Tens of millions heard Thursday’s nuclear bomb of news that a former U.S. president was found guilty of 34 felonies, leading to unknown political fallout.
Two days earlier, just 30 people were privy to results of a survey with arguably more profound consequences — regionally and nationwide.
In a chilling assessment, University of San Diego researchers found that 46% of local female electeds (and 39% of men) who responded to a survey have considered leaving public office thanks to threats, harassment and other abuse.
The data were delivered by Rachel Locke, director of the Violence, Inequality and Power Lab at USD’s Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.
“These are people who may have entered public service because they really wanted to serve their community,” Locke told a small audience at the Coronado Library. “They are getting harassed and threatened on a regular basis. ‘And why should I keep putting up with this?’ is what they’re asking themselves.”
Locke noted how this reality jeopardizes the high amount of work done recruiting women into runs for elective office and leadership positions.
“That’s a big risk right now because of this,” she said.
Locke told Times of San Diego on Friday that her team had a 13.8% response rate, getting 108 questionnaires back from 785 elected officials in San Diego, Riverside and Imperial counties contacted in February and March.
Last year, only San Diego County officials were surveyed — with 99 replying (a 30% response rate).
Locke said the latest rate was on par with the industry standard for this kind of email survey.
“We compared the demographics of our respondent pool to the demographics of elected officials across the three counties and found very close alignment,” she said via email. “Meaning, we have confidence in our sample as being representative because even though it wasn’t as large as we would have liked, it corresponded to the particular population being surveyed.”
USD did confidential personal interviews with 20% of those who responded — randomly chosen. The chats lasted from 45 minutes to 2 hours. USD also did a “traditional media review” along with analyzing social media and published scholarship.
Tuesday’s meeting at the Coronado Library’s Winn Room included a 20-minute breakout session where five attendees per table brainstormed solutions to the threat problem. (The event had little promotion, with the forum announced only four days earlier.)
Earlier, San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott discussed what local boards and councils could and couldn’t do when confronted with hateful speech, given First Amendment protections and Brown Act rules. (Basically, only those who disrupt a meeting can be bounced.)
Other findings of USD’s “California Threats and Harassment Initiative” — said to be the only one of its kind in the state — included :
- 67% say that being threatened has become a routine part of public service, with
liberals (at 70%) being more likely to say it is routine compared with conservative
(56%) and “moderate” (60%) elected officials. - 52.6% say they feel pressure to accept threatening or harassing behavior as a normal part of elected service.
- 100% of San Diego city policymakers with Twitter accounts between January 2016 and December 2022 received “aggressive tweets.”
- 12% of policymakers from cities under 100,000 population got aggressive tweets.
- Women received almost four times as many aggressive tweets as men.
- And 30.8% of women say they’ve been harassed “more than weekly” compared with 8.3% of men.
“Women are more likely to report being harassed and threatened than their male counterparts,” Locke said. “Minorities [were] more likely to be harassed and threatened than their white counterparts.”
She said the Bridging Divides study at Princeton said California had the highest number of unique incidents of abuse of any state in the country by proportion of population.
“So we’re not doing great at the state level,” Locke said.
In a review of news accounts where perpetrators were identified, 84% were white men.
“Of the most egregious incidents that are reported, the vast majority of perpetrators are white men,” she said. “And threats and harassment occurred in public forums over the phone and via social media with the focus really very often on state level policies that very often the bodies being attacked and the individuals on them have no ability to do anything about it.”
Although women are more frequently on the receiving end of threats and harassment, men are more likely to call the police.
“This could be because men trust the police more,” Locke said, or women are more used to being harassed in the workplace.
But more women than men say that they fear for their safety and back stronger penalties for those who threaten public officials, she said.
When asked if they’d recommend public service to somebody else, the recurring answer is: “You should only do it if you’re thick-skinned.” She called it a “pre-qualification to public service.”
Locke said she also heard: “I would never recommend public service again. I recommended it to somebody and she came in for so much abuse that she now goes to counseling multiple times a week, and I would never do that to somebody ever again.”
Locke called abuse a nonpartisan phenomenon.
“Liberals, moderates, conservatives are all getting it,” she said. “Last year, moderates received threats and harassment at the highest level. This year, liberals are receiving threats and harassment at the highest level.”
But 72% of liberals cited threats, about 15 points higher than conservatives, said the study, whose formal public release this fall will include suggestions from people attending similar forums.
Never mentioned during the event lasting close to 2 hours was Donald Trump, often blamed for a coarsening of public debate.
Political scientist Carl Luna — director of USD’s Institute for Civil Civic Engagement, which helped inspire the first study in 2022-23 and spoke Tuesday — said different things are driving the threats.
Not All Trump’s Fault
“So to say that it’s all Donald Trump’s fault or all Barack Obama’s fault or Mitt Romney’s — I don’t think I can say it,” Luna told me Tuesday, “but I think you’re seeing politicians who know how to demagogue it and use it to their advantage. It’s the sales pitch that currently works, you know.”
He recalled President George W. Bush’s 2004 race against Democratic challenger John Kerry and “hearing conservative commentators saying we have to win so big that they can’t steal it.”
Also addressing the library audience were La Prensa San Diego publisher Arturo “Art” Castañares and Daniel Orth, associate director at the San Diego-based National Conflict Resolution Center.
Investigative journalist Castañares, a former Democratic operative, noted political violence in Mexico, which has seen more than 30 candidates killed in the run-up to this weekend’s national elections.
“If I did in Mexico what I do here,” he said, “I’d be dead long ago.”
Said Orth of today’s vitriolic climate: “We don’t believe this has to be the new normal. … There’s a role for all of us.”
USD’s Locke said similar presentations to Tuesday’s will be made in June and July in (so far unannounced) locations in North County and East County, plus one in Riverside County. But she was open to other venues.
“We’re happy to have this conversation anywhere,” she said before closing on a somber note — that no money currently exists for a third annual study of threats to elected officials.
“We have the system set up to go statewide … with this study,” she said, telling potential donors: “Feel free to reach out.”