There is a point at which political polarisation becomes something more serious than people shouting at one another on television. It arrives when a substantial number of citizens no longer regard losing an election as an outcome they are morally obliged to tolerate.
A remarkable new poll of US Democratic voters suggests that the United States may be moving further into that dangerous territory. The figures circulating in conservative media are sufficiently extraordinary that they deserve checking before anyone builds an argument upon them. Unfortunately, the underlying numbers are real.
The survey was conducted with the Center for Strategic Politics for Liberal Currents, which describes itself as a liberal publication. It questioned 683 Democratic voters in September 2026 about a wide range of political issues, including several hypothetical ways in which Donald Trump might cease to be president.
The least surprising results concerned constitutional removal. Eighty-six per cent said they would react positively if Trump were impeached and convicted by Congress, while 84 per cent said the same about removal through the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Whatever one thinks of the merits of either course, those are constitutional mechanisms. The American political system contains procedures for removing presidents before their terms expire.
Then the pollsters asked something much more disturbing. Respondents were presented with a hypothetical situation in which military leaders removed Trump and took control of the United States in order to "safeguard the Constitution." Fifty-nine per cent said they would react positively. Only 28 per cent said negatively, with the remainder neutral.
Then came assassination. Respondents were asked how they would feel if Trump were assassinated while speaking at a rally. Twenty-three per cent said very positively and another 8 per cent somewhat positively, making 31 per cent.
There are qualifications here which matter. This was a relatively small poll of Democratic voters rather than the American population. There was no equivalent Republican sample answering precisely the same questions. Most importantly, the military-coup question was framed in unusually favourable language. A military junta described as arriving to "safeguard the Constitution" sounds rather different from generals announcing that they have abolished civilian government and will henceforth run the country themselves. Poll questions are not neutral containers.
Nor should the 31 per cent assassination figure be distorted. Forty-three per cent reacted negatively to the assassination scenario and another quarter were neutral. It would therefore be wrong to turn this into the claim that 69 per cent of Democrats support assassinating Trump. They may not. But after every sensible qualification has been made, the figures remain disturbing.
Nearly one Democratic voter in three surveyed expressed a positive reaction to the imagined assassination of the sitting president. A majority expressed a positive reaction to military leaders removing him and assuming control. The problem here is larger than Donald Trump and larger than the Democratic Party. It is the erosion of the loser's consent.
Every functioning democracy depends upon something rarely written into constitutions because it precedes constitutional machinery. The losing side must accept that losing an election does not dissolve the political order. That does not mean believing the winner is wise, decent or even harmless. It does not prevent protest, litigation, investigation, impeachment or ferocious political opposition. It means accepting that political power changes through established constitutional procedures rather than through bullets or generals.
Without that principle, elections gradually become meaningless. Why bother winning an election if your opponents believe that your victory itself constitutes such an emergency that extraordinary measures are justified to reverse it?
The danger is reciprocal. If Democrats conclude that a Republican president is so dangerous that military intervention becomes acceptable, Republicans can eventually construct the same argument about a Democratic president. Each side possesses an unlimited supply of reasons for regarding the other side as uniquely dangerous.
The process feeds itself. One side becomes convinced that its opponents are destroying democracy. Extraordinary measures therefore become thinkable. The other side sees those extraordinary measures and concludes that its opponents really are trying to destroy democracy. It therefore becomes more willing to contemplate extraordinary measures of its own. Soon everybody is saving democracy from everybody else.
There is evidence that the underlying problem crosses party lines. A large nationally representative study of American attitudes towards political violence found substantial minorities willing to justify violence for at least some political objectives. In its 2025 data, support was higher among MAGA Republicans than strong Democrats on many measures.
That matters because it prevents an easy partisan explanation. America's problem is not simply that one tribe has become dangerous while the other remains serenely committed to constitutional government. Different surveys ask different questions and produce different partisan patterns, but the broader warning is that political violence and authoritarian remedies have acquired constituencies.
The great danger arises when each constituency can point to the other as its justification. There is an additional ingredient: Americans increasingly inhabit different moral worlds.
They do not merely disagree about tax rates, government spending or whether the minimum wage should rise. Increasingly, many Americans regard the opposing political coalition as a threat to the country's fundamental character.
Pew Research Center's 2026 work illustrates part of the perceptual divide. Democrats and Republicans both place themselves closer to the ideological centre than their opponents place them. Republicans see the Democratic Party as considerably further Left than Democrats themselves do, while Democrats see the Republican Party as further Right than Republicans see it. Each tribe therefore encounters a more frightening opponent than the opponent recognises in the mirror.
Add declining institutional trust, partisan media ecosystems, social-media outrage and repeated claims that every election may be the last meaningful election, and democratic compromise becomes psychologically difficult. Why compromise with people who are supposedly about to destroy the country? That question contains the seed of something much darker.
The United States has survived periods of savage political division before. It survived the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, assassinations, riots, Watergate, Vietnam and enormous racial conflict. Before that it survived the Depression and bitter labour struggles. And once, of course, it did not survive political division peacefully.
The Civil War remains the enormous warning sitting behind every discussion of American national fragmentation. Nobody should casually invoke it. The United States of 2026 is not the United States of 1860, and political hostility on social media is not Fort Sumter. If American fragmentation came again, it might not initially resemble 1861 anyway.
There is already measurable support for something previously confined largely to political fantasy: secession. A large YouGov survey published in 2026 found that 18 per cent of Americans supported their own state leaving the United States. Among Democrats the figure was 22 per cent and among Republicans 14 per cent. In California, 27 per cent supported secession.
Those are minorities. Nearly four Americans in five do not support their state leaving the Union. That is the reassuring fact. The less reassuring fact is that almost one American in five does.
The interesting feature of modern American separatism is that its partisan geography changes with political power. When Democrats control Washington, separatist talk tends to become more attractive on parts of the Right. When Republicans control Washington, it becomes more attractive on parts of the Left. That suggests something deeper than a settled regional independence movement.
For some Americans, national allegiance appears increasingly conditional upon who controls the federal government. That is a dangerous development for any federation.
A stable political system requires citizens to distinguish between the nation and the temporary government of the nation. Donald Trump is not the United States. Neither was Joe Biden. Neither will the next president be. Presidents come and go.
If citizens increasingly experience rule by the other party as occupation by an alien political tribe, however, that distinction begins to collapse. Then the federal structure itself becomes interesting.
America is unusually capable of political fragmentation because it already consists of fifty states possessing governments, legislatures, courts, police forces, tax systems and strong regional identities. California has nearly 40 million people and an economy larger than those of most sovereign countries. Texas has more than 30 million people and an equally powerful sense of separate identity. The institutional skeleton of fragmentation therefore already exists.
That does not make breakup likely or predict that it will occur. Constitutional, economic, military and practical obstacles to secession would be enormous. The Civil War also settled, at terrible cost, the historical proposition that states cannot simply walk out of the Union when political circumstances become inconvenient.
But political systems are ultimately sustained by legitimacy as well as law. A constitution can specify who possesses authority. It cannot indefinitely manufacture the willingness of millions of people to regard that authority as legitimate.
That is why the latest poll matters. The most disturbing issue is not really whether the headline number is 59 per cent or 31 per cent. It is the weakening of the boundary between "I desperately want this president removed" and "I accept only constitutional means of removing him." Those propositions must remain separate.
A Democrat can regard Trump as disastrous and still reject a military coup. A Republican could regard a future Democratic president as disastrous and still reject political violence. Indeed, democratic citizenship is tested precisely when the person holding legitimate power is somebody one profoundly dislikes. There is nothing heroic about respecting constitutional restraints when your own side is winning. The test comes when it loses.
America still possesses enormous forces holding it together: a common economy, armed forces, constitutional institutions, families spread across state and partisan boundaries, shared popular culture and nearly two and a half centuries of national identity. Most Americans continue to reject secession, and large majorities in a 2026 Reuters/Ipsos survey said both that democracy is the best form of government and that they value elections even when their own party loses.
Those facts should prevent apocalyptic conclusions. But the same Reuters/Ipsos survey found 64 per cent saying American democracy was in danger of failing.
That fear can work in opposite directions. It can make people more protective of democratic institutions, or it can convince them that normal democratic restraints must be suspended to save democracy from the other side. The second road is particularly dangerous because everybody travelling along it believes himself to be defending the Republic.
Military coups are frequently justified as temporary interventions necessary to rescue constitutions, restore order or protect democracy. Political violence is likewise rationalised as exceptional action against an exceptional threat. Once that reasoning becomes reciprocal, there is no obvious stopping point.
America's eventual danger is not that everybody will suddenly decide to dissolve the Union. It is that enough Americans may gradually cease believing that they belong in the same political community as people who vote differently from them.
A country can survive hatred of a president and hatred of a political party. What becomes much harder to survive is the conviction that losing to the other half of the country is itself intolerable. That is the line America now approaches.
https://gellerreport.com/2026/09/poll-60-of-democrats-would-approve-of-military-coup-to-remove-trump-31-would-react-positively-to-his-assassination.html/