Which Party Should Be Worried About the Politics of the LA Protests?

Politico

4 days ago

Two hotly competing narratives have emerged over the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles and President Donald Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard and Marines to California. On one side, the protests symbolize crucial resistance to abuse and overreach by the Trump administration. On the other, radicals are torching cars and the troops are needed to restore law and order.
The ultimate political fallout is still unknown. But one scholar who has drilled deep into the subject is Omar Wasow, a professor at UC Berkeley who published a paper in 2020 showing that non-violent protest — especially when met with violence from the state — shifted public opinion toward the Civil Rights Movement, while protester-initiated violence fueled a right-wing backlash.
The paper happened to come out less than a week before the murder of George Floyd and it caused a stir, with commentators across the political spectrum citing Wasow's work, and one pollster even losing his job over suggesting that violent protest could hurt Democrats' election chances.
So, will the LA protests harm Democrats' political prospects this time around?
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine, Wasow said it was too early to make predictions about the political consequences and noted that so far property damage had been relatively contained, with no loss of life. Trump, meanwhile, could face his own political risk if the state engages in 'some spectacle of excess violence,' he said.
Wasow also previewed some of his other work that has yet to be published, which includes some depressing, if not entirely surprising, conclusions about where things might go from here.
'Violence works a bit like a bat signal, both for Trump and for the anti-ICE movement,' he said. 'People who are pro-Trump get mobilized to be more pro-Trump. And people who are anti-Trump get mobilized on behalf of the anti-mass deportation movement.'
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me what you've found in your research about the political effects of when protests turn violent.
Looking at the Civil Rights Era from about 1960 to 1972, what I find is that in the earlier period of the Civil Rights Movement, most of the violence was state violence against protesters and the protest movements were overwhelmingly peaceful. Protesters were mostly using nonviolent tactics. That generates media coverage that emphasizes civil rights, and then ultimately voting behavior shifts in favor of the Democratic coalition, which is the pro-Civil Rights coalition in the '60s.
But in the later period of the 1960s, we see more protester-initiated violence. These are events that have historically been called urban riots. That generates media coverage that emphasizes crime, disorder, riots, and the public opinion in counties near those events shift toward more concern about crime, concern about law and order, and vote more conservatively and toward the Republican coalition, which is the law and order coalition at the time.
In contemporary rhetoric, there's one school of thought that says, 'Tactics don't matter. You're going to get painted as violent no matter what.' And I find that, at least in the 1960s, tactics really did matter, and nonviolent tactics, particularly nonviolent tactics met by state repression, moved public opinion in favor of civil rights.
Fast forwarding to the present, there's a variety of evidence from other countries that suggests it's not just violence, but more broadly what is perceived as extreme tactics that tend to cause people to disidentify with protesters and with their cause, and that leads to a lowering of support. So there's this process by which people are watching the story unfold, and they're writing themselves into or out of that story.
What do you make of the protests in Los Angeles, and the potential for public reaction?
One thing I'm still puzzling over a little is that in the 1960s, the violence was at a totally different scale. Watts in 1965 or [the Rodney King protests in] Los Angeles in 1992 even, there's thousands of recorded incidents of arson, and there were 37 people killed in Watts in 1965 — that's also often by groups like the National Guard coming in and firing lots of ammunition.
So, in some ways, five Waymos and some graffiti, it's very easy to imagine that we're just a couple of news cycles away from moving on to the next thing. That's one scenario. But I think a more likely scenario relates to some unpublished work that I've been working on.
This is about how violence works a bit like a bat signal, both for Trump and for the anti-ICE movement. People who are pro-Trump get mobilized to be more pro-Trump. And people who are anti-Trump get mobilized on behalf of the anti-mass deportation movement. One thing we're seeing is these parallel protests in San Francisco and other cities where people are now being called to action by what they're seeing in Los Angeles. And I would also expect that the counter mobilization, the pro-mass deportation movement, gets activated too. So what's happening in Los Angeles is polarizing and also mobilizing. I think we're going to see more of these anti-mass deportation protests around the country.
How does the continued backlash to the George Floyd protests and the 2020 moment in America impact this week? What historical analogues are you drawing on as you watch protests in Los Angeles?
Not to sound too technical, but what's going on in Los Angeles is what's called in social science a 'contentious event.' It's not just contentious in the sense the National Guard and LAPD are in conflict with local protesters. It's contentious in the sense that it gets read very differently by different constituencies. When I went to Fox News over the weekend, its language was, 'Riots are gripping Los Angeles.' Conversely, other headlines emphasize a military-style crackdown.
So there's evidence for either side to make a story that's consistent with their prior beliefs. And so if your frustration with the liberal media in the era of George Floyd was, 'They're telling me these events are peaceful, but I just watched the Minneapolis Police Station go up in flames,' this is more evidence of how the radical left is engaging in violence and is hypocritical when they say 'We are peaceful, but January 6 was violent.'
As people are pushed to their corners, the event can be read in a way that affirms a conservative story. And of course, from the liberal side, there's lots of evidence of excess force by the state like, 'Why are they shooting flash bangs and tear gas?' There's this clip of an officer shooting a reporter, which is one more step in any kind of authoritarian transition. In that sense, if you believe that, then militant resistance to this repressive set of policies is justified.
That's all to say, there was and still is a lot of contention in whether the Floyd protests were violent or nonviolent.
So, the way I think about this is it's not just tension on the ground, but there's narrative contention in how these different constituencies read these events and use them to affirm stories that go back to 2020, and even before.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s had real official leaders, who could make strategic choices. That doesn't exist in LA, or in many contemporary protests. Is that a fundamental hurdle facing protests today?
That's exactly right, and that's one of the core differences between the more traditional Civil Rights movement and a lot of the activism that we see today. A core challenge of any movement is how do you get a bunch of people to meet at a certain place and a certain time — that coordination problem is now vastly simplified because of the internet. The advantage of that is it radically lowers the cost of organizing. But the disadvantage is, it means you have no organizing body that can help to impose message discipline on a movement or to rein in somebody who might be behaving in a way that undermines the larger message.
We're in this transition where movements are really struggling to figure out how to adapt to that radical decentralization.
Democratic voters want politicians who will stand up to Trump. But swing voters or less engaged voters are generally put off by images like cars burning in the street. What's the tightrope walk that someone like Gov. Gavin Newsom is doing right now politically?
The classic pattern historically is that an elected official, Democrat or Republican, will condemn rioting, looting or violence, but will say 'We believe deeply in freedom of association and the First Amendment and the right to assemble.' That's such a standard refrain at this point.
But where I think there is a tightrope walk and where politicians often fail, is in their inability to articulate why it is people are so angry. And so whether it's around the Rodney King decision or to fast forward to the present, the sense that these mass deportations are harmful, if politicians can't give a pretty full-throated articulation of what's mobilizing people in the streets, then the sort of routine condemnation of violence will typically feel very hollow.
The tightrope walk for Newsom or Bass or national figures is that they're trying to hold this diverse coalition together, from an 'Abolish ICE' end of the continuum, to a more moderate, pro-law-and-order end of the continuum. And they need to speak to both of those sets of concerns in a way that feels credible and also doesn't alienate the other.
When I was walking in the neighborhood near where I work in Oakland, somebody had both a Black Lives Matter sign on their front lawn and a sign that said this house is patrolled by a private security company. That, to me, captures some of who these voters are. There's a non-trivial chunk of the Democratic base that is pro-Black equality — and wants order.
Should Democrats be worried they'll get hurt politically because of the LA protests and images of burning cars?
I think it's too early to expect there to be political consequences for this. That's not just because we're a year and a half from 2026, but also because so far, the amount of property damage is relatively contained. Nobody's been killed to my knowledge. And those are the sorts of things that tend to really raise the salience of an event like this. So while it certainly has become national news and is almost certainly polarizing the electorate, the only way this will matter in the election is if it keeps happening.
The other scenario is there's some risk for Trump. If there's an incident where the state is engaging in some spectacle of excess violence, that also could move the median voter into being more critical of Trump's policies.
Since the 1960s, it seems like liberals have believed mass mobilization leads naturally to political change, whereas conservatives have been less interested in developing mass movements — conservative protests, when they do occur, are usually smaller in scale. What do you make of that continued distinction?
Fundamentally, I agree with you. It is worth noting that the Tea Party is an important right-of- center mobilization. It's also probably worth thinking of Trumpism and Make America Great Again as not just conservative, but as reactionary. MAGA is a nostalgic motto, 'We have to return to some glorious past.' And much of what Trump has done in terms of policy is also about turning the clock back on various policies.
Usually, the right tends to be almost by definition for preserving the status quo. And so you do have movements like the pro-life movement that had both national protests and mobilizations against abortion facilities. But on the whole, if you're looking to preserve the status quo, then that doesn't lend itself to taking to the streets as much. But in some sense, Trumpism is actually not status quo preserving, and it's more about trying to return to policies of years or decades past. His rallies also serve a little bit as a place where that kind of mobilizing energy manifests.
In general, though, there's much more of that on the left than the right. Going back to the Civil Rights movement and then the long echo of feminist and disability rights and gay rights movements that follow, there's just a tradition on the left of these movements that seek change.
If you had advice for people on the left or right engaged in protest, what would it be?
What my and other research suggests is that a lot of how protests are effective is in terms of making an issue salient in the news. By making it salient in the news, they make it top of mind for the public. To give two examples, the Tea Party helped bring debt to the forefront of national debate. And then Occupy Wall Street helped bring inequality to the forefront of national conversation. By having message discipline and trying to focus the media on their concerns, a protest movement can influence what's top of mind for the public. The other dimension of that, though, is whether that coverage is positive or negative.
Part of where violence can potentially harm a movement is you make your issue salient, but the coverage is quite negative toward the movement. Mass deportations are more salient in the news right now, but if the coverage is quite negative toward a movement, that can make it salient and move people away from your side of the issue. So there's this balancing act of trying to draw media attention, which often requires drama and conflict — but to do it in a way that ideally produces sympathetic coverage so that you're growing your coalition.