Poll: Young Voters Are Sympathetic to the Killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO

According to a new Emerson College poll, a plurality of voters aged 18 to 29 find the actions of the killer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO acceptable (41 percent). This is in stark contrast to all voters, as 68 percent find it unacceptable. If you dig into the polling a bit further, I think you can find one of the seminal splits in politics today.

Just 33 percent of 18-29 voters find Luigi Mangione’s actions completely unacceptable, while just 43 percent of people aged 30 to 39 do. Once you get outside the Millennial and Zoomer cohort, these “completely unacceptable” figures start accelerating rapidly: 61 percent of 40- to 49-year-olds, 65 percent of 50- to 59-year-olds and 74 percent of 60- to 69-year-olds (it is interesting that for those 70 years or older, that dips to 69 percent).

What could possibly explain the split between people under 40 having varying levels of sympathy for killing a Healthcare CEO, while those over the age of 40 see that as beyond the pale in large majorities?

I got at this in my piece Who Is Allowed to Kill in America, as we have created a culture where there are socially acceptable ways to kill people, like denying insurance claims in the name of profit, and unacceptable ways, like walking up and shooting someone in the back. The latter is much more visceral and antithetical to any civilized society, but the former has no place in one either. I believe this poll helps get at the defining political dynamic of our era, which is that young people are upset with the status quo and have been for quite some time, while older folks and the wealthier ones who benefit from it have been captured by the inertia of our fundamentally broken society and now defend its barbarity as normal.

Dave Weigel made an interesting observation on Bluesky that “surely one factor in the St. Luigi of Mangione discourse is that people have learned there are no real consequences for saying or doing ‘extreme’ things.* Every Jan. 6 rioter’s getting pardoned next month!

*unless it’s about Israel.”

There is no such thing as respectable society anymore, if there ever was.

As Everytown notes, “Active shooter drills are implemented in over 95 percent of American K–12 schools today. While school shootings are relatively rare—accounting for less than 1 percent of the more than 44,000 annual US gun deaths—they instill a deep sense of fear in communities, propelling school systems to ‘do something’ fast.”

We have taught our children from a very young age that they could be brutally murdered at any minute, and adults’ fear over our violent society reaching their kid’s schools has led to a world where 60 percent of 14- to 24-year-olds say the drills make them feel “scared and helpless.” There are countless studies which indicate that these active shooter drills have caused serious levels of trauma in children, and a RAND survey found that just one-fifth of teachers said that active shooter drills make them feel safer.

This country has explicitly told children that they and their friends could be killed at any minute, and those old enough to have lived through enough school shootings have seen for themselves that America will not lift a finger to stop the slaughter of children.

So why would they give a fuck about one CEO?

Now to be clear, I am not advocating for vigilante justice. I would likely fall in the unacceptable bucket of 30- to 39-year-olds, because I don’t think violence leads to anything but more violence and attacking the ruling class will only make them more authoritarian, but I think if you just dismiss this as some virtue signaling lefties on the web trying to prove how radical they are, you are completely missing a major story in American politics. These feelings of societal alienation are real, and they are widespread.

We have been taught that life in America is expendable, especially the poorer and less white you are. People far less privileged than Brian Thompson are killed in this country every day, some by gun violence like Brian Thompson was, or some by anodyne bureaucratic measures that stops people from getting the care they need, like some of Brian Thompson’s customers. Both forms of violence are bad, but only one is widely condemned in mainstream America.

The last generation of Americans who oversaw the decline of the American empire in the late 20th and early 21st centuries look at the status quo in a wholly different light than those of us who have had to grow up under the consequences of the last generation’s excess. I graduated into the catastrophic 2009 job market and became instantly radicalized against a status quo that was diametrically opposite from what I was taught. There are countless examples of younger people finding that the world they were promised by older folks does not match their experiences, and that has led to a massive split in public opinion that rears its head time and time again—whether it’s younger voters flocking to Bernie Sanders while older voters stick with their safe status quo in Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton—or this more radical finding where younger people are sympathetic to the targeted assassination of a health insurance CEO. If you find yourself recoiling at these poll results, now you understand how a lot of younger people feel when they see things that older folks just regard as business as usual in America.