One of the recurring themes of the 2024 election campaign was the argument that “democracy is on the ballot”. Trump had attempted to overthrow US democracy, and regularly mused about the desirability of dictatorship, but had nevertheless been renominated by the Republican Party. That argument went nowhere, and hasn’t been seen in the current midterm campaign.
The optimistic interpretation is that the threat to democracy has faded. Talk of Trump running again in 2028 has diminished, and the SAVE Act, which would disenfranchise millions, has stalled in Congress and won’t apply to the current election. A further reason for optimism is that Trump is now so unpopular that he would lose even a rigged election, as long as there was some attempt to preserve a pretence of electoral competition.
These points may be correct, but they are contingent and circumstantial. The bigger lesson of 2024 is that a plurality of American voters are willing to vote against democracy, and a majority are willing to vote against or abstain. That’s a depressing conclusion for believers in democracy, and one that runs against a lot of previous evidence.
Although there have been many previous periods when government crises have produced a demand for a “man on horseback”, most voters have almost always rejected such candidates. Democracies have been overthrown by coups or (in Germany’s case) by governments which lacked majority support, but rarely in free elections.
So far, we have seen no such rejection. Trump is massively unpopular, but mainly for reasons that apply to many previous presidents: he promised lower prices and instead delivered higher inflation, and he promised to keep the US out of Middle Eastern wars, but started them instead.
By contrast, his attempted overthrow of the constitution in 2021 is barely mentioned. His immigration policies, with masked secret police, concentration camps and deportation of people who have lived in America since infancy, are disapproved of by a slender majority, but remain by far his most popular policy position.