Political impacts of assassination attempts 

Whatever the motive — and GOP talking points notwithstanding, no one knows yet what the motive was — the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump was horrific.  

In addition to the threat to the former president’s life, a man died saving his family, while other attendees were seriously injured in a mass shooting, a phenomenon that has sadly become a near daily occurrence in our country. 

It seems callous, perhaps even morbidly inappropriate, to contemplate the political implications of an attack on a presidential candidate, but we’re in the midst of an intense political campaign that was already absorbing the nation’s attention. 

So, what effect will the attack have on the election outcome?  We simply cannot know with any certainty.  

History offers only the loosest of parallels, but the examples we do have from the U.S. and abroad suggest the impact may be murkier than some assume. 

Journalists reached first for a comparison to the attempt on President Reagan’s life in 1981. Reagan’s bravery and good humor buoyed the country and raised his approval rating by 13 points, literally overnight.  

Within a week, however, Reagan had given back half those popularity gains, and some two months later the president’s approval rating was lower than it had been before the assassination attempt.  

Other commentators drew a parallel to Theodore Roosevelt, who was shot while campaigning in Milwaukee but carried on with his speech for 90 minutes, telling the crowd “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot—but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” 

Despite the myriad accolades he received, Roosevelt went on to lose the presidential election to Woodrow Wilson less than a month later.  

A very different candidate, George Wallace, was shot while campaigning during Maryland’s Democratic primary in 1972. Wallace won the Michigan and Maryland primaries the next day (reports suggest he was already leading), but the assassination attempt did not seem to move the general election polling.   

While she never got the shot off, a member of the murderous “Manson Family,” Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, attempted to kill President Gerald Ford in 1975. In the immediate aftermath, the president’s approval rating declined, albeit by a single point. 

In the wake of a second attack on Ford, 17 days after the first, his approval rating appeared to increase by about 2 points but fell below its pre-assassination attempt level within a month.  

Polling was sparser in 1950 when assailants sought to murder President Harry Truman, but his approval rating seems to have sunk after the attack, which killed a soldier, but spared the president.  

In November 1995, Israelis were traumatized by the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Everyone assumed the murder would seal the next election for his sometime rival and sometime partner, Shimon Peres. But it was rookie prime ministerial candidate Benjamin Netanyahu who surprised the world by winning the office.

Immensely popular Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was shot to death at a rally by the Medellin drug cartel. Galan’s son anointed César Gaviria (for whom I consulted in 1990), to stand in his father’s stead in the election. Escobar’s cartel also attempted to kill Gaviria by blowing up a passenger airliner on which he was supposed to travel, killing more than 100 people. Gaviria led for the entire race and defeated his next closest foe by a two-to-one margin.  

Each case is unique and even where data exists it is impossible to disentangle the relative impact of so many factors and circumstances. 

Eight disparate cases don’t add up to a general rule. Indeed, the only general rule here is the absence of general rules.   

There is sometimes a rally-around-the victim response. But when that occurs, it’s often short lived.  

More broadly, though, there is no one single political trajectory from an assassination attempt.  

These eight stories don’t share a narrative arc and even lack a common ending. While I hate to say it this way, some politicians accrue political benefit for a time, others do not.  

In the present case, careful observers can only wait and see.  

Mellman is a pollster and president of The Mellman Group, a political consultancy. He is also president of Democratic Majority for Israel.