American democracy optimism vs. pessimism
A stars & stripes pros-and-cons list
When it comes to elections, we can’t run randomized controlled trials to determine what made the difference in each race. What we can do is dispassionately assess the evidence and see what patterns emerge. The longer I’ve sat with the still-incomplete 2022 election results, the clearer it seems that a pro-democracy, pro-reality, anti-extremist majority stepped-up to defeat right-wing conspiracists and radicals, especially in the key swing states.
In Arizona, mainstream Democrats Mark Kelly and Katie Hobbs defeated Trump-endorsed, Big Lie-supporting Blake Masters and Kari Lake in the races for U.S. Senate and governor by 5 points and 1 point, respectively. In contrast, Republican Kimberly Yee, who had initially cozied up to Trump during her brief primary campaign for governor, ultimately ran a mainstream campaign for reelection as state treasurer and defeated her Democratic opponent by 12 points.
In Nevada, Republican Big Lie supporters Adam Laxalt and Jim Marchant lost their races for Senate and secretary of state, while Republican Joe Lombardo, who disavowed the Big Lie and ran a more traditional campaign on economic issues, was elected governor.
In Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger were reelected by comfortable margins, while Trump-backed looney-toon Herschel Walker lost narrowly to Democrat Rafael Warnock (under an unusual Georgia state law, because neither candidate received 50 percent of the vote, the race now heads to a runoff).
In Michigan, where the three main Republican statewide candidates were Big Lie supporters1, Democrats ran the table. In fact, both Governor Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson actually won by wider margins than they had in 2018, a Democratic wave election.
This is all incredibly good news. Especially in contrast to the vibes in final weeks of the campaign, which included a rising cacophony of increasingly aggressive fascist messages like these:
At the time, I observed:
It’s as if people who harbor bigoted beliefs are realizing not only is there no social penalty for being openly fascist, in some cases expressing hateful ideas publicly is status enhancing because it attracts other people with the same inclinations. And so they grow bolder.
I think my assessment of their mindset was basically correct, but the aspiring fascists appear to have misread the appetite of the American people for bigoted dominance politics. There’s still a social penalty for fascism, at least on the margins.
So where does this leave us? The results were much better than expected and about as good as we could hope with an unpopular president and the highest inflation in two generations. Does that mean the risks to American democracy have receded and we’re in the clear? Somewhat and no. The risks are less than they were two weeks ago but our democracy still faces serious challenges.
In this strange, liminal moment when it’s hard to get a feel for the currents in American society, I decided to make a pros-and-cons-style list of reasons to be optimistic and reasons to be pessimistic about American democracy in 2022.
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Reasons to be optimistic about American democracy
First: The election was carried out with very few hiccups. In my election preview article, The 2022 midterms viewed through a survival-of-democracy lens, I listed the things that had to go right to pull off a normal, successful election:
[R]equesting and receiving absentee ballots, finding precincts, casting ballots, deterring and punishing voter intimidation, counting votes, recording vote counts, certifying vote tallies, formalizing results, announcing winners, conceding losses, and handling Election Day and post-election lawsuits in accordance with the rule of law.
Impressively, we’ve achieved almost all of these. I think the single most surprising to me was radical nutjob and Republican gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, conceding his loss (albeit in writing). Tudor Dixon in Michigan did the same, as did most Republican candidates. And although a number of them refused to commit ahead of time to abiding by the results of the election, not a single Republican has cried “stolen election” or tried to whip up anger with claims of fraud (we’re still waiting to see if Kari Lake will embrace reality or go the conspiracist-whiner route).
One of the factors that was most worrisome and hardest to assess given its breadth was the “precinct strategy” pushed by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.
When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.
These Republican Big Lie-believers apparently interfered relatively little if at all with the administration of voting and vote-counting. I would love to read some additional color on this but so far I haven’t seen much reporting. The lack of stories is probably a sign of a system functioning as intended, which is the best possible outcome.
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Second: As the above results show, a small but decisive majority of voters in swing states appears to have rejected unsubstantiated conspiracy theories like Trump's Big Lie and the dangerous politicians who promoted them. Not only did Democrats hold or gain a seat in the U.S. Senate (depending on the outcome of the Georgia runoff on December 6th) and nearly hold the U.S. House, but 4 of the 5 states that swung from Trump to Biden between 2016 and 20202 will have Democratic governors in 2024. The one that won't, Georgia, has a Republican governor and secretary of state who acted with integrity in the counting and certifying of votes in 2020.3
These results are important on their own terms, but even more so because they shift the incentives for future Republican candidates.4 Running for office is hard work and it’s not something most potential candidates will do unless they think they have a chance to win. Beyond one or two issues they believe in deeply, most candidates don’t want to take positions that will make it harder to win. The next crop of Republican candidates will soften their rhetoric on the Big Lie, and some will try to avoid it altogether.
It’s more important what elected officials will do in office than what they say while trying to get elected, but in practice the two are closely connected. Less inflammatory rhetoric will reduce right-wing demand for dangerous, destabilizing conduct in office.
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Third: The races for election administration-related roles in the key 2024 swing states were ALL won by non-election deniers! Of these 10 critical offices, 3 were won by Republicans who rejected the Big Lie (Georgia governor, Georgia secretary of state, and Nevada governor), and the other 7 were won by Democrats running against Republican election deniers. These ten people will oversee the 2024 election in the decisive swing states.
Michigan governor & secretary of state
Pennsylvania governor (secretary of state is appointed by the governor)
Wisconsin governor (secretary of state is not chief elections officer)
Arizona governor & secretary of state
Georgia governor & secretary of state
Nevada governor & secretary of state
A clean sweep of the races I flagged in my pre-election article as being essential for a free-and-fair election in 2024!
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Fourth: The fierce backlash against actual and potential abortion bans.
Democratic campaigns invested more heavily in abortion rights than any other topic, riding a wave of anger after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. In total, Democrats and their allies spent nearly half a billion dollars on ads mentioning abortion…
Voters in three states — California, Vermont and highly contested Michigan — protected abortion rights in their state constitutions. In Kentucky, the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s home state, voters rejected an anti-abortion amendment.
In several states where the future of abortion rights rested on the outcomes of state legislative and governor’s races, voters said the issue was pivotal, according to exit polls conducted by TV networks and Edison Research. In Pennsylvania, abortion overtook the economy as the top issue on voters’ minds. Democrats there won a Senate race, critical to their hopes of maintaining a Senate majority, as well as the governor’s mansion...
In Michigan, where nearly half of voters said abortion was their top issue, Democrats won both chambers of the Legislature and re-elected Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, giving the party a trifecta of power for the first time in 40 years.
Shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade I wrote: I should put my cards on the table and say my expectation is the reversal of Roe will be a nontrivial political headwind for Republicans in the coming years. That turned out to be true this year, but will it remain so moving forward? I suspect the answer is yes, for reasons I detailed in the same piece:
1) abortion rights are popular and have been for decades (and more popular among younger cohorts that have lower turnout rates and therefore contain many more not-yet-voting eligible voters than older cohorts do); 2) the intensity gap, which for my whole life has favored Republicans, has flipped (see the FiveThirtyEight chart below); 3) abortion rights are an issue that affects people’s lives directly and intensely, and which many therefore can’t ignore, e.g., a pregnancy scare for a not-ready-for-kids couple in a red or purple state is now a much more precarious, high-stakes predicament than when Roe was the law of the land; 4) even though #3 is also true of, for example, health care, that’s an area like many where policy is complex and it can be hard to tell exactly what each party would do, whereas abortion is straightforward and it’s clear which party is on which side; and 5) as I wrote this week, Republicans can only moderate their unpopular position a little bit before they anger their base – they’re stuck.
It’s #3 in that list that makes me think abortion bans are more likely to grow in salience and political significance than they are to fade: “abortion rights are an issue that affects people’s lives directly and intensely, and which many therefore can’t ignore.” This is a fact of life that’s not going to change, it will just have more time to affect more people’s lives.
At the same time anti-abortion activists may try to build on their abortion victory at the Supreme Court by restricting the use of plan B or even birth control pills, which would amplify the backlash against these invasive, oppressive polices.
Now the bad news…
Reasons to be pessimistic about American democracy
First: Although many of the most toxic election deniers lost in swing states, their races were uncomfortably close. It’s good that Kari Lake is projected to lose her race for Arizona governor to Democratic governor-elect Katie Hobbs, but she’s only losing by 0.8 percentage points (with most but not all votes counted). Lake spent her campaign promoting the Big Lie and talking like a fascist propagandist. Among other things, she:
Campaigned with insurrection strategist Steven Bannon in the final week of the campaign.
Called absurd conspiracist Mike Lindell, aka the My Pillow Guy, “one of the great patriots of our time.”
Said Cindy McCain, widow of war hero and iconic Arizonan John McCain, “wants to end America.”
Advocated perp walks for election officials.
Called the media “the right hand of the the devil, the scourge of the earth.”
After all that, she came within less than 1 percent of winning the governorship of a key swing state.
Similarly, Tim Michels in Wisconsin came within 3 points of winning his state’s governorship a week after saying, “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I'm elected governor.”
These semi-fascist radicals lost, and we’re grateful they did. But they came *awfully* close to winning.5 If one or two things had gone differently, who knows what would have happened.
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Second: The Republican voters who nominated Big Lie-endorsers haven’t gone anywhere. In upcoming 2024 Republican primary elections, the non-crazy candidates will have a useful argument to make: that nominating election deniers is a losing strategy. Maybe the argument will work, maybe it won’t.
Either way, the ongoing participation in politics and public life of Americans who voted for Kari Lake, Tim Michels, Doug Mastriano, Mark Finchem, et al means it would be folly to assume our democracy is now safe.
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Third: Despite Democratic electoral success in 2022, the legislatures in most of the key swing states are still controlled by Republicans. That means if the U.S. Supreme Court endorses the bonkers, ahistorical, constitutionally illogical “independent legislature” theory this term, Republicans would still have an opening to steal the 2024 election in broad daylight. To do it, Republican-controlled legislatures would need to 1) create enough chaos and confusion in the voting and vote-counting processes that they could claim the election was inconclusive, 2) vote for and send to Congress their own slate of (Republican) electors, and 3) withstand legal challenges and popular unrest.
This threat was mitigated somewhat when Michigan Democrats shocked everyone by winning back both houses of the state legislature, and Pennsylvania Democrats appear to have won a bare majority in the state House. With Nevada’s legislature controlled by Democrats, that leaves the legislatures in Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina positioned to wreak havoc in 2024.
Importantly, the rejection of anti-democracy candidates in the 2022 midterms is a signal to would be election-stealers that a majority will punish at the polls those who attack democracy. This gives Democrats and pro-democracy Republicans more leverage to push back against such an effort if it were to materialize.
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Fourth: The mainstream political press remains terrible. Its reliance on advertising and its culture has mired it in a “both sides” partisan equivalence framework from which it’s failed to extricate itself. I have little new to add to this longstanding debate, but credulous news coverage featuring an everything-is-fine tone and normalizing “Democrats argue… Republicans claim…” framing is an enormous problem in a time of restless fascist energy.
The future remains cloudy and American democracy could still be in trouble, but we’re in a much better place than we were a few weeks ago.
The biggest variable in the future of American democracy is one I haven’t discussed here: the internet media ecosystem and its impact on society and politics. I have some thoughts percolating but I’m going to let them simmer a bit longer before sharing. (Hint: keep an eye on whether Fox News and other right-wing media can sustain their effort to blame Trump for the disappointing election results or if they end up reversing course as they have previously.)
And the fourth, Republican lieutenant governor nominee Shane Hernandez, was a slightly more muted election denier.
Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia.
In other important ways, it's worth saying, like establishing the rules under which elections will be held, Kemp and Raffensperger are little different from their vote-suppressing peers. And Kemp's conduct in 2018, when he was the Republican nominee for governor as well as the sitting secretary of state administering Georgia’s elections, was especially egregious.
In all of this, I proceed from the proposition that for American democracy to thrive it needs both of its major parties to be committed to democracy, which includes trusting effective voting processes and conceding publicly and gracefully when you lose.
The pushback here is that in a time of polarized politics, small margins can be bigger than they appear and small movements are more significant than their magnitude reveals.
Thank you for the insightful analysis. I don't know whether to be pessimistic or optimistic. Some unknown event may arise to bring us together as a nation or the centrifugal forces may strengthen and create two uneasy nations sharing the same flag and continent but to all intents and purposes estranged from each other. Some seem to want that. E pluribus pluribis.