Our research design allows us to infer Americans’ willingness to trade-off democratic principles for other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, and policy preferences. We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence. Our findings echo classic arguments about the importance of political moderation and cross-cutting cleavages for democratic stability and highlight the dangers that polarization represents for democracy.
We show that this conventional wisdom [overwhelming public support for democracy dating back to Tocqueville] rests on fragile foundations. Rather than asking about support for democracy directly, we adopt an approach that infers Americans’ commitment to democratic principles from their choices of candidates in hypothetical election scenarios. Each candidate is experimentally assigned attributes and platforms that approximate real-world elections and, crucially, may endorse positions that violate core democratic principles, including free and fair elections, civil liberties, and checks and balances. In this framework, voters “support democracy” not when they say so, but rather when their choices reveal a preference for democratic principles over other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, or policy preferences.
The following is a summary of our experimental findings:
1. Americans value democracy, but not much: A candidate who considers adopting an undemocratic position can expect to be punished by losing only about 11.7% of his overall vote share. When we restrict attention to candidate-choice scenarios with combinations of partisanship and policies that we typically see in real-world elections, this punishment drops to 3.5%.
2. Support for democracy is highly elastic: When the price of voting for a more democratic candidate is that candidate’s greater distance from the voter in terms of her preferred policies, even the most centrist voters are willing to tolerate at most a 10–15% increase in such a distance.
3. Centrists are a pro-democratic force: “Centrist” voters who see small policy differences between candidates punish undemocratic behavior at four times the rate of “extremist” voters who strongly favor one of the candidates.
4. Most voters are partisans first and democrats only second: Only about 13.1% of our respondents are willing to defect from a co-partisan candidate for violating democratic principles when the price of doing so is voting against their own party. Only independents and partisan “leaners” support more democratic candidates enough to defeat undemocratic ones regardless of their partisan affiliation.
5. Supporters of both parties employ a partisan “double standard”: Respondents who identify as Republican are more willing to punish undemocratic behavior by Democratic Party than Republican Party candidates and vice versa. These effects are about equal among both Democrat and Republican respondents.A couple of points jump right out of the research. First, political extremism and polarization on the left and right tend to be anti-democratic. Second, hard core partisan voters believe they are supporting democracy even when they vote for anti-democratic candidates. As we all know, what people believe to be true can be mostly true, mostly ambiguous or mostly false. That argues for the importance and morality of honest speech and the deep immorality of dark free speech and the damage to democracy it causes.
Consider the characteristics of a cult:
‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections
Placing operatives as poll workers and building a "hotline" to friendly attorneys are among the strategies to be deployed in Michigan and other swing states.Video recordings of Republican Party operatives meeting with grassroots activists provide an inside look at a multi-pronged strategy to target and potentially overturn votes in Democratic precincts: Install trained recruits as regular poll workers and put them in direct contact with party attorneys.
The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.
“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” said Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.
Backing up those front-line workers, “it’s going to be an army,” Seifried promised at an Oct. 5 training session. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”Separately, POLITICO obtained Zoom tapings of Tim Griffin, legal counsel to The Amistad Project, a self-described election-integrity group that Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once portrayed as a “partner” in the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, meeting with activists from multiple states and discussing plans for identifying friendly district attorneys who could stage real-time interventions in local election disputes.
On the recording, Griffin speaks of building a nationwide network of district attorney allies and how to create a legal “trap” for Winfrey.
“Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” Griffin said during a Sept. 21 meeting. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.,” he said.
In the introduction graphic on his training presentation, Seifried says the RNC’s goal is to “make it easy to vote and HARD TO CHEAT.”
The recordings are among the first windows into what former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon, who’s been urging listeners to his podcast to take on election leadership positions, calls “the precinct strategy.”
But Penniman, the election watchdog, believes the strategy is designed to create enough disputes to justify intervention by GOP-controlled state legislatures, who declined to take such steps in 2020.
When polarization shifts into survivalist mode, democracy is in danger“I went to Congress as a collaborator, and now I'm in an environment where the Republicans want to rule or ruin-- that's the mindset,” Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA) told me in January. “There's no room for collaboration…Do you believe in rule of law or do you believe in violence? That's the battle in Washington right now.”
Rep. Swalwell’s comment, which reflects a political class that is deeply divided, prompts thoughts on polarization. We often hear about polarization as a fixed state of affairs, rather than as a process that can deepen if there is a political will driving it, as there is in the US today.
Disaffection with liberal democracy, rising economic inequality, and social media’s exposure of billions to disinformation are among the factors that have contributed to the spread of polarization around the world, as studies show. Polarization is likely here to stay, and democracies need to find ways to contain and reverse it.History is clear on who benefits from polarization: It’s never democracies. For a century, anti-democratic movements and parties have encouraged it. When it is joined to an illiberal political design, polarization can become “energized,” shading into survivalist states of mind.
In the hands of authoritarians, the low-level rancor of me vs. you can become me or you –the idea that only one of us can survive the encounter – leading to violence and other lawless behaviors. It is deeply worrying that in the US, Republicans are not just accelerating polarization, but shifting into survivalist mode.
Polarization, like propaganda, feeds on existing biases and tribalist impulses that are continually refreshed as we do research on line or scroll through the news, absorbing algorithmically-selected ads and friend/follow suggestions.Illiberal [Germaine’s label: neo-fascist] politicians and their media allies build on this, feeding us images and rhetoric designed to encourage anti-democratic behaviors and outcomes. Media disinformation and conspiracy theories that undermine shared assumptions and truths act in harmony with political polarization, creating enemies and scapegoats that further foment division, suspicion and hostility.
The global right’s exploitation of the pandemic to destroy accepted scientific and public health practices is one example. Schools, town councils, hospitals and clinics become sites of conflict. Anti-science aggression (to use Peter Hotez’s term) and hostility to education have turned previously respected community members, like teachers, health officials, and nurses, into enemies.
Polarization is just the start of a process that aims to get people into a state of fear about losing everything, preparing them to accept authoritarian solutions to democratic issues of free speech and coexistence with diversity.
You might have noticed that many of the same Republicans who insisted that “voter fraud” cast doubt on Donald Trump’s 2020 loss mysteriously don’t see fraud at play in elections that they win. This is routinely described as “hypocrisy.”But the “hypocrisy” charge doesn’t do this justice. Because embedded in this tactic is something more than mere political double talk. It embodies an actual principle of sorts: that when Republicans lose elections, the voting can be presumed illegitimate or suspect, and when Republicans win them, the voting can be presumed legitimate and above suspicion entirely.
Usefully enough, Rep. Mo Brooks has now stepped forward to confirm this. And the Alabama Republican’s corroboration is noteworthy in light of emerging details about a complex new GOP plan to make this principle actionable in future elections.Brooks’s latest comes in a New York Times piece that reports on the selective approach that Republicans take with charges of voter fraud. As the Times notes, this exposes a “fundamental contradiction,” in which those charges are used to challenge GOP losses but not GOP wins.Pressed further by the Times, Brooks blithely suggested that in Alabama, the fraud took place “in predominantly Democrat parts of the state.”
You see, in primaries decided by Republican voters in red areas, the voting is pure and unsullied. By contrast, in general elections that Democrats are trying to steal from Republicans, the voting in blue areas is marred by widespread fraud.That form of fraud alleged by Brooks happens to be virtually nonexistent. But the point is that the mere assertion that something illicit happened is the coin of the realm here. It’s meant to give some kind of patina of a public rationale for naked efforts to subvert election losses.
