Scholars warn the threats to American democracy are not over
Four days after the midterm elections, with results still outstanding in some House and Senate races, political scientists say one of the big, clear winners of the vote is American democracy itself.
Bright Line Watch, a national survey that asks hundreds of political scientists about the health of American democracy, had found widespread expectations in a pre-election survey that prominent Republicans would deny the legitimacy of the results, co-director Brendan Nyhan said. After Trump took office last year, most scholars saw the United States moving swiftly toward some form of authoritarianism, and with the president talking up fears of election fraud ahead of the midterms, there was a lot of concern, Nyhan said. “In our pre-election survey of political science experts, it was widely expected that prominent Republicans would deny the legitimacy of the election results,” he said.
That did not happen. “I think the clarity of the result just made it hard to deny. People have this phrase - too big to rig,” Nyhan said. President Trump, who according to NPR’s report lied about losing the 2020 election, said he would accept the results.
“It’s a remarkable turning point. We’ve been in the age of Trump for 10 years. The threat to democracy has been acute. It wasn’t clear whether he’d be able to subvert this election, but the system held,” said Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth.
The White House rejected the assessment. NPR said it reached out for comment, and White House spokeswoman Lauren Biss called the report “another completely ridiculous news story by NPR and a perfect example of why the president stopped American taxpayers from subsidizing this fake news outlet. President Trump has done more than any other president to ensure we have free and fair elections.”
Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, said the administration in fact tried a range of measures to give Republicans an advantage in the midterms. “It has thrown two dozen pieces of spaghetti at the wall in the form of trying to centralize voter lists and trying to stop or subvert vote by mail,” Levitsky said. He said it also engaged in what he called an unprecedented national gerrymandering scheme to tilt the electoral balance in the House. “None of that worked,” he said.
Levitsky credited lawyers who mounted legal challenges and the courts, which often blocked Trump’s moves. “Critics of the Trump administration, the opposition, Democratic Party, civil society was much more aware of the threat to democracy and was very, very active in combating it,” he said.
Lorinc Redei, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who grew up in Hungary, said the Republican defeat fits a pattern in Europe this year in which ruling parties with autocratic leaders were toppled after failing to address kitchen-table issues. “In Hungary, you had falling living standards, high inflation, terrible hospital conditions. Those were the things that brought people out to vote. In Serbia recently, you had failing infrastructure and high unemployment. That’s what people were upset about,” Redei said.
Redei said there is a lesson in that pattern: “Elections still matter. If there’s enough significant public outcry against the government and they go vote, you lose elections.”
None of the scholars NPR spoke with think the threats to American democracy are over. Nyhan, the Dartmouth professor, noted that the blue wave was not driven by political ideals. “To the extent that we can tell, it’s far more a repudiation of Donald Trump’s management of the economy and the war in Iran, for instance, than it is a repudiation of his attack on democracy,” he said.
“I see no reason why Trump won’t continue to try to engage in authoritarian shenanigans,” Levitsky said. “I think he’ll probably be less successful, one, because he’s weaker, two, because the Democrats control Congress and will have some levers that they can pull to constrain him.” Third, he said, some Republicans, for the first time, will begin to defect from the president.