is burgeoning, set to exceed $220 million in fiscal year 2027.

Americans are more likely than any other nationality surveyed to rank politics above their own health as a daily risk – a distinction that comes to light after a string of incidents that have made political violence less abstract. Controversial conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed at a Utah Valley University event last September, an assassination that rocked the political world.

“It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year in the most hateful and despicable way possible,” President Trump said during remarks delivered from the White House in response to the assassination.

“From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

Perceived threat may outpace reality. Democrats estimate that nearly half of Republicans, 47%, believe violence against Democrats is justified. The actual figure, according to PRRI’s January polling, is a fraction of that: just 5% of Americans would justify killing a political opponent, and only 6% would justify pushing, shoving, or punching one. An overwhelming majority, 77%, reject the idea that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence” to save the country.