Americans agree that the 2024 election will be pivotal for democracy, but for different reasons

WASHINGTON — In a politically polarized nation, Americans seem to agree on one issue underlying the 2024 elections — a worry over the state of democracy and how the outcome of the presidential contest will affect its future.

They just disagree over who poses the threat.

A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 62% of adults say democracy in the U.S. could be at risk depending on who wins next fall. Majorities of Democrats (72%) and Republicans (55%) feel the same way, but for different reasons.

President Joe Biden has attempted to paint a dystopian future if GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump returns to the White House after promising to seek retribution against opponents and declining to rule out that he would abuse the powers of the office. The former president has tried to flip the narrative lately, saying the election subversion and documents cases against him show Biden has weaponized the federal government to prosecute a political opponent. He has called Biden the “destroyer of American democracy.”

“I think from the side of the left, it’s pretty obvious that they’re concerned about electing a president who is avowedly authoritarian, someone who clearly wants to reduce checks and balances within the government to strengthen the presidency and to do so in ways that give the executive branch kind of an unprecedented reach across the population and sectors of the government,” said Michael Albertus, political science professor at the University of Chicago.

“From the right, the Republicans think about government overreach, big government, threats to freedom and mandates to act in a certain way or adopt certain policies,” he said.

Against that backdrop, the poll found that about half of U.S. adults, 51%, say democracy is working “not too well” or “not well at all.”

The poll asked about the importance of the coming presidential election for 12 issues and found that the percentage who said the outcome will be very or extremely important to the future of democracy in the U.S. (67%) ranked behind only the economy (75%). It was about equal to the percentage who said that about government spending (67%) and immigration (66%).

Tony Motes, a retired firefighter who lives in Monroe, Georgia, cited a number of reasons he believes “we’re not living in a complete democracy.” That includes what he sees as a deterioration of rights, including parental rights, thieves and other criminals not being held accountable, and a lack of secure borders.

The 59-year-old Republican also said the various criminal cases being brought against Trump undermine the country’s democratic traditions.

“They’re trying to keep him from running because they know he’s going to win,” he said.

The poll’s findings continue a trend of Americans’ lackluster views about how democracy is functioning. They also believe the country’s governing system is not working well to reflect their interests on issues ranging from immigration to abortion to the economy.

Robert Lieberman, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, has studied the fall of democracies elsewhere and the common elements that feed their demise.

The factors include polarization, growing ethnic or racial antagonism, rising economic inequality and a concentration of power under a country’s executive officeholder.

“For a number of years now, the United States has had all four of these conditions, really for the first time in history,” he said. “So we’re in a period that’s ripe for challenges to democracy.”

Trump is not the cause of the pattern, Lieberman said, but “seems to have an unerring instinct to make things worse, and he certainly has authoritarian impulses and a lot of followers who seem to validate or applaud him.”

The AP-NORC poll found that 87% of Democrats and 54% of independents believe a second Trump term would negatively affect U.S. democracy. For Republicans, 82% believe democracy would be weakened by another Biden win, with 56% of independents agreeing.

About 2 in 10 U.S. adults (19%) say democracy in the U.S. is “already so seriously broken that it doesn’t matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.”