Will American Democracy Survive?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Two decades ago, it seemed that democracy was becoming the dominant form of government around the world. Today, democracy is struggling, including in the United States.

In a poll released Aug. 31 by Quinnipiac University, 69 per cent of Democrats and 69 per cent of Republicans said that democracy in America was “in danger of collapse,” each blaming the other. The poll contacted 1,584 adults, with a margin of sampling error of +/- 2.5 percentage points.

A growing number of Republican officials are questioning a basic premise of democracy: That the losers of an election are willing to accept defeat. About two-thirds of Republican voters say that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election legitimately, according to polls. Among Republican candidates running for statewide office this year, 47 per cent have refused to accept the result, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis published Sept. 16.

A website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, it drew on news reports, debate footage, campaign materials and social media and reached out to every single Republican nominee for Congress, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general to determine their position.

Election denialism has spread across the country. Candidates who support former President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen will appear on ballots in nearly every state this fall.

Out of these 552 Republican nominees running for office, they found 201 who fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election. These candidates either clearly stated that the election was stolen from Trump or took legal action to overturn the results, such as voting not to certify election results or joining lawsuits that sought to overturn the election.

Moreover, an additional 61 candidates raised questions around the results of the 2020 election. These candidates haven’t gone so far as to say explicitly that the election was stolen or take legal action to overturn it. However, they haven’t said the election was legitimate either. In fact, they have raised doubts about potential fraud.

Finally, here were 123 candidates whose position on the 2020 election they could not determine. They either had no comment on the 2020 election or avoided answering when asked directly.

“By any indication, the Republican Party -- upper level, midlevel and grass roots -- is a party that can only be described as not committed to democracy,” Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, has said. He added that he was significantly more concerned about American democracy than when his and Daniel Ziblatt’s book, “How Democracies Die,” came out in 2018.

The Republican Party’s growing acceptance of election denial lies raises the question of what would happen if Trump or another future presidential nominee tried to replay his attempt to overturn the result.

In eleven states this year, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, a position that typically oversees election administration, qualifies as an “election denier,” according to States United Action, a research group. In fifteen states, the nominee for governor is a denier, and in ten states, the attorney general nominee is.

The growth of the election-denier movement has created a possibility that would have seemed unthinkable not so long ago. It remains unclear whether the loser of the next presidential election in 2024 will concede or will instead try to overturn the outcome.

“There is the possibility, for the first time in American history, that a legitimately elected president will not be able to take office,” warned Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies democracy.

Part of the problem lies with the disconnect between the popular vote nationwide, and the way the actual outcome is based on who has gathered more Electoral College votes from the 50 states. In 48 of the 50 states, state laws mandate that the winner of the statewide popular vote will receive all of that state’s electors.

Still, it worked fairly well historically. Before 2000, only three candidates won the presidency while losing the popular vote. But in the six elections since then, the Republican nominee twice won the keys to the White House, while the Democrat gained more votes.

What changed? In recent decades, liberals have flocked to large metropolitan areas, which are heavily concentrated in big states like California, while residents of smaller cities and more rural areas have become more conservative.

The larger states have grown much faster than smaller ones. This means that the increase in the number of voters in their large metropolitan areas has not had any impact on presidential outcomes. It just gives Democrats greater margins in big liberal states without changing the Electoral College outcome in those jurisdictions.

And the loss of population in the small states doesn’t affect their Republican majorities, so they still get the same number of Electoral College votes. It means the residents of less populated states like Wyoming and North Dakota, which are disproportionately white, have an outsize influence compared to California or Illinois. That’s a central reason that both George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 were able to win the presidency while losing the popular vote.

“We’re in a very different world today than when the system was designed,” remarked Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. And that’s not likely to change.