Inhabiting Different Worlds: How Partisan Attitudes Shape Americans’ Evaluation of the Black Lives Matter Protests and the January 6 th Insurrection

Introduction

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. The next day, nationwide protests began, some of which turned violent. On May 28, Minneapolis protestors burned down a police station. Early in the next morning, President Donald Trump tweeted “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” In that November’s election, Trump won nearly 90% of the vote of those who had an unfavorable view of the Black Lives Matter Protests (CNN 2020).

On January 6, 2021, following months of false claims by Trump that the 2020 election had been stolen, Trump held a rally in which he stated to a crowd of supporters “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Shortly thereafter, his supporters marched on the Capitol, violently breaching the perimeter, erecting gallows, and temporarily halting the certification of the 2020 election. In the coming weeks, every Democratic member of Congress would vote to either impeach or remove Trump from office.

It is well understood that responses to these two events differed significantly by partisanship (Drakulich and Denver 2022). In this paper, we seek to understand why. How and why did individuals process Black Lives Matter Protests and January 6 differently across the partisan spectrum? Partisanship (Drakulich and Denver 2022), ideology and racial attitudes (Reny and Newman, 2021) are associated with individuals’ responses to the 2020 BLM protests. Racial attitudes and feelings toward Black Lives Matter Protests appear to have been instrumental in shaping attitudes toward January 6 (Barreto et al. 2024). In this paper, we examine the factors that condition how partisans evaluate these key events, including attachment to partisan factions (namely, MAGA Republicans and Progressive Democrats), perceptions of democracy as threatened and affective polarization—the increasing dislikes and animosity between Democrats and Republicans (Iyengar et al. 2019; Iyengar et al. 2012).

It is worth noting that we are not suggesting that these events were qualitatively similar. Where the January 6^th insurrection represents a legitimate threat to democracy as a violent attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, the BLM protests, though violent at times, were an attempt to gain rights and recognition for a long-marginalized group. However, we argue that to different partisans across the spectrum, both events are seen as threatening. To be clear, we are comparing responses to these events rather than the events themselves.

Through understanding how and why partisans differed so starkly in the way in which they processed these two major events, we hope to better understand how partisanship may shape the way in which we experience the political world. Since The American Voter (Campbell et al. 1960), partisanship has been understood as the key driver of American political behavior, but in the current era of polarization, partisanship seems to have taken on an even larger role. Are Democrats and Republicans, particularly those in the more extreme camps of their party, inhabiting different worlds? Our findings suggest that they are. They suggest that the partisan public views the legitimacy, legality, impact, and threat posed by these key events very differently depending on their partisanship, as well as their positioning within their own party (i.e., MAGA vs. non-MAGA, Progressive vs. non-Progressive), their perceptions of whether democracy is under threat (presumably from the other party), and their disaffection for the other party. This indicates that partisanship, and with it affective polarization, party factionalism, and polarized perceptions of democracy, are extremely powerful lenses that may alter our fundamental understandings of the political world around us.

In this paper, we examine several ways in which partisan attitudes are linked to the ways Americans interpret two defining political events: the Black Lives Matter protests and the January 6th insurrection. Relying on an original 2023 YouGov survey as well as cross-sectional and panel data from the 2016–2024 ANES, we provide a comprehensive portrait of how partisan identities and affective attachments shape citizens’ judgments about the legitimacy, consequences, and democratic implications of these events. While our analyses are observational, they reveal three consistent patterns. First, out-party affect is strongly associated with evaluations of both events beyond partisan identification and racial resentment alone, and additionally changes in out-party affect over time track corresponding changes in views of Black Lives Matter. Second, substantial heterogeneity exists within parties: MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats diverge markedly from their co-partisans. Third, evaluations of BLM and January 6 are associated with perceptions that American democracy is under threat. Both Democrats and Republicans who perceive democracy as under greater levels of threat have more polarized views of these events compared to co-partisans. Together, these findings demonstrate that while partisanship strongly structures evaluations of major political events, its effects vary systematically by affective attachments, perceptions of democratic threat, and intra-party factional identities.

Partisanship, Affective Polarization, and Processing Political Information

Partisanship has long been understood to be an identity that one develops during political socialization (Campbell et al. 1960). Significant literature has established that partisanship is a deeply held social identity (Achen and Bartels 2016; Campbell et al. 1960; Carsey and Layman 2006; Green et al. 2002; Mason 2015). Tajfel and Turner (1979) argue that social identities stem from a process in which individuals first distinguish between groups, then self-categorize into a group and lastly make comparisons between groups. This process may lead to stereotyping as group membership may be a source of psychological esteem and individuals feel a need to view their group as superior to others. It may also lead to a process of otherization in which those adhering to one social identity ostracize, criticize, and even dehumanize members of other groups (Finkel et al. 2020).

Though partisan politics are often framed in ideological terms, the general public largely does not hold ideological belief systems (Converse 1964; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017). Rather, they conceive of politics in terms of group membership and group benefits (Achen and Bartels 2016; Berelson et al. 1954; Converse 1964; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017). This identity-driven polarization is known as affective polarization which describes the phenomenon that Democrats and Republicans increasingly dislike and distrust each other (Iyengar et al. 2019; Iyengar et al. 2012). Affective polarization has deleterious consequences in both social and political settings. In social settings, for example, affective polarization has impacts on whom individuals decide to make friends with or date (Huber and Malhotra 2017; Nicholson et al. 2016), whom the employers decide to hire (Gift and Gift 2015) and whether people offer help and connect with each other (Webster et al. 2021). In political settings, affective polarization may determine whether individuals place trust in the government (Hetherington and Rudolph 2015) and whether they support political violence (Kalmoe and Mason 2022) and democratic norms (Graham and Svolik 2020; Kingzette et al. 2021).

The association between affective polarization and issue positions are closely associated. Although some works suggest that affective polarization has an ideological foundation (Orr and Huber 2020; Orr et al. 2023; Rogowski and Sutherland 2016), others argue that affective polarization may also shape political belief and attitude formation. For example, Druckman et al. (2021a, 2021b) reported a strong association between partisan animosity and subsequent attitudes towards the COVID-19 (also see Druckman et al. 2024). Relatedly, affective polarization is also strongly associated with selective attribution of blame on specific policies (Jin et al. 2023).

Social identity appears to be instrumental in shaping out-party affect. The decline of cross-cutting cleavages (Jin et al. 2025; Jin and Jones 2026), combined with greater emotional investment in partisanship as a social identity (Mason 2016) and increasingly bitter rhetoric from political and media elites (Lelkes 2018; Mason 2018) are primary drivers of affective polarization. Similarly, Westwood and Peterson (2022) find linkages between partisan and racial attitudes. They find that parallel updating occurs in experimental settings, meaning that racial primes move attitudes towards the out-party in addition to those towards the racial outgroup and vice-versa.

Individuals most often process political information not through a detailed study of policy or news events, but rather through the use of heuristics (Lupia 1994; Petty and Cacioppo 1986; Petty et al. 1981; Zaller 1992). Additionally, we know that feelings towards outgroups commonly shape political attitudes. Racial attitudes, for instance, have regularly been found to have a significant role in shaping attitudes towards various policy domains not directly related to race, such as welfare (Gilens 2009), healthcare policy (Tesler 2012), disaster relief (Gilens et al. 2024), the death penalty (Peffley and Hurwitz 2007), and tax policy (Holbrook and Heideman 2022). We argue that the preexisting affective dispositions associated with affective polarization may shape what heuristics those who are more affectively polarized are susceptible to. In other words, affective polarization may condition the informational shortcuts one uses to form political opinions. For instance, those with greater out-party disaffection may hold more extreme elites as opinion leaders, or may be more likely to see out-party members as a threat leading them to take more adversarial positions on partisan issues. In this way, affective polarization shapes not only the direction of political attitudes, but the informational pathways through which those attitudes are formed. These informational pathways, in turn, structure how individuals interpret political events, shaping judgments about blame, threat, legitimacy, and deservingness in ways that align with their partisan attachments.

Affective polarization may also, similarly, drive certain voters to engage in motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning refers to the tendency for individuals to process information in ways that align with their prior beliefs and desired conclusions rather than objective accuracy (Kunda 1990; Lodge and Taber 2013; Taber and Lodge 2006). In political contexts, these prior beliefs are often rooted in partisan identity and reinforced by affective attachments to political groups (Green et al. 2002; Mason 2018). A large body of research demonstrates that individuals engage in directional motivated reasoning, selectively crediting information that is congruent with their prior attitudes while dismissing or counterarguing incongruent information (Bolsen et al. 2014; Taber and Lodge 2006).

We argue that affective polarization functions as a key prior that conditions how individuals engage in this process. Rather than serving as a heuristic itself, affective polarization shapes how individuals respond to political cues, including partisan labels, elite messaging, and the framing of political events (Druckman et al. 2021a, 2021b; Zaller 1992). In The American Voter, Campbell et al. (1960) describe partisanship as an “unmoved mover” that structures how individuals understand the political world. We build on this insight by arguing that affective polarization operates as a central mechanism through which this structuring occurs. Specifically, hostility toward the out-party functions as a predisposition that conditions both the types of political cues individuals are receptive to and the elites they recognize as credible opinion leaders. This perspective aligns with the Receive-Accept-Sample model (Kuklinski and Hurley 1994; Zaller 1992), in which prior dispositions shape the acceptance of elite messages. In highly polarized environments, elite communications are rarely neutral; instead, they provide partisan frames that signal how events should be interpreted. Affective polarization intensifies these dynamics: individuals with stronger negative affect toward the out-party are more likely to accept congenial elite messages and dismiss or counter-argue opposing frames, amplifying both confirmation and disconfirmation biases in political information processing and leading them to interpret political events in ways that are consistent with their underlying group attachments (Strickland et al. 2011; Taber and Lodge 2006). In this way, affective polarization intensifies directional motivated reasoning, leading individuals to evaluate the same political events, such as Black Lives Matter protests or the events of January 6th, in sharply divergent ways and in accordance with various heuristics that may themselves be shaped by motivated reasoning. Thus, we present the following hypotheses:

H1

Partisan Differences Hypothesis—Democrats have more positive evaluation on BLM than Republicans; Republicans have more positive evaluation on January 6 ^th than Democrats.

H2

Affective Polarization Hypothesis—As affective polarization increases, individuals are more likely to evaluate political events in ways that are consistent with their partisan identities. Accordingly, Democrats are expected to evaluate BLM more positively and January 6 more negatively, whereas Republicans are expected to show the opposite pattern.

It is notable that we do not anticipate that lower levels of affective polarization will necessarily lead to generalized tolerance toward outgroups or more accepting attitudes more broadly. Rather, we recognize that lower levels of affective polarization likely signal the occupation of a differing space on the partisan spectrum in terms of identity, ideology and affective attachments, including potential shifts toward more moderate or cross-pressured positions. This may function not to foster generalized tolerance towards outgroups, but rather to shape susceptibility to out-party elite messaging, to incentivize directional motivated reasoning toward more moderate or bipartisan positions and to act as a cross pressure generally pulling people towards the out-party’s positions. This dynamic is especially relevant for highly polarized issues that are strongly associated with one party’s coalition, where increased openness to cross-cutting cues may lead co-partisans to adopt less favorable evaluations.

Notable cleavages have emerged in recent years within the two parties. Parker and Barreto (2015), for instance, found significant differences in the racial attitudes of tea-party and non-tea-party identifying Republicans. Similarly, Melcher and Lindsay (2024) find differences in the attitudes of self-identified socialists and non-socialist-identifying liberals that extend beyond redistributive attitudes. We argue that each party effectively has two sub-brands—MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans and Progressive and non-Progressive Democrats. We conceive of each of these groups as, at least in ways relevant to the present study, to be separate, albeit sometimes overlapping, identities. We expect that these wings of each party will process politics and political events in heterogeneous patterns reflecting their ideological positioning. Because these factions differ in their affective attachments to political groups, as well as in their ideological orientations and exposure to elite cues, we expect them to process political events in systematically different ways.

H3

Party Faction Hypothesis—Democrats who identify more strongly as progressive are expected to evaluate BLM more positively and January 6 more negatively relative to other Democrats, whereas Republicans who identify more strongly with MAGA are expected to evaluate BLM more negatively and January 6 more positively compared to other Republicans.

We acknowledge that partisan sub-brands are not perfectly symmetrical across the two parties. On the Republican side, distinctions such as “MAGA” versus “establishment” Republican are relatively well established in elite discourse, media coverage, and public understanding, and the MAGA brand has been closely associated with a successful presidential candidate. By contrast, the boundaries of Democratic sub-brands are more contested: labels such as “progressive,” “liberal,” “moderate,” “establishment,” and “mainstream” are used inconsistently across scholarly work, political commentary, and voter perceptions. Moreover, unlike the Republican case, no clearly identifiable progressive Democratic elite has been elected president, which limits the extent to which a “progressive Democrat” sub-brand has been nationally institutionalized around presidential leadership. Thus, our distinction between “progressive” and “establishment” Democrats should be understood as a heuristic for capturing meaningful intra-party variation, not as a definitive or universally accepted typology. This asymmetry is substantively important and should inform the interpretation of cross-party comparisons: Republican sub-brands may map onto clearer and more widely recognized factional identities, whereas Democratic sub-brands are more fluid, overlapping, and debated.

Partisanship and Perceptions of American Democracy Under Threat

Perceptions of threat to American democracy are widespread in American politics. Many scholars of politics have argued that American Democracy is vulnerable in the current era (Carey et al. 2019; Graham and Svolik 2020; Kingzette et al. 2021; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). The mass public also largely sees American democracy as threatened. In the 2024 Presidential election, democracy was the most important issue to voters, and Harris won the voters who named democracy as the top issue by 62 points (National Exit Poll 2024). This may lead some to believe that the perception of democratic threat is primarily a phenomenon concentrated among Democrats. However, this is not the case. According to those same exit polls, 73% of voters said that democracy was threatened and Trump actually won voters who said Democracy was under threat by a slim, two-point, margin. This indicates that both Democrats and Republicans widely believe democracy is under threat. We contend, however, that the nature of the perceived threat to democracy likely varies significantly by party. Where Democrats are likely to believe that democracy is threatened by Trump and Trumpism, Republicans almost certainly believe the source of the threat is different. Perhaps they believe that marginalized groups’ push for rights threatens the social order and therefore poses a threat to democracy. This would be consistent with theory regarding the authoritarian personality and its nature as a polarizing force in American politics (Hetherington and Weiler 2009). Perceptions of status threat may lead some Republicans in dominant groups to perceive that “their” country is being taken away from them (see Parker and Barreto 2015). In the European context, belief in the Great Replacement Theory is associated with decreased democratic satisfaction and political trust (Herold 2025). Additionally, conservatives may view the progressive agenda as a threat to traditional American values. Each of these theoretical orientations suggests that segments of the political right may be more likely to interpret shifts in the distribution of political and social power as a threat to the existing political order. As demographic change and evolving social norms alter patterns of representation and influence, some individuals may perceive these developments as a departure from established understandings of how the political system functions. From this perspective, changes that expand political voice and inclusion for historically marginalized groups may be experienced not simply as policy disagreement, but as a transformation of the underlying rules and balance of the system itself. As a result, what is often understood as democratizing may be understood by some on the political right as a weakening of the political order they associate with democracy. In short, each party may see some members of the other party as a threat to democracy.

We conceptualize “saving democracy” as a justificatory frame through which individuals evaluate political actions in terms of their perceived consequences for democratic institutions and norms. Prior research suggests that citizens are willing to tolerate or even support violations of democratic norms when such actions are perceived as necessary to protect their preferred political group or the democratic system more broadly (e.g., Graham and Svolik 2020; Svolik 2019). Importantly, these perceptions of threat are not likely neutral but, rather, often filtered through partisan and affective lenses. Recent work shows that in highly polarized political environments, partisans frequently perceive the out-party as a threat, which can erode support for democratic norms (Mason 2018; McCoy et al. 2018). In this sense, appeals to “saving democracy” can operate as a form of motivated reasoning, allowing individuals to align their evaluations of political events with their underlying affective attachments to political groups. As a result, the same event may be interpreted as either a defense of democracy or a threat to it, depending on the observer’s partisan and affective predispositions. Accordingly, we present the following hypothesis:

H4

Saving American Democracy Hypothesis—Among Democrats, perceiving American democracy as under threat is associated with more positive evaluations of BLM and more negative evaluations of January 6, whereas among Republicans the opposite pattern is expected.

It is worth discussing why partisans would perceive the BLM Protests and the January 6^th insurrection as either supporting or threatening democracy. Democrats are likely to perceive the January 6^th insurrection as an attempt to overturn the results a democratic election, thereby being inherently undemocratic. However, Republicans, particularly MAGA Republicans, are more likely to see the results of the 2020 election as illegitimate and thereby to believe that the January 6^th insurrection aimed not to overturn a legitimate election, but rather to instate that election’s rightful winner.

Why attitudes toward the BLM protests may implicate perceptions of democracy is less straightforward, but nonetheless clear. Republicans may be likely to view BLM protests as undemocratic because rather than using the traditional, “normal” democratic channels to implement social change, such as elections and legislation, protests are taking to the streets and, in some cases, using violence. Therefore, a group they may already see as more threatening are seen as circumventing the democratic process through means of intimidation. For Democrats, on the other hand, the BLM protesters are advocating for democracy as a long-marginalized group demands proper rights and recognition. Rather than circumventing the democratic process, protesters are advocating for greater inclusion in the rights and privileges of citizenship. While Republicans, who tend to be higher in the authoritarian personality, value conformity and order and see threats to that order when social dissidents challenge it, Democrats, who tend to be lower in the authoritarian personality, place greater emphasis on individual rights and inclusion (see Hetherington and Weiler 2009). This likely leads partisans to place different values on their conception of democracy. Republicans tend to value order and conformity; thus, they may see the primary function of democracy as to provide order and calibrate social values. Where Democrats, on the other hand, tend to value rights and inclusion; thus they see democracy’s primary function as to protect individual rights and grant inclusion to long-marginalized groups.

BLM and January 6th

We are not the first to research public opinion on the 2020 BLM Protests, nor January 6. Many have found that racial attitudes impact support for the January 6^th insurrection. White racial antipathy (Rush et al. 2025), status threat among white republicans (Hernandez et al. 2025), aspirational status among Latinos (Ocampo et al. 2025), and changes in local racial demographics (Sanchez et al. 2025) are all linked to attitudes towards January 6^th. Barreto et al. (2024) find that immigration attitudes, belief in the great replacement theory, and support for the BLM protests are predictive of attitudes towards the January 6^th insurrection. Those with more negative racial attitudes are more likely to support January 6^th.

Others have found partisan and ideological influences in perceptions of January 6^th. Silver and Shi (2023) found that partisan bias shapes support for repressive and punitive action in response to protests; those who were more ideologically conservative were more supportive of repressive and punitive responses towards BLM protests than MAGA protests relative to their liberal counterparts. Drakulich and Denver (2022) find that “Although those who identify as Democrat or Republican have starkly different views of the movement, what they share is that these views appear relatively fixed: partisan respondents did not meaningfully change their views when we explained the broader goals of the movement, highlighted police violence toward the protestors, or described the protests negatively as violent riots.” However, they also find that framing effects have a significant impact on independents’ views of the protests. Reny and Newman (2021) find that the BLM protest negatively impacted attitudes towards police and positively impacted perceptions of discrimination among liberals, but that these effects were smaller and less durable among conservatives. Notably, Kalmoe and Mason (2022) find that support for political violence is driven by partisan identity and extremity. Barreto et al. (2024) find that favorability toward Trump is associated with support for January 6^th. For reasons discussed above, we also believe that affective polarization, partisan subgroupings and perceptions of democratic threat are associated with perceptions of both the BLM protests and January 6.

The Black Lives Matter Protests and January 6 are not equivalent by any means. We are not the first political scientists to point this out (Barreto et al. 2024), but in many ways, this point should be obvious. One was a violent attempt to overthrow the government by a faction supporting a candidate who had recently lost their reelection bid, the other was a decentralized series of protests intended to bring recognition and equality to a long-marginalized group. On this level of analysis, these events are not equivalent and cannot be made equivalent. However, both likely presented a threat to those who were not sympathetic to their cause and challenged the worldview of those who opposed them. We compare these events not based on their qualitative merits, but rather based on the mechanism through which the American public cognitively processed them.

It is also important to note that both of these events occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic and therefore may be impacted by the unique social undercurrents of that time. While this is certainly a possibility we see it as unlikely that the pandemic impacted the mechanism through which these events were processed, even if it may have made these issues or partisan differences more salient. Nonetheless, we cannot entirely rule out Covid having a unique impact on the way individuals processed political information in that time, and this may be a “best case” test of our theory due to the plausibly increased salience of partisanship and political events broadly.

We distinguish our work from extant research on attitudes of BLM and January 6^th (particularly Barreto et al. 2024) in several important ways. First, we contend that partisan affective attachments structure public opinion on key political events, so we argue that focusing on the role of affective polarization, party factionalism, and perceptions of democratic threat adds additional explanatory leverage beyond standard measures of partisanship and ideology. Second, we agree that views on these two key events reflect more generic racial attitudes, but racial attitudes alone cannot explain divergent views on these two events. As our later analysis shows, even when controlling for racial resentment, affective polarization is significantly associated with evaluations of BLM and January 6^th. More importantly, we believe that opinions on contentious issues derive from entrenched partisan divides. Third, as partisan politics increasingly erodes democratic norms (Graham and Svolik 2020; Kingzette et al. 2021), we theorize that perceptions of threats to American democracy function as a key motivator in shaping support for both BLM protests and the January 6^th insurrection. Individuals’ stance on these two events may hint at underlying beliefs about democratic politics.

We also believe that this research has implications beyond these two events by identifying specific mechanisms, affective polarization, intra-party factionalism, and perceptions of democratic threat, through which partisanship shapes how political events are interpreted. While the BLM protests and January 6^th insurrections were of course unique events that drew significant attention from journalists and scholars alike, the lessons drawn from how partisans understand and process these events are likely to have implications for how they do so for other major events. We seek not just to understand attitudes shaping perceptions of these two key events, but rather how partisans process the world around them.

Data and Method

We launched a survey with a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults (aged 18 years or older) recruited from YouGov which is an online survey platform that recruits large and diverse samples of adults to participate in opt-in online surveys. The survey was fielded during November 8^th–13^th, 2023. See Section C, Online Appendix for additional survey details.

Results

Discussion

Taken together, our findings contribute to ongoing debates not simply by reaffirming that partisanship structures political evaluations, but by demonstrating how this relationship is conditioned by multiple, interacting dimensions of partisan identity. In particular, we show that affective polarization, factional identities within parties, and perceptions of democratic threat each independently and jointly shape how citizens interpret major political events. Relying on an original YouGov survey with a nationally representative sample and ANES 2016–2024 cross-sectional and panel surveys, we examined the association between a variety of partisan attitudes and evaluation of two controversial political incidents—the Black Lives Matter movement and the January 6^th insurrection. Our findings complement prior works that focused on racial attitudes or ideological alignments in explaining response to these two events. We first affirm preexisting findings that attitudes on these two events are sorted along partisan lines—Democrats have more positive evaluation on the BLM but more negative views on January 6^th, while Republicans have more positive views on January 6^th but more negative opinion on the BLM. More importantly, we find that partisanship seems to shape evaluations of these major events through a variety of different mechanisms. First, we find that affective polarization is associated with polarized perceptions of the two key events we analyzed. Affective polarization is associated with attitudes on these two incidents; those who are higher on affective polarization have more extreme views on BLM and January 6^th. This highlights the ways in affective dispositions toward the out-party may be a powerful force in shaping one’s worldview. At first glance, the finding that Democrats who become warmer toward Republicans also become less favorable toward the Black Lives Matter movement may appear counterintuitive. However, this pattern is consistent with our theoretical framework. We do not interpret increased warmth toward the out-party as a general reduction in political conflict or a uniform increase in tolerance. Instead, such changes may reflect movement within a broader partisan and ideological space. In this context, Democrats who grow warmer toward Republicans may also be shifting toward more moderate or cross-pressured positions, which are associated with less favorable evaluations of movements that are widely perceived as aligned with the political left. More broadly, this pattern is consistent with accounts in which affect, and the partisan identities with which it is closely intertwined, shape the interpretation of political issues, rather than simply reflecting them. From this perspective, individuals adjust their issue attitudes to maintain coherence with evolving affective and identity-based orientations toward political groups. While our data do not allow us to definitively establish this direction of causality, the observed relationship is consistent with this interpretation.

Second, we find substantial heterogeneity within parties in how individuals evaluate these two political events depending on which faction individuals identify with. In particular, MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats hold significantly more polarized views than their co-partisans, suggesting that partisan identity alone masks important internal divisions. This pattern highlights the importance of intra-party factionalism as a structuring force in public opinion: individuals are not simply Democrats or Republicans, but are differently positioned within those coalitions in ways that meaningfully shape their interpretations of political events. These findings contribute to a growing recognition that contemporary polarization is not only between parties, but also reflects the influence of distinct ideological and identity-based subgroups within them. As such, the more extreme wings of each party may play an outsized role in anchoring and potentially shifting party-level attitudes toward more polarized positions, with implications for elite rhetoric, coalition dynamics, and the boundaries of acceptable political discourse.

Third, we find that perceptions of democratic threat are strongly associated with how partisans interpret both the Black Lives Matter protests and the January 6^th insurrection. Individuals who perceive American democracy to be under greater threat tend to hold more extreme evaluations of both events, suggesting that these perceptions intensify rather than moderate partisan responses. Importantly, this relationship appears across party lines, indicating that concerns about democratic backsliding do not operate as a neutral constraint on polarization, but instead become filtered through partisan lenses. In this way, perceptions of threat may reinforce divergent political realities, as citizens interpret the same events as either defending or undermining democracy depending on their prior commitments. This dynamic underscores the difficulty of building shared understandings of democratic norms in a polarized environment, and suggests that subjective perceptions of threat are themselves a key component of how political conflict is experienced and sustained.

Before we turn to the limitations and broader implications of our paper, it is important to clarify what our comparison does and does not imply. We do not treat the Black Lives Matter protests and the January 6th insurrection as normatively or morally equivalent events. They differed profoundly in their goals, organization, and relationship to democratic institutions. Our objective instead has been analytic: to understand how partisan attitudes are associated with the ways citizens interpret events that many perceive as consequential for American democracy. The contrast thus helps reveal how polarization is linked to divergent political realities rather than suggesting parity between the events.

An important limitation of our study concerns temporal ordering and causal identification. Our primary analyses rely on survey data collected in 2023, in which respondents evaluate events that occurred in 2020 and 2021. As a result, our measure of affective polarization may not function purely as a prior disposition; it may also reflect, in part, how individuals have already processed and incorporated these highly salient political events into their political worldviews. This raises the possibility of endogeneity, as the observed relationships may capture reciprocal reinforcement between partisan affect and evaluations of political events rather than a unidirectional causal effect. To partially address this concern, we draw on ANES panel data (2016–2024) to examine whether changes in out-party affect are associated with subsequent changes in attitudes toward the Black Lives Matter movement. These analyses provide additional leverage on temporal ordering and yield patterns that are consistent with our theoretical expectations. However, even with panel data, we cannot fully rule out reciprocal causation or the influence of unobserved factors that jointly shape both affective polarization and event evaluations over time. Accordingly, our findings should be interpreted as documenting robust and consistent relationships between partisan identity, affective polarization, and the interpretation of major political events, rather than as definitive evidence of causal direction. At the same time, the persistence of these relationships across both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses suggests that the linkage between partisan affect and political evaluations is a stable feature of contemporary American public opinion. Future research using experimental or high-frequency panel designs would be better positioned to more cleanly identify the causal mechanisms underlying these relationships.

Our study has several important implications for understanding how partisanship influences political attitudes in a highly polarized environment. First, we contribute to ongoing debates about the relationship between affective polarization and political beliefs. While existing work often treats affective polarization as rooted in ideological disagreement (Abramowitz and Webster, 2018; Orr and Huber, 2020), a growing body of research suggests that partisan affect may also play an independent role in structuring political attitudes (Druckman et al. 2021a, 2021b, 2024). Our findings are consistent with this latter perspective: across multiple datasets, we show that out-party affect is strongly associated with how individuals evaluate salient political events, even when accounting for partisanship and related predispositions. At the same time, we expand on this literature by demonstrating that the relationship between partisanship and political evaluations is not uniform, but is systematically conditioned by additional dimensions of partisan identity.

Additionally, our results highlight the importance of intra-party factionalism and perceptions of democratic threat as underappreciated factors shaping political judgment. Taken together, these findings suggest that contemporary partisanship and polarization operates through multiple, reinforcing mechanisms—affective attachments, factional identities, and threat perceptions—that jointly influence how citizens understand the political world. Future research should build on these insights using experimental and longitudinal designs to more precisely identify the causal pathways linking partisan identity, affect, and political interpretation.

Second, aligning with works on racial sorting (Jardina and Ollerenshaw 2022; Westwood and Peterson 2022), we find additional evidence that racial attitudes actually are also sorting along the partisan lines. Evaluations of January 6th are not necessarily driven by racial attitudes, but some scholars characterize it as anti-BLM and white status anxiety (Barreto et al. 2024). Furthermore, political scientists are increasingly concerned about polarization and its deleterious consequences on American democracy, particularly after January 6^th. To our best knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate that Americans’ perception of the status of democracy not only motivates their political views on hot-button issues, but also that this association is conditional on partisan identity.

Third, our study contributes to ongoing debates over how affective polarization should be measured and what different measures capture. Scholars have long debated whether feeling thermometers reflect a general affective orientation toward partisan groups or whether they capture more specific evaluations of party elites and politically salient partisan symbols. Druckman and Levendusky (2019), for example, argue that feeling thermometers are especially closely tied to evaluations of political elites, while social distance is only weakly correlated with other common measures of affective polarization (also see Kingzette et al. 2021). Our findings reinforce this distinction. The results are broadly consistent when affective polarization is measured using party feeling thermometers, candidate feeling thermometers, in-party versus out-party candidate differences, and out-party trait ratings. By contrast, social distance is less consistently associated with evaluations of the Black Lives Matter protests and January 6th. This pattern suggests that measures capturing generalized evaluative negativity, moralized perceptions of partisan opponents, or affect toward partisan elites are more closely connected to how citizens interpret major politicized events than measures capturing interpersonal avoidance in everyday social life. This distinction matters because the political consequences of affective polarization may depend on which dimension of partisan affect scholars are studying. Feeling thermometers and trait ratings may be especially relevant when the outcome concerns judgments of blame, threat, legitimacy, or democratic meaning in political settings. Social distance, by contrast, may be better suited for studying the social and interpersonal consequences of affective polarization, such as friendship, dating, neighborhood preferences, or willingness to interact across party lines. Our results therefore caution against treating all measures of affective polarization as interchangeable and suggest that scholars should select measures that correspond to the specific political or social consequences they seek to explain.

Lastly, our findings expose a vexing paradox for efforts to reverse democratic backsliding in the United States: partisans cannot even agree on what threatens democracy, let alone how to improve it. Although the survey did not ask respondents to name the source of danger, the interaction between partisanship and perceived democratic threat indicates that Democrats and Republicans locate the menace squarely in the opposing camp—essentially inhabiting divergent political realities. When citizens disagree about the very meaning of democracy and who endangers it, forging bipartisan consensus on institutional reforms becomes exceptionally difficult. Future research should therefore map these competing threat narratives in greater detail and identify any residual areas of agreement on core democratic norms.

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