The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally Saturday in western Pennsylvania threw an unpredictable wrench into the 2024 campaign cycle, just days before the start of the Republican National Convention.
With nearly four months still to go before Election Day, questions loom about how the shooting will affect not only the rest of the presidential campaign, but down-ballot races across the nation. President Joe Biden addressed the country Saturday night, calling for unity, while he and several other Democrats have temporarily paused campaign advertising.
Alex Keena, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, said that the shooting could calm the tenor of the race for a while.
“What you'd like to think is that this would cool down some of the rhetoric and the inflammatory language that has become kind of normal over the last eight years,” Keena told VPM News.
But even if rhetoric is toned down for the time being, he said that things would eventually return to “normal” — with Republicans taking cues from Trump after he accepts the nomination on Thursday at the convention.
“I think it will all depend on what former President Trump does and how he shapes the narrative surrounding the events of the weekend.”
Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, echoed that sentiment.
“I expect that the commitment to behave more responsibly won’t last all that long,” he said. “There are so many people who have had such progress in politics because of their aggressive, combative discourse that it's not something that will remain off the table.”
Keena said it was unlikely that major security increases would make their way down to state and local races. Instead, he said, the clearest sign that the shooting had impacted those campaigns would be a renewed debate on gun safety laws.
“I would expect Democrats running down-ballot who saw [gun safety] as a successful strategy for the past few election cycles … would resurrect that as a way to draw a distinction between themselves and Republican candidates,” he said.
No matter what happens in the short term, Farnsworth suggested that voters would refocus on issues that are important to them — including abortion and the economy — by Election Day. Keena agreed, saying that the shooting won’t “change the fundamentals of this election.”
“The public’s attention span is really short,” he said. “And who knows what the heck is going to happen between now and November?”
