When the Pentagon announced that it was planning on livestreaming the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was scheduled to be put to death by a firing squad on December 3 until a change of course this week, it was met with widespread shock and disgust. Hasan was convicted by a military court for a 2009 shooting massacre at Fort Hood in Texas that left 13 people dead.
Part of the problem of planning such a spectacle is that the announcement came just days after the botched execution of Christa Pike, a 50-year-old Tennessee woman who was convicted of murder in 1996. Prison officials injected Pike twice with lethal drugs, but she survived.
As capital punishment takes center stage in the weeks leading up to the midterms, the country is now being confronted with the thorny reality of what it means when the government puts someone to death for their crimes. While the Republicans have landed on full-throated support of the practice,some Democrats see an opening to oppose Republicans and act according to public sentiment.
The American public has historically supported the death penalty, with 74% of people saying they supported capital punishment in the 1990s. Over the last decade, the numbers have dropped considerably, though a small majority of people still believe that some people should be put to death for their crimes.
But botched executions and the horrors of livestreaming Hasan’s death may give Americans pause.
“When people learn more about it, they become less enthusiastic about it, and many even come to oppose the death penalty,” Laura Porter, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty, told The Caucus. “The last couple weeks have shown that there are deep flaws in the execution process.”
Though the country is at a historical low for new death sentences, executions are on the rise. Last year, 47 people were executed, a jump from the 25 people who were put to death in 2024. And in 2026, 31 people have been executed so far.
“That’s political-leader driven. Florida is approaching 20 executions for the year so far. They represent more than half of all the people executed in the United States this year,” Porter said. “That’s a decision by Gov. DeSantis. He says he wants to be the law and order state.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is likely being influenced by President Donald Trump. “The Trump administration has reached into the states and has encouraged their followers who are in political power to keep executing people,” Porter said.
But for blue states with Democratic leaders where Trump has no influence, the death penalty seems to be on its way out.
“A lot of states have been in a position where they had people sentenced to death and sitting on death row, but they weren’t executing people,” Porter said. “And I think that’s because of a discomfort with executions.”
It wasn’t always this way. In the 1990s, Democrats were being dogged by claims that the party was “soft on crime.” Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas, left the presidential campaign trail in 1992 to oversee the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, even though his presence wasn’t required. That same year, facing criticism that their crime policies didn’t go far enough, Joe Biden bragged on the Senate floor about a bill that recommended the death penalty for 53 different crimes.
When support for capital punishment waned, so did the political appetite for it. From 2012 until 2020, the Democrats had opposition to the death penalty as part of their party platform. Biden promised to abolish the federal death penalty.While he didn’t follow through, one of his last acts in office was to commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal death row prisoners.
Anti-death penalty activists were disappointed when in 2024, the party left opposing the death penalty off its official platform.
But even as the party decided to remove it from their platform, it’s still not a dormant issue. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA-07) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) co-sponsored a bicameral bill to abolish the federal death penalty in May after the Trump administration announced it would be bringing back firing squad executions and was looking to revive the gas chamber and electric chair.
Democrats are still more likely to be against the death penalty, according to polling, but like with most issues within the party’s base, opinions vary by age, race, and education. Black Democrats and those with a college education or higher support the method the least.
“It’s a moral issue for some people and that goes across the ideological spectrum,” Porter said. That’s probably why members of both parties came out against the livestreaming plan.
For now, Tennessee’s term-limited governor, Republican Bill Lee, is pausing executions in the state. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Tennessee, Jerri Green, who is trailing GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) by double digits for the office, came out forcefully against the death penalty after the state tried and failed to kill Pike.
In a lengthy statement Green called for continuing the moratorium on executions, saying capital punishment “has always been inhumane, expensive, and biased.”
“As a public defender, I’ve met a few too many people who were wrongfully convicted on death row who were later exonerated,” she said. “As Governor, I would put a moratorium on all future executions. If we say we are pro-life, that means we must be anti-death penalty.”
Green could be onto something, as some experts believe the country is on the brink of ending the punishment once and for all. “We believe the country is moving away from the death penalty,” Porter said. “It’ll be interesting to see in the next few years.”