Yet the rhetoric has sometimes turned darker in recent weeks.
“The Democrats are willing to do anything, to hurt anyone, to get the power they so desperately crave,” Trump declared at a Minnesota rally this month. “They want to resist, they want to obstruct, they want to delay, demolish. They want to destroy.”
He warned this week, without proof, that terrorists had infiltrated a caravan of Central American immigrants headed toward the U.S. border. He also praised a Republican congressman from Montana for body slamming a reporter.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes, believes there is no “moral equivalence” between the violent rhetoric of the two parties, according to Heidi Beirich, the head of the organization’s Intelligence Project.
“The fact of the matter is that the people who have received these bombs — the Clintons, Obama and George Soros — have been horrifically demonized by the right. Not just in terms of neo-Nazis, but also from people like Donald Trump,” Beirich said. “There tends to be a relationship between demonizing rhetoric and violence.”
Yet Republican voters across the country are equally convinced that Democrats pose the real threat. And Republican candidates are going out of their way to reinforce that message.
At a weekend campaign appearance at a Florida retirement community, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis attacked Waters and Holder by name for calling on Democrats to harass Republicans. He also recalled the 2017 Capitol Hill shooting that left several wounded, including Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana.
“We don’t want the state of Florida to be the petri dish of George Soros and the radical left,” DeSantis charged. “You look at the stuff that’s going on with these mobs and the violence that they’re doing.”
Clinton, speaking at a Florida fundraiser for congressional candidate Donna Shalala, thanked the U.S. Secret Service for intercepting the package before it reached her suburban New York City home. But she called it a “troubling time” and a “time of deep divisions, and we have to do everything we can to bring our country together.”
Voters in key midterm battlegrounds are fed up and frightened.
Ariana Hendricks, a 40-year-old massage therapist in Denver, said violence in politics has always been something people thought about.
But because of Trump, she said, “now they think it’s OK.”
Article Appeared @https://www.radio.com/articles/ap-news/bomb-threats-highlight-risk-violent-political-rhetoric