The ability of the U.S. Secret Service to keep presidential candidates safe in the wake of last month’s attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life is doubted by most Americans, a survey released Friday reveals.
The poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds only around three in ten Americans are extremely or very confident the Secret Service can keep the presidential candidates safe from violence in the weeks before the November election.
The survey also found some seven in ten Americans think the Secret Service bears at least a moderate amount of responsibility for the assassination attempt.
As Breitbart News reported, the law enforcement agency tasked with protecting presidents for more than a century is under intense scrutiny after a gunman got within 150 yards of Trump and fired several bullets at the Republican candidate at a July 13 Butler, Pennsylvania, rally.
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Trump was injured in one ear but was inches away from being killed.
AP reports the poll was conducted after the resignation of director Kimberly Cheatle, who faced intense questioning at a congressional hearing that was broadcast live last week and in which she gave evasive answers.
She admitted the nearly-successful assassination attempt was the “most significant operational failure” in the agency’s history in “decades.”
The news service broke down the survey results:
The poll revealed that Americans were most likely to say that political division in the U.S. had “a great deal” of responsibility for the assassination attempt.
Half of U.S. adults say that, while about 4 in 10 say the Secret Service bears a high level of responsibility, and about 4 in 10 say the widespread availability of guns is greatly responsible.
Democrats were far more likely to blame the availability of guns while Republicans were more likely to blame the Secret Service.
The survey further revealed half of Americans think local law enforcement in Pennsylvania had at least a moderate amount of responsibility for the assassination attempt, although only about two in ten said it had “a great deal” of responsibility.
The poll of 1143 adults was conducted July 25-29, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.