Washington, DC – How does an assassination attempt transform a presidential race?
It's a question American voters have had to ask twice this election season, as Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump faced another incident Sunday that the FBI says it is investigating as an attempted assassination.
This comes just two months after Trump survived being shot by a gunman while on stage during a campaign rally.
A day after the latest attack, its implications are far from clear, but Trump’s response has been unequivocal. After a U.S. Secret Service agent shot the gunman at Trump’s golf course in Florida, the former president issued a defiant statement, vowing “I will never give up!” That echoed his earlier sentiment in the moments after the July attack in Pennsylvania, in which a bloodied Trump raised his fist in the air, chanting “fight, fight, fight.”
As he did in July, Trump again blamed U.S. Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Monday for the second attack, saying it was the result of Democrats' “rhetoric” and “lies” that bullets are flying.
It's a familiar response, according to James Davis, a Republican strategist, who said the Trump campaign likes to remind voters of the July attack, which Trump narrowly survived.
“It’s kind of a reminder of how difficult July really was and how important it was for so many people,” Davis told Al Jazeera.
That could draw out some key voters in battleground states, a potentially significant boost in an election expected to be decided by just a few thousand votes in key areas.
At the same time, Sunday's incident appears to have so far prompted a far more subdued response than the shock of the July attack, reflecting how normalized the threat of violence has become in a race where the vast majority of voters are deeply entrenched in their support for their party, Davis said.
“I have spoken to several people after the incident and it is almost as if people had expected it. And that is horrible,” he added. “The feeling in the air is not even one of shock. People are talking about it in a more thoughtful way.”
'There is no gap in sympathy'
Trump certainly experienced a huge political boost following the July attack. Just two days later, he triumphantly took the stage at the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin.
The attack transformed the event, with supporters in the crowd wearing bandages that mimicked the one Trump wore after a bullet grazed his right ear. His campaign promised that the brush with death would bring a less bellicose and more unifying candidate, though that promise was never fulfilled.
For some political analysts, the July effort all but assured Trump of victory in November, while his then-opponent, President Joe Biden, was lagging far behind in the polls after his disastrous performance in the late June debate.
But just a week after the rally shooting, before most of the high-quality polling on its effects could be conducted, Biden dropped out of the race. Democrats coalesced around Harris, who saw a surge in support that largely neutralized Trump’s momentum.
Despite the extraordinary disruptions to the campaign over the summer, polls have again shown the two candidates neck and neck. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed a gap of just 1 percent in support in the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.
Rina Shah, a political strategist, predicted that Trump would not feel a similar phenomenon this time.
“This time there is no surge of compassion,” he told Al Jazeera. “It is what it is. People have incorporated what they believe.”
Shah said there has been repeated evidence that unprecedented events do little to change electoral dynamics in a political landscape that regularly stretches into uncharted territory. He pointed to a series of dramatic political events, dating back to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 vote and his criminal conviction earlier this year, as well as Biden’s unusual exit from the race.
Add to that the fact that voters are disillusioned by a political system dominated by the ardent bases of both parties — and the outsized influence of special interest groups — and she expected little to change after Sunday.
“People who are paying attention are totally numb to what is happening,” Shah said. “There is also a lot of apathy, because American representative democracy is broken.”
Trends in political violence
Of course, Sunday's events are likely to continue to cast a long shadow, though it may be more serious outside the political race.
The July attack has already prompted a reckoning over how the Secret Service protects candidates and how they campaign safely. While the Secret Service has been praised for preventing what could have been a much worse situation in Florida, those questions are likely to linger.
On Monday, Biden said the Secret Service “needs more help,” in his first public comment calling for more resources for the agency.
“And I think Congress should respond to their need,” he said.
For his part, Trump continued to campaign after the July attack, albeit with bulletproof glass and barriers to block sight lines now a mainstay at his rallies. His campaign has not indicated it plans to cancel any future events, which include an in-person rally in Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday.
Michael Fauntroy, founding director of the Center on Race, Politics and Policy at George Mason University, said he expected little soul-searching among the political establishment after the latest incident.
Fauntroy described the event as the logical conclusion of political strategies to demonize opponents that Trump helped foster, creating a tinderbox in a country with such easy access to guns.
“It’s just a continuing turn that the United States has taken toward political violence,” he said. “No one should be surprised by that.”
Fauntroy mentioned former President Barack Obama, about whom Trump spread racist conspiracy theories during his early days in politics. A 2014 Washington Post report found that Obama received three times as many threats as previous presidents.
