Take a look at polling data and you might get the impression that there is a glorious, bipartisan consensus that our democracy is in trouble and needs nurturing. In reality, there are profoundly dissonant chords in the democracy chorus.
Start with the seemingly good news: A New York Times/Sienna poll from fall 2022, for example, found that 71% of Americans agreed that “democracy is currently under threat.” There was hardly a wisp of difference across party lines: 74% of Democrats agreed, but so did 72% of Republicans and 71% of independents. Kumbaya, my lord!
Such data has encouraged conservatives to dismiss the effort of Democrats, starting with President Biden, to insist that in the 2024 election, “democracy is on the ballot.” The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins Jr., for instance, recently referenced a February NBC News poll showing Biden and Donald Trump essentially tied on the issue of who would best protect democracy — 43% of voters preferred Biden, 41% picked the former president. He concluded, “pollsters find Trump voters every bit as concerned about democracy as Biden voters.”
If only that were true. In reality, only on one side of politics is democracy a voting issue, and the other would render our system less democratic by making it harder for voters to cast ballots.
That Times/Sienna poll was instructive here. It asked voters what concerned them more about elections: “that some people will cast votes illegally” or that “some eligible voters won’t have a fair chance to vote.”
The country split right down the middle: 46% worried about illegal voting, 48% about voter suppression. That’s because partisans were entirely at odds: 82% of Republicans were more concerned about voters casting illegal ballots while 76% of Democrats were more concerned about voters not getting a fair chance to vote.
This divide has led to radically different voting policies, state by state, depending on which party holds sway. The Post’s Patrick Marley reported that in Michigan, controlled by Democrats, voting will be easier in 2024 than it was in 2020, whereas North Carolina, where Republicans hold a veto-proof legislative majority, has erected new barriers to the ballot box.
And during his recent pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to earn kudos from Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) pitched a federal bill to require proof of citizenship from those who would register to vote. Since Trump believes that any election he loses must have been rigged, Johnson’s effort must have warmed the former president’s heart.
This is not some honest disagreement about whether voting should be easier or harder. New barriers to voting and voter purges are being rationalized to solve problems that don’t exist because there is no evidence — zip — that fraud is a problem in our system.
Noncitizen voting in federal and state elections is already illegal everywhere, and studies by the Brennan Center for Justice concluded that “votes by non-citizens account for between 0.0003% and 0.001% of all votes cast.” A separate Brennan Center report estimated incident rates for overall voter fraud between 0.0003% and 0.0025%.
When someone offers policy changes based on claims devoid of any factual support, it’s fair to suspect that something other than solving a real problem is motivating their proposals. On this, the Times/Sienna poll provided an important clue: It found that while 95% of Democrats said Biden was the “legitimate winner” in 2020, only 31% of Republicans said this. Their objection is to the outcome, not the process.
Bear in mind that the voting changes introduced to make it easier to vote during the pandemic — simpler early and mail voting, widely available ballot drop boxes and the like — produced by far the largest numerical turnout in our history. Holding a successful election in a health crisis was a great victory for democracy and, by the way, the emergency reforms helped Trump get 11.2 million more votes in 2020 than he got in 2016. Yet Republicans seem eager to roll back participation.
The acid test of whether both sides are equally concerned about an issue is the degree to which it motivates their respective electoral coalitions. And here, the data is unambiguous: Democracy is a core concern for Democrats in a way it is not for Republicans. It’s not even close.
In a March Quinnipiac poll, voters who listed preserving democracy as the most urgent issue facing the country favored Biden over Trump in a head-to-head matchup by 85% to 12%. That’s because 32% of Democrats listed preserving democracy as the campaign’s most important issue; only 5% of Republicans did.
In his book “Democracy and Its Critics,” the legendary political scientist Robert A. Dahl argued that democracy was inspired by “the vision of people governing themselves as political equals, and possessing all the resources and institutions necessary to do so.” Tearing down barriers to participation is more consistent with this goal than erecting them.
I wish Biden were wrong in saying democracy is on the ballot this year. Unfortunately, he’s not.
Follow E.J. Dionne Jr. @EJDionne on X (formerly Twitter). Distributed by The Washington Post.
