The tape first. On Hannity Friday night, in a segment about the Tyler Robinson preliminary hearing, Kellyanne Conway told viewers: 'it is the 25% of self-identified liberal democrats who say political violence is sometimes justified' [1]. She named no poll, on that sentence or around it [1].
There is one major national survey with a 25 percent figure in this territory, and it says something different. Marquette Law School's poll, fielded September 15-24, 2025 among 1,043 adults, found 89 percent of Americans saying political violence is 'never justified in order to achieve political goals,' with 11 percent saying it can sometimes be justified [2]. Broken out by party: 15 percent of Democrats, 6 percent of Republicans [2].
The 25 percent lives in a different table. It is the share among self-described 'very liberal' respondents - an ideology slice drawn from all adults, not a subset of Democrats - and it has a mirror image the segment did not mention: 10 percent of 'very conservative' respondents said the same [2].
Data
| All adults | 11% |
|---|---|
| Democrats | 15% |
| Republicans | 6% |
| Very liberal (any party) | 25% |
| Very conservative (any party) | 10% |
Relabeling 'very liberal' as 'liberal Democrats' does two jobs at once. It inflates the Democratic figure by 10 points - from 15 to 25, against a poll whose whole margin of error is 3.3 points - and it moves the number from an ideological fringe onto a party's name, so that a finding about the outer edge of the spectrum arrives in living rooms as a finding about one in four members of the opposition [2].
The record cuts both ways, and should. PolitiFact reviewed this genre of claim in May and found 'evidence of an increasing tolerance for violence among Democrats and liberals' - a real trend, reportable with real numbers - while concluding that 'most people, regardless of political affiliation, reject political violence' [3]. Robert Pape, who runs the University of Chicago's project on political violence, puts the share of Americans who abhor it at 'between 75% and 80%' [3]. Fifteen versus six is a genuine partisan gap, and an honest segment could have led with it. The one that aired chose the column with the bigger number and gave it a new name [1][2].
