Before the midterms this month, experts who measure the health of democracies saw the United States experiencing “the most dramatic decline in American history,” in the words of one global index.
Warnings also came from judges ruling on election-related cases. In late October, Judge David O. Carter blocked the Justice Department from ordering California officials to segregate the ballots of 20,000 voters who were on a list of suspected noncitizens that Carter found to be unreliable. “If the executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,” he wrote.
Against the backdrop of such fears, the November election became not just a referendum on President Trump, but also a crucial test of American democracy. In the end, the country passed. Turnout was the second highest for a midterm in more than a century, and Republicans, including Trump, have accepted the results. Even last week, when Democrat Scott Colom was declared the winner of the tight race for Senate in Mississippi, there were no challenges or protests in the historically Republican state.
Does one free and fair election mean the concerns that preceded it were overblown? There’s little question that Trump’s hyperaggressive use of presidential power and his family’s self-enrichment have served as a shock to the county’s democratic traditions. But the election suggests that American democracy has the resources to heal. The point is not that Democrats were the victors. It’s that the popular will won and reflected a wholesale turn against the administration in power.
Leading up to the midterms, scholars debated whether the country was sliding into a soft form of authoritarianism in Trump’s second term, akin to Hungary under former Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The answer was yes, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way argued in an article published in October. They cited Trump’s leveraging of federal power to cow law firms, prosecute political opponents, pressure news media outlets to alter their coverage, and steer political donations toward his own super PACs. It was all an effort to entrench himself and his party in power, Levitsky and Way wrote, as was Trump’s mid-decade gerrymandering push.
On the other side of the debate, Kurt Weyland, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, said that while Trump was transgressive, he was not transforming the U.S. government into an authoritarian regime. For the most part, the laws and traditions protecting free expression and civil society blocked his undemocratic initiatives. The United States was not turning into Hungary under Orban or Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “The mayor of Istanbul is sitting in prison” for opposing Erdogan, Weyland said. “James Talarico isn’t in prison.” In fact, he is headed to the Senate.
To amass power, authoritarians need people to rally behind them, either through popular support or fear. Trump has tried both but has hit limits. With Republicans running 13 points behind in the national vote, it became implausible to contest the midterm results, much less seize ballots or voting machines, as Trump said he had regretted not doing after he lost in 2020.
It’s easy to imagine a close election ending with a fight for control in the House and Trump trying to force that outcome, as he did in 2020. As it was this year, he had no chance. “The voters freed this country from what has felt, for many years now, like a doom loop,” Mona Charen, policy editor at The Bulwark, said.
But it’s not just the size of the Republican defeat that safeguarded the election from interference. So did the nation’s constitutional design. States and Congress, not the president, set the rules for elections, which are run by as many as 10,000 local offices around the country. The structure serves as a buffer against presidential manipulation. “Election officials are committed to this highly decentralized system under state and local control, and voters by and large trust it,” writes Bob Bauer, a lawyer who traveled the country this year to support local leaders in defending the voting process.
The courts also checked presidential overreach, as the Constitution provides. The Justice Department brought about 30 lawsuits demanding access to state voter rolls but won none of them. The Trump administration also lost at crucial moments at the Supreme Court. The justices blocked the administration’s plan to restrict the delivery of mail ballots through the U.S. Postal Service in September. And the day before the election, they rejected the Justice Department’s emergency request to set aside the 20,000 ballots in California.
The role the judges have played reflects in part the time that it takes for a president to transform the courts. “It took Orban three years to capture the high court in Hungary and blunt the effect of the other courts,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton sociologist who lived in Hungary while studying its courts and focuses on the rise and fall of democracies.
Trump packed the Supreme Court in his first term by appointing three justices, Scheppele said. But a majority of the court has held the line on election administration, even as the justices have elsewhere adopted an expansive theory of presidential power in line with Trump’s wishes. And popular will, expressed in the midterms, also blunted the effect of the court’s decision this year that cleared the way for states to erase majority-Black districts. Black voters turned out in high numbers in the South, estimates show. The number of Black Democrats in the House rose by one. In this way, too, the Constitution gives voters the means to check the courts or another branch.
Even Trump’s tactic of claiming elections were rigged fell flat this time around. Researchers found that this type of disinformation didn’t get the traction on social media that it had in the past. “We went into the midterms aiming to show these rumors to be old, played out, predictable & boring,” Kate Starbird, who helped found the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, said on social media. “Seems their audiences felt that too.” After Trump amplified claims of an election conspiracy this week, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host, posted: “Just stop.”
Maybe Trump will be remembered for trying to distort American democracy but ultimately proving that it was stronger than him. The United States has an advantage over more vulnerable democracies — its wealth and the capacity of civil society. The private sector, universities, unions, foundations and nonprofit groups, along with state and local governments, create a countervailing force. Consider the threats that petered out. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, urged ABC’s affiliates to drop Jimmy Kimmel, a move that Trump applauded. But Kimmel was back on the air days later after widespread protest. Law firms bowed to the Trump administration’s demands, but lost lawyers and clients. Elon Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Republican candidates and came up empty.
Still, it remains true that the president, whom the Constitution obligates to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” has often undermined the rule of law. Trump’s Justice Department has defied hundreds of court orders. His executive branch has spent or withheld money without regard for Congress and its power of the purse.
The health of a democracy ultimately depends on the commitment of all the major parties to play by the rules. It’s instructive that after Watergate, Republicans helped push President Nixon out of office — but have done nothing so far to signal that they’re ready to hold Trump accountable.
The president and his advisers have effectively reduced parts of the federal government to rubble, Scheppele said. “They’re destroying things, like the National Weather Service, so Democrats can’t use them either when they’re back in office,” she added.
Voters may become frustrated with the next president — Democrat or Republican — because of the difficulty of rebuilding. In Poland, Scheppele pointed out, the high court filled by the previous illiberal government vetoed measures that the new government tried to take, like restoring the independence of the judiciary or granting abortion rights. That and other factors have made it hard for the liberal centrists elected in 2023 to deliver.
As long as democracy remains damaged in the United States, would-be autocrats have more opportunity worldwide. And huge hurdles loom, at home and internationally, including the challenge of governing artificial intelligence. “The midterms opened up people’s imaginations,” Scheppele said. “There’s a horizon you can see beyond now. But we’ve just taken the first step. What comes out of the rubble, and how do people respond?”
The post Perhaps the Rumors of Democracy’s Demise Were Premature appeared first on New York Times.
