What Is the State of Political Violence in PA?
It’s not your imagination: American politics, including in Pennsylvania, has become more aggressive and, sadly, violent. From 2024 to 2025, the number of violent threats against members of Congress jumped by over one-third, 9,474 to 14,938. Since 2022, harassment against state and local officials have leapt by 74%. “The United States,” Ryan Greer tells me, “Is in a heighted period of political violence.” Greer, former White House National Security Council Staffer and current chief strategy officer for the Polarization & Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL), added, “We have seen more violence year-to-year at other times in American history” but the “normalization of violence has many Americans feeling fearful.”
Brian Shank knows the feeling. The 62-year-old Erie County Republican is recognizable for his colorful campaign trailers. In June, he put his Donald Trump mannequin in storage for a “Back the Blue Flag.” While distributing pamphlets, the burly security professional told me, “A gentleman pulled up and screamed at me about being a threat to democracy and coldcocked me.” Days later, an area businessman took to social media to celebrate Shank’s failed state representative campaign, declaring, “I sure hope his cancer comes back and he dies.” This hit home. “My mother just had her last round of chemo,” Shank shared, “and I literally just had some skin cancer removed.”
Lindsey Scott knows this invective too well. In 2025, the Crawford County Democratic Chair endured a bout of politically-inspired social media mobbing followed by having her Meadville home and car vandalized. This was punctuated by an online threat: “I hope that you have a child and they’re a girl and people that are illegal in your town find out.” That melee reached a crescendo when Scott appeared in a photo with a musician who had inscribed “86, 47” on their guitar. This is restaurant slang for eliminating a menu item, and the maxim is used by those who want to eject President Donald Trump from office. Many deem the maxim violent, an understandable conclusion in the aftermath of the multiple assassination attempts against Trump.
“I wasn’t deliberately posing with somebody. It’s not my guitar. I didn’t engrave it,” Scott told me. In a rush of handshakes and selfies after a speech, in which she had, ironically, denounced political violence, Scott glanced at the “eight and a four on [the guitar]’” and assumed it referenced northwest Pennsylvania’s 814 area code; she barely gave it any thought. But once the photo made its way to Libs of TikTok and its 10 million followers, a tsunami of invective followed. The native of Meadville, population 13,000, knows most everyone in her community. The reverse is also true, which meant that when she left the Democratic Party headquarters with a young son in tow, cars would sometimes slow so a driver could scream extreme obscenities.
Shank and Scott are no outliers. Political violence has certainly increased across the nation. Trump has endured multiple assassination attempts, and “targeted [political] violence,” meanwhile, has jumped by 30% from 2024 to 2025. But political violence is not always what it seems, nor is it evenly distributed across the nation. Most political violence is committed by someone without a coherent political ideology. Greer told me, “People perpetrating political violence don’t fit any particular [ideological] bucket.”
Emblematic of “salad bar extremists” is Thomas Crooks. In July 2024, the 20-year-old nearly murdered Trump in Butler. The registered Republican, with no discernible political ideology, targeted Trump, who was speaking a short drive from his suburban Pittsburgh home. “That fact has become the norm,” Greer explained, “Most organic political violence does not fit into a clean [political] bucket.”
Our violent era first formed in the 1990s when a 24/7 news cycle, divided government, and presidential impeachment sparked partisan rancor. This hyper-partisanship has since been layered onto a fractured media environment where supporters self-select their personal understandings of facts and a populist era in which anti-elitism is weaponized into what Greer calls “a vast mosaic of hate.” The final ingredient of “nihilistic violent extremism” is social media, which has, in Greer’s words, resulted in “the normalization of otherization.”
This normalization of otherization was seen in the Commonwealth’s horrific 2018 mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue and the 2025 arson of the Governor’s Residence, where Gov. Josh Shapiro lives with his family. Last year, Charlie Kirk’s assassination brought the issue to the national fore. But the normalization of political violence is anything but geographically uniform. U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, who represents northwest Pennsylvania’s 16th district in Washington, D.C., sees less of this sturm-und-drang in his district. “We’re blessed to be in an area that we don’t see much of this,” Kelly told me, “We’re from an area that people are pretty calm. They’re very data based.” Kelly, whose district office in Mercer County was vandalized in 2025, explained, “We’ve had several occasions where things have happened. But a lot of this is a case where people are disturbed. But I have not had some of the same experiences as some of my colleagues.”
Seth Trott, who chairs the Erie County Democratic Party, agrees with Kelly. “Part of me thinks that it is because we are a purple district,” he told me, “We’re used to seeing different opinions. Here [in Erie County] the guy next door to you is a very MAGA supporter and the person on the other side is a [Bernie] Sanders’s supporter. You get these mixed bags of people.” He added: “I don’t think you run into the violence issue as much.” The Tree of Life murders and Trump’s near assassination aside, day-to-day politics in western Pennsylvania is relatively calm.
Kat Divittorio seconds this. The small-town Democrat is running for state representative in a rural Republican Erie County district. She told me, “It’s all about learning how to talk to people … I’m really used to working in Republican areas with Republicans, and a lot of our issues, are the same.” She added: “Everybody wants to afford the groceries.” Her sole example of political aggression was the exception that proved the rule. At one event, a man on a motorcycle gave the candidate an obscene gesture and yelled, “You’re a freaking idiot.” When Divittorio smiled and waved back, she told me, “He literally came back and said, ‘I'm sorry.’”
In DiVittorio, Greer sees the classic formula of deescalation. In this, a sincere candidate listens to voters or as Greer explained, “Instead of saying, ‘I hate Donald Trump,’ you say, ‘we need to patch the potholes.’” Divittorio puts it more succinctly. “Democrats,” she told me, “Are always explaining their problems to them [rural voters]. It’s not mansplaining, it's Dems-splaining.”
Listening to voters and avoiding “Dems-splaining” will only go so far. Divittorio admits that her campaign’s social media is a magnet for invective. Brian Shank experiences this, too. As if getting punched in the face were not enough, a political opponent warned, “we’re going to Shank’s house and we’re going to tear that [Back the Blue] sign down.” Shank told me “[social media] creates its own energy and aura, and whirlpool of hate and people get kind of sucked into this vortex of hate.”
Rep. Kelly has been on the receiving end of this discord. He noted, “We’ve had capital police involved in several situations where there was a threat. But we don't go public with it. I don't think that helps anything.” Sadly, some officials think publicizing threats can play to their short-term political advantage. Kelly told me, “I'll be very honest about this, some of my colleagues have made a big deal out of something that isn't a big deal. But some of the people I serve with think that's kind of their red badge of courage, so to speak.”
Greer is not surprised. “By and large, Pennsylvania state policymakers tend to be pretty strong on these [political violence] issues. I’m not surprised that there’s some resilience built into Pennsylvania. [But], I don’t want to overlook that there’s still challenges.” One such challenge was demonstrated in June by a group of Pennsylvania state employees who flashed an “86, 47” while sailing on the Brig Niagara.
In 2026, the normalization of otherization is just a fact of American political life. For now, Pennsylvania is not Greer’s locus of concern. Equipped with good leadership as it pertains to political civility, the Commonwealth lacks a divisive “flashpoint” driving otherization. “I don’t want to overlook that there’s still challenges and still going to be problems there,” Greer shared, “But, you know, there, there's more of a, let’s say a flashpoint in Minneapolis right now … I’m more worried about Minnesota right now than Pennsylvania.”
