US democracy survives tests so far
But many more challenges await ahead in new year
Over the past three years, the world’s oldest democracy has been tested in ways not seen in decades.
A sitting president tried to overturn an election and his supporters stormed the Capitol to stop the winner from taking power. Supporters of that attack launched a campaign against local election offices, chasing out veteran administrators and pushing conservative states to pass new laws making it harder to vote.
At the same time, the past three years proved that American democracy was resilient.
Former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results failed, blocked by the constitutional system’s checks and balances, and he now faces both federal and state charges for those efforts.
Then the voters stepped in. In every battleground state, they rejected all candidates who supported Trump’s stolen election lies and were running for statewide offices that had some oversight of elections.
The election infrastructure in the country performed well, with only scattered disruptions during the 2022 midterms. New voting laws, many of which are technical and incremental, had little discernible impact on actual voting.
“Voters have stepped up to defend our democracy over the past few years,” said Joanna Lydgate, chief executive officer of States United, which tracks those who refuse to believe in the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. “State and local officials have done a tremendous job in protecting our free and fair elections.”
So why all the worry? As Lydgate and anyone else who works in the pro-democracy field quickly notes, the big test — what Lydgate calls “the Super Bowl” — awaits in 2024.
Trump is running for the White House again and has been dominating the Republican primary as the first votes approach. He has called for pardoning those prosecuted for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, continues to insist falsely that the 2020 election was “stolen” and says he will use the federal government to seek revenge on his political enemies.
Trump has used authoritarian rhetoric as he campaigns for the GOP nomination. If he wins, allies have planned to seed the government with loyalists so the bureaucracy doesn’t hinder Trump’s more controversial plans the way it did during his first term.
It’s gotten to the point that Trump was recently asked by conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt whether he planned to be a dictator.
“Not at all,” Trump responded. “No, I’m gonna rule as somebody that’s very popular with the people.”
The 2024 election could cause all sorts of conflict, including scenarios that have notably not materialized despite widespread concern since 2020: violence at the polls, overly aggressive partisan poll watchers or breakdowns in the ballot count.
It’s unlikely that Trump could return to the White House if he loses the election. That’s what he failed to accomplish in 2020, and he’s in a weaker position now.
His strategy then was to use Republican dominance in swing state legislatures, governorships and secretary of state offices to try to send slates of fake electors to Congress even though Democrat Joe Biden won those states and captured the presidency.
Since then, Republicans have lost two of those swing state secretary of state offices — in Arizona and Nevada — as well as the governor’s office in Arizona and control of the state legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
In Congress, lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill closing some of the loopholes in the counting of Electoral College votes that Trump tried to exploit to stay in office, making it harder to challenge state certifications on the House floor.
The upshot is it will be far harder for Trump to try to overturn a loss in 2024 than in 2020. The most likely way he returns to the White House is by winning the election outright.
“It’s not to say the risks are gone,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s to say we’ve successfully fought the last war.”
History is full of examples of authoritarians who first came to office by winning a legitimate democratic election. But the risk to democracy of someone legitimately winning an election is different than the risk of a candidate trying to overturn an election loss.
“There’s little doubt our democracy has gotten dinged up in a couple of moments of late, but we have decided we like it compared to the alternative,” said Justin Levitt, who served as adviser for democracy and voting rights for two years in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Election deniers have been able to make gains in one area — offices where they simply have to win a GOP primary. That’s meant they have taken power in local governments in many rural areas, often disrupting elections and embracing conspiracy theories or procedures such as hand-counting, which is less reliable and more time-consuming than tabulating thousands of votes on machines.
They also have been able to expand their power within Republican legislative bodies from statehouses to Congress. U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who helped organize a brief supporting the quickly thrown-out lawsuit to overturn Biden’s victory, is now the House speaker.
If Johnson retains his speakership in January 2025, he could be in a position to disrupt certification of a Biden victory.