High Anxiety
High Anxiety
Bracing for post-election fallout
A new report says 62% of registered voters believe an outbreak of post-election violence is likely if Donald Trump loses the election next week. To mitigate risk, businesses are creating new programs to ease employee conflict while some local communities are creating in-person public service campaigns. Will it be enough?
CHICAGO—The election is seven days away, and counting.
How are you feeling about America’s future?
[No, really. Let us know. This year’s election-year roller coaster has been delivering big, steady doses of electoral anxiety for months, so if you’re feeling more stressed than usual, welcome to the club.]
Last evening, I asked the same question—how are you feeling about America’s future?—to a standing-room-only crowd at one of Chicago’s favorite “third space” community hangouts, KibbitzNest Books, Brews & Blarney on the West Side of the city’s popular Lincoln Park neighborhood. Using Post-it notes (this third space bar is WiFi free), volunteers from the cross-generational crowd offered up an eight-word paper “Wordle” that listed the following words as their answer: anxious, afraid, weary, miffed, confused—and “oddly complacent” along with the words blinkered and detached.
[KibbitzNest, located about two miles north of where the Emmy Award-winning drama, The Bear, is filmed, has been hosting a series of neighborhood conversations this fall in the run-up to the November 5th election; I was invited to help moderate one of the sessions.]
The words chosen came as no suprise. The American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey found that politics is a leading cause of stress for 7 out of 10 adults—from both parties, and nearly three-fourths of those surveyed also said they are worried about the future of democracy. On Tuesday, the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released a new survey of its own that estimates 42% of the roughly 244 million Americans registered to vote this year are “extremely” or “very” concerned there will be post-election political violence.
And wait—there’s a bit more data point drama to share. According to the AP-NORC survey, which polled voters supporting both parties, as many as 6 in 10 voters think Donald Trump—after years of publicly denying he lost the 2020 election—will again refuse to accept election results if he loses next week; more than half of registered voters surveyed said they are concerned the former president and his allies might try again to overturn the results, as they attempted to do on January 6, 2020, using unlawful means.
The F Word
Of course, it’s no wonder public worry is running high. Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly and more than a dozen other former, high-ranking Trump aides went public recently with the statement that Trump meets the definition of a “fascist”— and confirmed reports that Trump had told them all on numerous occasions that he openly admires Adolf Hitler. While Trump has not denied his admiration for Hitler, Trump insists he is “not a Nazi,” though his speeches over time have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused and more profane, according to a detailed review by the Times of his many hundreds of public appearances over the years. His recent riffs have meandered from the irrelevant to irreverent, whether focusing on Arnold Palmer’s penis size, or saying Kamala Harris “is a very low-IQ individual who is drinking or is on drugs,” or that his political opponents are “vermin” and immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S., or that wind power is killing birds and is stopping people from watching television.
“Plenty of presidents have been called unwell, or called dictators by their political opponents,” Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote recently, “but none until now has been publicly accused of being a “fascist” by his own handpicked advisers … and no American commander in chief over the past couple of centuries has so aggressively sought to discredit the institutions of democracy at home while so openly embracing and envying dictators abroad.”
State and local officials are preparing for multiple possible disruptions across the country, but especially in key swing states. In the state of Pennsylvania, which holds 19 Electoral College votes which both Trump and Harris say they’ll need to win, officials have created an election-threat task force that includes security representatives from the governor’s office, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard and Pennsylvania’s Emergency Management Agency.
If Harris wins, security officials say, Trump attorneys and supporters may launch targeted attempts to unseat her; in Pennsylvania, all 67 counties must legally certify the results by November 25th. [Four years ago, Republican commissioners in three counties—Lancaster, Berks and Fayette—refused to certify the vote, which may happen again.]
Warns American Historian Michael Beschloss: “If you think there’s stress now, wait until you see what happens when Trump wins— or loses. His reckless behavior makes him very dangerous.”
Politics at Work
Of course, with political polarization at an all-time high, state election officials, government agency leaders and political campaign managers aren’t the only people preparing now to manage risk before—and after—Tuesday. Employers in the workplace and hosts of third spaces in local communities are also on the alert—regardless of their political affiliation or voting preference.
According to new data from the upcoming Integral Index, an annual study of more than 2,000 US employees conducted with the Harris Poll, two groups of employees stand out in terms of their view on discussing politics in the workplace. It’s an interesting combination: younger workers and senior leaders are far more comfortable with having political conversations at work, but also are more concerned about political tensions erupting around them when they do.
Many HR leaders have been setting up small “stress management” programs for months—partly to avoid any post-election fallout among employees, and the reasons are clear. Perceptyx, an HR analytics firm, found in a recent survey of 2,300 people that 1 in 3 employees have already experienced a recent conflict stemming from a political disagreement at work. What’s more, 80% of those who faced such conflicts are now actively seeking a new job, making them 1.6 times more likely to quit their current position than their colleagues. “Understanding the impact of an election result, especially in a high-conflict election year as this one, we know exactly when it’s coming and can prepare for the potentially disheartening—and as a result, disruptive —feelings it could stir up,” says Shawnee Irmen-De Anda, chief people officer at the online counseling and therapy firm Thriveworks. “It will also have an impact on some employees’ mental health.”
GenZ workers have been most susceptible to workplace dust-ups over politics, says Perceptyx—and are 2.3 times more likely than Boomers to have a political disagreement at work and 5 times more likely to have experienced bias, prejudice or discrimination due to their political beliefs.
Harvard Business Review recently published A Leader’s Guide to Navigating Employee Activism, citing some potential actions employers might take to lower the political heat in the office this week and beyond—and check out other ideas in the Corporate Playbook developed by Civic Alliance, a non-partisan organization committed to civic engagement.
Words Matter
Civic organizations and philanthropic foundations are also stepping up to help ease workplace, campus and community tensions tied to next week’s election.
The Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), a leading third space organization founded during the pandemic by two dozen of the nation’s largest philanthropic foundations—including the Ford, Rockefeller, Obama, Ronald Reagan, Gates, Bezos, Bloomberg and Kresge foundations—just completed a five-year research project that measures the reaction of more than 5,000 registered voters to 21 words used often by nonprofit causes and civic organizations.
Called the Civic Language Perceptions Project’s How to Talk Bridgey guide, the report includes an index, based on a survey that ranks whether commonly used words are met with a favorable response in today’s political climate and can bring people together. The report also looks at whether a word is received negatively and pulls us apart.
Democracy is on the ballot this fall, yet the word “democracy” is one of the words the report cites as being among the most divisive, ranking a lowly 15th in PACE’s analysis of the power of the 21 words to bring people together.
“On this word, democracy, there’s a pretty big disconnect,” says Amy McIsaac, author of the report and head of the project. “ We’ve heard from democracy advocates that the word is off-putting to conservatives who believe it’s a Trojan horse for liberal agendas.”
McIsaac suggests using the word “freedom” instead, adding, “that’s why Vice President Kamala Harris and her 2024 campaign team have been using that word often, too—to be heard by all sides. There seems to be a relationship between partisanship and negativity this year. …Words matter, and so will this election.”
Got any new data to share on post-election planning for risk management? Give us a shout by sharing a comment. And don’t forget to vote!
NOTE: This post was updated October 31st to cite state and federal government agency deployments of election-threat forces to guard against efforts by bad actors to disrupt this year’s election.