Why Voters Are Worried About Democracy, In Their Own Words
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I, for one, truly, truly believe that if Donald Trump were to win this election, democracy as we know it is dead. No confidence in the way they run the elections for sure. There's always been an effort to take away people's right to vote. Everybody here is trying to figure out who is the lesser of the two evils.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Concerns about democracy are going to be central to the 2024 election. Late last year, Gallup recorded a record low, going back to the 1980s, for the number of Americans who are satisfied with the way democracy is working. It was just 28%.

In the latest New York Times-Siena College polling, 14% of registered voters said the political and economic system in America needs to be torn down entirely, and another 55% said it needs major changes.

At first blush, that looks like a bipartisan consensus. Democracy is struggling. But of course, different voters mean very different things when they express concern about our system of government. There are concerns about another January 6th-style attack or former President Trump's norm-breaking behavior. There are also false claims about rigged elections that a majority of Republican voters believe.

And there are concerns that predate any of this. Things like the undue influence of the wealthy, self-serving politicians, or gerrymandering. To better understand how Americans are thinking about democracy heading into the 2024 election, FiveThirtyEight teamed up with Perry Undum, a nonpartisan research firm, to conduct focus groups with voters.

We heard from those focus groups on the economy a couple weeks ago, and today we're going to hear from them on democracy. FiveThirtyEight senior politics reporter Monica Potts listened into those groups, and she's here now to talk about it. Welcome back, Monica. Thanks for having me, Galen. I'll also say that later in the show, we're going to speak with Brightline Watch about the polling that they've been doing of both Americans and experts on threats to democracy.

But Monica, just to start things off, what was the overall tenor of these conversations? How do people feel about democracy? You know, it was interesting because it really varied between the group of voters that was leaning towards voting for Biden and the group of voters that was leaning toward voting for Trump.

The Biden leaners were still very worried about Trump's activities before and after the last election in 2020 when they felt he undermined a free and fair election. Of course, he's facing charges for some of his activities now related to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. And they are worried about something like that happening again. They felt like that shouldn't be happening in the United States, that this was not how adults acted. And the fact that, you know, this

pretty big portion of Americans didn't trust the results of the election and a political party was undermining the results of the election were really big problems for our democracy. But they also had more structural complaints, which included that the electoral college itself is not fair,

that the whole system is geared toward the wealthy. Those were the complaints we heard from the Biden leaders. From the Trump leaders, what surprised me is that they really repeated a lot of, I guess, what we would call conspiracy theories or at least things that have been proven to be untrue. The idea that illegal immigrants are voting in elections, the idea that dead people are voting in elections.

And those are the kinds of, you know, ideas and conspiracies that have been spreading along the right that do undermine faith in the results of the election. And so if people are worried about another January 6th style attack happening, those are the kinds of sentiments that might fuel such an attack again if Trump were to lose or if the election is very close in 2024. Yeah.

So let's hear what the voters had to say. And we're going to start with a Biden leaner from Michigan.

I, for one, truly, truly believe that if Donald Trump were to win this election, democracy as we know it is dead. I mean, honestly, I really believe that there will be an authoritarian because he's got nothing to lose after that. I really, really fear that there might not be another election in 2028 if he actually gets in. And that's specific not to the Republican Party, but to that particular person, that man.

and those who enable him. Monica, I have to say that that doesn't sound like an undecided voter to me. And we should say here that both focus groups that you listened in on were undecided voters, but one group leaned towards Trump and one group leaned towards Biden. This, of course, is a Biden leaner. But how does he come to the conclusion that a potential authoritarian government is at stake in the 2024 election, but yet he's undecided?

Well, he did tell me that when push comes to shove, he's going to vote for Biden. He's going to vote for the Democratic Party. The issues that each group of voters had that kept them from being firmly in the camp or one camp or another differed. For a lot of the Biden leaners, they really were worried about his age. And they're worried that something's going to happen before the election or they were sort of

on both sides, people were kind of waiting for a potential third party option to emerge. And that was something that they really felt like also undermined democracy, the fact that they only had these two choices that they weren't 100% happy with, they wished that we had a viable third party in the United States. I think that might just be particular to them. Because again, these are undecideds. These are kind of people who aren't firm partisans one way or another. So this was

One of the things that they expressed that they felt like wasn't very democratic about our system as it exists. You mentioned that amongst the Trump leaners, you heard conspiracy theories. And I think we should listen to some of what they had to say to give a sense. And so here's a Trump leaner from North Carolina.

I turn on the news and I hear all these people who are, you know, running past our border and then we're turning around and giving them all this funding and even allowing them to vote in our election. And we also have another similar sentiment from a Trump leaner from Wisconsin. No confidence in the way they run the elections for sure. When you have dead people supposedly voting, I think there's a problem. Yeah.

Now, the sentiment that we heard from those voters in North Carolina and Wisconsin are rooted in conspiracy theory. And, you know, we know from all of the court cases that played out after the 2020 election that there was no evidence for any of the things that Trump claimed. And fair-minded people on both sides conclude that it was a legitimate election. But nonetheless, as we see, these kinds of things happen.

continue to permeate the electorate. And I should say that this is sort of even above and beyond some of the things that were talked about related to the 2020 election. So where is this coming from? Is it mainly the former president himself or is it the broader conservative media ecosystem? I

I think it's the latter. I talked to a couple of people after the fact and I asked them, you know, how did they know these things or where they heard these things? And they said, oh, from you guys, from the media. This is what I hear from the media. And I think this really speaks to something that we know from a lot of research and also just intuitively, which is that

Not everyone is closely reading and following the news every day or evaluating evidence or looking for kind of original sources. And it can be hard for those of us who are steeped in the news every day to remember. People sort of hear things. Sometimes they hear things from their friends. Sometimes they hear things on snippets on their drive to work from talk radio. And so they hear these things and they take these things as true. And a lot of that depends on who's around them.

For lack of a better word, a lot of it is vibes. And then they kind of make decisions based on that. And so the polls might pick up those decisions. But that was part of why we wanted to do these focus groups is to delve more into what was driving these decisions and opinions that people have. And I think that the broad conservative community

ecosystem is repeating a lot of these things. And we even heard Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, say the other day, he said something like, we know intuitively that illegal immigrants are voting in federal elections. Actually, we don't know that. As you mentioned, almost every real fair evaluation of the issue has found that in-person voter fraud is vanishingly rare, that

undocumented immigrants are not voting in federal elections. And that when voter fraud does happen, it's generally found and prosecuted. Exactly. Exactly. And so making policy decisions or making electoral decisions or as a voter making voting decisions based on these ideas is really difficult.

All right. You all discussed January 6th directly. So let's hear what Biden and Trump leaners had to say about that. And it was kind of interesting in that there was a little bit of overlap. But then what happened between then and now was where people diverged. So first, we're going to hear from a Biden leaner from Virginia.

That was really hard to watch because I spent a lot of time in D.C. I lived there. And honestly, I'm originally from Mexico. So for me, coming to this country was just a great opportunity. And, you know, it was just the American dream. Of course, we were here. And when I saw that, honestly, I cried. I was like, my kids are going to be left in this craziness.

All right. And on the other hand, we have a Trump leaner from Nevada. Some of my initial reactions the day it happened were quite extreme. I felt what we were watching was horrific and frightening and wrong.

When you back away to get a little more historical review, you discover that there are things that happened that weren't as what they first appeared, as well as those that were accurate. And you start to have more of a balance of it. That's sort of where I am now. I still think overall it was a wrong action. I don't think.

Anybody should have been going in there. They should have stayed out. They should have protested. They should have done whatever they wanted. But I'm not as strong as I was the day it happened. I was angry, angry the day it happened.

Monica, is this pretty representative of what you heard from the rest of the groups on this issue? Were there folks who said, no, January 6th never bothered me. I was always fine with it. I mean, is it mostly things have sort of evolved since or for the Biden leaners, you know, they're still as concerned as ever? That's right. Yeah, the Biden leaners are as concerned as ever and they're concerned about a repeat of January 6th.

The Trump leaners really showed what we have seen in polls. There was a big Washington Post University of Maryland poll on the third anniversary of January 6th that found that Republicans have softened their views about the event that day. They're less likely to blame Trump than they were in the immediate aftermath.

They are more likely to buy into or at least give some credence to some of the conspiracy theories that have surfaced since then. The idea that federal agents were in the crowd that day or that other agitators were spurring some of the action. Some of them are.

still believe everything happened that happened, but are less likely to hold Trump accountable for those actions than they were in the immediate aftermath. They feel like the blame lies with the people who actually went into the Capitol and who committed all of those actions. And so, you know, it was really representative. And also, we've just kind of seen a softening on the right about the events of January 6th.

We also mentioned that there were concerns about democracy that extended beyond the specifics of the Trump dynamics of the past decade. And we heard that, honestly, on both sides. And it gets a little bit at this sentiment that was pretty clear in the most recent New York Times-Siena College polling, where you have a clear majority of Americans saying that

They either think there need to be major changes made to our system or, you know, a small but meaningful group, 15 percent that say, you know, tear it all down. So let's get into that sentiment a little bit. And first, let's hear from a Trump leaner from North Carolina.

The fact that we are limited to these two parties and the people who are running from those two parties, it seems overwhelmingly that everybody here is trying to figure out who is the lesser of the two evils and that's who they're going to vote for. So I think if we were truly democratic, we would not be limited. We would be able to vote for whoever we thought would do the best job and not be worried about throwing our votes away.

And let's also listen to some broader concerns that a Biden leaner from Nevada had. I think there's always been an issue where people literally had to fight for their right to vote. So there's always been an effort to take away people's right to vote. But the fact that laws are constantly being implemented,

That it's like, OK, if we're not going to take your right away to vote, then we're going to do our best to make it as difficult for you to vote. And that's been going on for a long time. It's not just something that just started in the last four years. So because of that, it's just like, yeah, this country's always been on some when it comes to voting. You know, the topics that we've been talking about, norm breaking, false claims that the 2020 election was rigged January 6th.

These have really sort of come to the fore and been the conversation about democracy in the mainstream for the most part. But of course, this all happened after trust in institutions declined.

declined significantly for the decades preceding that. And before Trump ever entered the scene, there were lots of concerns about things as broad as gerrymandering to Citizens United and whatnot. So how much of voters' concerns were specific to this moment that we're in versus a broader sense that everything just isn't working out, everything is kind of rigged?

You know, I would say that in both groups, people had just this broad sense that America systematically was not working for the masses, that there wasn't a way for a majority of the people to have their will enacted by government, that there wasn't, that people's voices weren't.

And the details of that varied. You know, the Biden leaner that you mentioned was worried about things like voter suppression. On the left, we saw more people worried about the Electoral College because they felt like it prevented the majority of American voters from having their voices heard because of the way they felt it misrepresented them in their states.

People mentioned gerrymandering. People mentioned a lack of a third party. They felt like they had to choose between the lesser of two evils, which a couple people mentioned. And I think that that just really kind of speaks to what you were saying, the broad displeasure with our political institutions.

And those are deeper than Trump, but they've been brought to the fore a little bit more, I think, in the Trump era, just because we're seeing a lot of division and a lot of partisanship in a way that people, I think, don't like. Right. In some sense, maybe there's a part of the electorate that was primed to accept the arguments that Trump made, understanding that he's exacerbated them significantly. Right.

Wrapping up here, what was your main takeaway from doing this? And in particular, the role that democracy ultimately plays in people's voting in 2024? Because if you look at the polls, oftentimes you don't see concerns about democracy rising to the top. But it seems like people have pretty strong feelings about the system of government nonetheless. So how do you sort of make sense of that?

You know, I think that concerns about democracy are underneath a lot of these other issues that we see. People may not put the name democracy to the category of issues that they're thinking about, or they might not find the exact issues that they're worried about as an option on polls.

But when people on the left are worried about Trump being reelected, a lot of what is driving that worry is what happened on January 6th and what happened after the 2020 election. When people more on the right are worried about immigration, some of that is this idea that immigration is undermining our democratic system because they believe that undocumented immigrants are voting in federal elections.

And so I think it's a background to a lot of the things people are worried about and talking about in a way that doesn't always get picked up. All right. Well, we're going to leave it there. Thanks so much for sharing these voters' voices with us. We appreciate it, Monica. Thank you so much. Let's move on and hear from Brightline Watch. But first, a break.

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Bright Line Watch is a group of scholars that routinely polls Americans and experts about potential threats to democracy to get a sense of how concerned both groups are and how that evolves over time. So joining me now to talk about their latest polling is Gretchen Helmke, political science professor at Rochester University. Her most recent book is called Institutions on the Edge. Welcome back to the podcast, Gretchen.

Thank you so much for having me, Galen. I want to begin where we left off with our last guest, Monica. Americans are broadly pessimistic about the direction of the country, and they have a lot of concerns. And the issues that most frequently rise to the top, at least in Gallup polling that asks Americans to pick just one issue, are the economy, then immigration, and then poor government leadership.

How do concerns about democracy figure into all of that? We have been looking at sort of how people are rating democracy overall since we began polling about seven or eight years ago. We've been asking experts that. And by experts, I'm thinking of all the political scientists that we ask from American universities to

as well as the public. And in this latest round, we also asked people to make projections about what they think the state of democracy might look like four years from now and eight years from now. And what we saw was that there was a lot of pessimism depending on who wins the election in 2024.

And predictably, it goes in exactly the opposite direction for Democrats that it does for Republicans. But there's about a 20 to 30 percentage point gap between the two different scenarios. So if Trump wins, Democrats systematically think that democracy is going to be under threat in four years. And the picture looks very different for Republicans. And the way that I interpret that

is sort of the stakes of the election. You know, if you think that not only policies are going to change, but that the very system of government that we have is under threat, then that sort of gives you a sense of how big the stakes of the election are for both sides.

Yeah. And in fact, we've seen different polling outlets try to get at this question differently. And in fact, an Ipsos poll from earlier this year sort of tried out the standard issues that get asked in issue polling, but then tried a couple other ways where they added specifically political extremism or threats to democracy, and then in another sample added

specifically, what are you voting based on? And they added Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans, and then Joe Biden and woke Democrats. And they saw that when you exclude those things, immigration, the economy, crime and corruption come to the top. But when you allow political extremism or threats to democracy as an option, it rises significantly. And

So maybe some of the issue polling that we see is undercounting how much folks care about this. And I think some New York Times polling has backed this up as well, that when you force people to maybe choose between two things, as opposed to just saying what their most important issue is, that that really seems to motivate people more than it appears at first blush.

Sure, sure. I mean, I think the way that you frame the question, the more specific you make it, you can really kind of get the polling numbers to move around a lot. And I think it is a much bigger concern than if you just ask people directly, you know, what are the top three issues on your mind? Certainly the economy is probably still going to be at the top.

But if you frame it in more specific ways, I think people are concerned. And that's actually a problem for democracy overall, that it is sort of rising to this level of an existential threat to the system. Which is to say that we would want it to be lowered down on the ranking of concerns because that would mean that democracy is probably healthier.

Precisely, precisely. You want a democracy where people are treating the opposition not as an enemy, but as an opponent and where people are basically fighting about and debating about policy. Right. That's that's what a healthy democracy looks like. It's much less healthy when people are talking about whether democracy is going to persist or not and whether basic democratic norms are under threat or not.

Speaking of debating those norms, we're speaking on Wednesday, May 15th, midday, when the back and forth over whether or not Joe Biden and Donald Trump will debate ahead of the election has come to the fore. At this very moment, there is an agreement between the two that CNN will host a debate in late June, ABC will host a debate in mid-September. Who knows if those two will stick? But

From your perspective, how important is a presidential debate to our institutions or to democracy?

I think that's a really interesting question. It's not something that we have polled on yet, but I suspect that as we get closer to the election, that would be a really interesting question to field and to get a sense of what experts think, but also, of course, what the public thinks. I mean, my personal opinion is that it's a really important norm that we've had for quite a long time. And it's obviously an important vehicle by which voters can assess the

qualities of the candidates. And so I think it's a really important thing to have the debates. All right. So let's dig into some of the specifics of the recent polling that you've done. How confident are Americans in the voting system overall this fall?

So we've been fielding questions about the confidence in the election system, as well as the confidence in the 2020 election results, pretty much since the 2020 election. And there's sort of some good news and some bad news.

So the bad news is that the divisions on whether there was election fraud, you know, the big lie, is Biden a legitimate winner? Those differences across the parties seem to be absolutely frozen.

So there was some movement around 2022 with the midterm elections where we saw independents and Republicans slightly updating, viewing Biden as a legitimate winner at a slightly higher rate. But since then, it's been frozen. Over 90 percent of Democrats think he's the legitimate winner. Something like

Two-thirds of Republicans do not. Those numbers have not changed at all. When we ask people, though, looking ahead, how much confidence do you have that your vote will be counted correctly in the 2024 election, we see still a gap between Democrats and Republicans, with Republicans less confident in the integrity of the election than Democrats.

But certainly those numbers have come up quite a bit since following the 2020 election and even the 2022 election. The other sort of interesting pattern in the data is that people are much more confident that their vote will be counted correctly at the personal level, at the state level. They're the least confident that votes will be counted correctly at the national level.

This seems to be a trend, and I should say here that a majority of Americans in totality think that in the upcoming election, their votes will be considered legitimately. But there seems to be a trend where Americans see their own communities, their personal financial circumstances. When it comes to things like crime, they feel safe in their own communities. But when they're asked to think about the nation more broadly, they're

their views turn decidedly pessimistic. And it sounds like that's also a trend when it comes to democracy. What do you make of that? Where does that divide come from? I mean, I think to some extent it maps on to this problem that we have of negative partisanship, where it's not that you value your party so much, it's that you fear and hate the other party. And so we haven't

gotten into this in a sort of causally identified way in our polling at this point. But I think it would be really interesting to give people different scenarios that are controlled by different partisan groups. So my hypothesis would be that if you asked Democrats,

how free and fair voting was or how much access there was to voting in California versus Texas, you get really different answers depending on which party controls the state and, you know, sort of a parallel situation for Republicans. So I think, you know, the bottom line is that they're sort of projecting their worst case scenario about what the other party is doing.

Another trend that I noticed in the polling that you've done is that experts routinely rate the functioning of American democracy higher than voters. What should we make about that? I mean, I guess that's more pessimism on the part of the voters, but what should we make of that?

I think that's actually really interesting. There's been some research lately in academia about whether democratic backsliding is actually occurring and a big debate on this. And one of the hypotheses is that experts are sort of whipping themselves into a frenzy and really concerned about democracy. And one of the things that we found, as you just said, in this polling is that

experts are actually systematically much more optimistic than the public is about the state of democracy. And there are a couple of reasons why that could be the case. So one reason is simply that political scientists don't just study American politics. They study other parts of the world. And even though democracy is more in danger here than it has been in the recent past,

Certainly relative to other systems that political scientists study, the United States is still performing relatively well. Another answer, though, could be more in the details. So we run a performance battery pretty much every time that we poll that asks specific questions about how different elements of democracy are performing. One of the key questions that we ask is, are all parties allowed?

to participate, right? That's sort of one of the markers of democracy, whether parties are able to run for office. And we know that in the United States, because of the way that districts are set up, right, we have two parties, but other parties are allowed to run. The public, however, just sees two parties and infers that other parties are not allowed to run. So there's sort of a gap in

in just sort of the understanding of why things are the way they are, given the institutions that I think experts have a different perspective on than the public does generally.

And also, I mean, experts tend to be more highly educated. Maybe you would consider more elite and therefore perhaps more inclined to, well, understand the system, like you said, but also trust the system where we see like decreasing trust in the system when you're talking to maybe folks who don't have a four year college degree or something like that. Does that also make sense as sort of a gap between voters and experts? Yeah.

That does make sense. And I think one of the really untapped interesting things in all of the Bright Line Watch data that we've looked at is not just the partisan divide, but the education divide. We're actually taking the data. We have 20 waves right now. We're taking the data and putting it into, you know,

So one big data set where you can pull these things out and really understand the demographic trends much more so than we've been able to do in each of the individual reports. And I think looking at that education gap would be hugely useful. So what potential threats looking ahead are experts and voters most concerned about in this moment?

Sure. So in this latest survey, we sort of approached this in the following way. We constructed a list of possible scenarios that might occur under a second Trump term. And we constructed that list based on media reports, also based on speeches that Trump himself had made. And then we asked experts how likely they thought those scenarios would be under a

second hypothetical Trump term. And then we asked the public whether they approved or disapproved of the actions that Trump might take.

And what we found was that experts placed a really high probability on a number of very concerning norm-breaking scenarios occurring. So a lot of the most likely events dealt with sort of responses to the current prosecutions, taking away the independence of the DOJ,

One of the most likely events was going after Biden. We also had some questions in there, though, about the likelihood of using the Insurrection Act to quell domestic rebellion. And we also fielded a question about the likelihood of Trump attempting to stay in power after January 2029. And then we asked again, we asked the public whether they approved or disapproved of these actions.

And we saw, you know, the very familiar partisan split where less than 25 percent of Democrats approved of any of these actions. I actually thought that was relatively high considering the nature of these actions. But we got, you know, upwards of 50.

75% to 80% of Republicans condoning these various actions. And actually the highest support, I think it was 84% of Republicans were in favor of Trump using the DOJ to investigate Biden. And also it's important to say here, though, that a majority of Republicans did not support Trump staying in office beyond January 2029.

Absolutely. So that was the one exception that did not get majority support among Republicans. And we also kind of parsed out the Republicans. So we asked people if they were primarily Trump supporters or primarily supporters of the GOP. We got some differences in opinion, but even among the very strong Trump supporters, only about 40 percent of them were interested in Trump trying to stay for a third term. Okay.

And a lot of this, like you mentioned, dealt with Trump's legal cases and sort of one of the popular things that experts thought that Trump might do that was popular amongst Republicans was, you know, fire special prosecutor Jack Smith, for example. The judiciary system is going to be asked to...

do a lot in the coming months in terms of adjudicating Trump's culpability in the things that he's been accused of. How much faith is there in the legal system right now to deal with that based on your polling?

Based on our polling, we do see quite a bit of difference between Democrats and Republicans here, probably not surprisingly. I think if I'm remembering it correctly, something like over 60% of Republicans trust that the judiciary is going to do the right thing. And actually, when we were asking, this was before the Supreme Court had heard either the Colorado case trying to ban Trump from the ballot or

or before the court had weighed in on the presidential immunity case that Trump is bringing to try to stop the investigations into January 6th. So it was prior to the court weighing in on either of those things. And I think Democrats were somewhere in the 40s in terms of trusting the court. My expectation, although I don't know this, is that that would have even widened after these most recent decisions. And we'll see what happens when the court actually hands down its decision for

immunity. So at the moment, though, it looks like a majority, although a thin majority of Americans say that they trust the judiciary to make unbiased or appropriate decisions when considering Trump's cases. But once those decisions are actually made, we might well expect some differences. Any other main takeaways from your recent polling or questions that you have going forward over the next five and a half months?

I mean, I think the main takeaway for me is that in the past, a lot of this norm breaking behavior was sort of seen as a, you know, a big minus for Trump, that people were willing to support him in spite of these promises to break fundamental norms, not because of them. And I think the sort of concerning thing that comes out of this recent set of questions that we asked is

is the high number of questions that people are willing to condone and sort of agree with and approve of Trump's actions. So, you know, that to me is concerning. And I think, you know, it sort of gets at a broader point about democratic norms, which is that

Democratic norms are basically things that people agree to follow because they believe that other people are following them. And, you know, we haven't gotten at this at our polling, but I think potentially one of the issues for Republicans is they believe that Trump is being unfairly prosecuted. They believe that the DOJ has been politicized and that

It's not fair that they're unfairly targeting him. And sort of in retaliation, they are willing to go ahead and break democratic norms themselves.

All right. Well, we're going to leave things there and hopefully we'll have a chance to talk to you again over the next five months or so. But thank you so much, Gretchen. Thank you very much. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Shortavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at FiveThirtyEight.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.