Over the past three years, the world's oldest democracy has been tested in ways not seen in decades.
A sitting president tried to overturn an election and his supporters stormed the Capitol to prevent the winner from taking power. Supporters of that attack launched a campaign against local election offices, ousting experienced administrators and pushing conservative states to pass new laws that made it harder to vote.
At the same time, the past three years have proven that American democracy is resilient.
Former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results failed, blocked by the checks and balances of the constitutional system, and he is now being sued at both the federal and state levels for these efforts. Then the voters intervened. In every presidential battleground state, they rejected all candidates who supported Trump's stolen election lies and ran for government offices that had some oversight of the election.
The country's election infrastructure performed well, with only scattered disruptions during the 2022 midterm elections. New voting laws, many of which are technical and incremental, had little discernible impact on actual voting.
“Voters have taken action in recent years to defend our democracy,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United, which tracks those who refuse to believe in the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. “State and local officials have done tremendous work in protecting our free and fair elections.”
So why all the worry? As Lydgate and anyone working in the field of democracy is quick to point out, the big test – what Lydgate calls “the Super Bowl” – awaits in 2024.
Trump is running for the White House again and is dominating the Republican primaries as the first votes approach. He has called for clemency for those prosecuted for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, continues to falsely insist the 2020 election was “stolen” and says he will use the federal government to retaliate for his political enemies.
Trump has consistently used authoritarian rhetoric in his campaign for the Republican nomination. If he wins, allies plan to expand the government with loyalists so that bureaucracy doesn't get in the way of Trump's more controversial plans as it did during his first term.
It has gotten to the point where Trump was recently asked by conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt if he planned to become a dictator: “Not at all,” Trump replied. 'No, I am going to govern as someone who is very popular with the people.'
The 2024 election could bring about all kinds of conflict, including scenarios that have not materialized despite widespread concern since 2020: violence at the ballot box, overly aggressive partisan poll watchers, or vote count glitches.
However, it seems unlikely that Trump could return to the White House if he loses the election. That's what he failed to do in 2020, and now he's in a weaker position.
His strategy then was to use Republican dominance in state legislatures, governorships and secretaries of state to try to send a series of fake electors to Congress, even as Democrat Joe Biden won those states and captured the presidency.
Since then, Republicans have lost two of those swing secretaries of state — in Arizona and Nevada — the governor's office in Arizona and control of state legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In Congress, lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill that closed a number of loopholes in the counting of Electoral College votes that Trump tried to exploit to stay in office, making it harder to challenge state certifications in the House of Representatives .
The result is that it will be much harder for Trump to reverse a loss in 2024 than in 2020. The most likely way he returns to the White House is by winning the election outright.
“That doesn't mean the risks have gone away,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It means that we have successfully fought the last war.”
History is replete with examples of authoritarians who first came to power by winning legitimate democratic elections. But the risk to democracy of someone legitimately winning an election is different from the risk of a candidate trying to overturn an election loss.
When Trump began falsely claiming he won the 2020 election and urging Republicans to overrule the electors in their states and send his electors to Congress, every GOP official with the power to do so refused . Republican leaders of the Michigan Legislature rejected his request to overrule the voters. In Georgia, where the presidential election was counted three times and Biden's victory was certified, Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger earned Trump's ire by censuring him. So did then-Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and the Republican leaders of that state's legislature.
Some Republicans tried to help Trump. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led a group of seventeen Republican Party attorneys general in filing a lawsuit urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the election. The Supreme Court quickly dismissed the case. Trump lost all but one of the more than 60 lawsuits he and his allies filed in states to overturn the election, sometimes before judges he appointed.
Then in November 2022, every swing state candidate who supported Trump's attempt to reverse his loss and ran for statewide office with a role in the election lost.
“There's little doubt that our democracy has been in disarray lately, but we've decided we like it compared to the alternative,” said Justin Levitt, who spent two years as a democracy and voting rights adviser in the Biden. White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Election deniers have been able to make gains in one area: offices where they simply have to win a Republican primary. That means they have seized power in local governments in many rural areas, often disrupting elections and embracing conspiracy theories or procedures such as counting by hand, which is less reliable and more time-consuming than mapping thousands voting on machines.
They have also managed to expand their power within Republican legislatures, from statehouses to Congress. U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who helped organize a brief in support of the quickly dismissed lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden's victory, is now the speaker of the House of Representatives.
If Johnson retains his speakership in January 2025, he could be in a position to disrupt the certification of a Biden victory. Republicans who are more willing to undermine democracy could also have greater influence in state legislatures.
Then there is the opinion of Trump supporters. They report that they are even more concerned about democracy than those who oppose him. Normally, party members without power feel like democracy isn't working very well for them, but Trump's situation is different. He is the first president in history to be prosecuted and is pushing the narrative that he is being persecuted by his likely opponent in the general election.
Trump says the criminal cases and separate efforts to bar him from voting under the Constitution's insurrection clause constitute a form of election interference.
The Colorado Supreme Court found that his role in the Jan. 6 attack was sufficient grounds to remove him from the state's ballot under the 14th Amendment. Trump's campaign said it will soon appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, where three of his nominees help form the conservative majority. On Thursday, Maine's Democratic secretary of state removed Trump from that state's primary, becoming the first election official to take such action. Shenna Bellows stayed her ruling until the Maine court system decides the case.
During his campaign, Trump has adopted an “I'm rubber and you're glue” approach, accusing Biden of being the real threat to democracy.
A more revealing argument comes from a claim one of the former president's lawyers made before the Colorado Supreme Court. Scott Gessler, a former Colorado secretary of state, argued against efforts by a liberal group to remove Trump from the ballot.
“If the entire nation elects someone as president, can that be an insurrection or is that a democratic choice?” Gessler asked.
Gessler was talking about the hypothetical case of a former Confederacy winning the White House in the 19th century, but it's easy to see how this applies to the election ahead.
Or, as Levitt said of American democracy: “It's kind of up to us how resilient we make it.”