Two articles published today—one in the Washington Post and the other in the New Yorker—cover Bright Line Watch’s recent surveys. Bright Line Watch is a multi-university initiative, housed at the Chicago Center on Democracy, that conducts regular surveys to gauge views on the state of U.S. democracy. The group has fielded 12 waves of surveys to U.S.-based political scientists and the American public since early 2017.

The Washington Post article, “Trump’s most worrying attacks on democracy, in one giant chart“, focuses on one aspect of the Bright Line Watch surveys: for many of the survey waves over the past few years, the group asked its expert respondents to assess the normalcy and importance of recent events. The author compiled the survey findings into a single chart that is, indeed, giant.

The New Yorker article, “Is American Tolerance for Political Violence on the Rise?“, discusses the findings of the most recent survey wave, conducted in October 2020. It looks specifically at Americans’ confidence in how their votes will be counted, views on the legitimacy of the electoral winner in various scenarios, and opinions on the appropriate use of political violence.