Such data is prompting conservatives to dismiss efforts by President Biden and other Democrats to claim that “democracy is on the ballot” in the 2024 election. For example, The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins Jr. recently published a paper showing that Biden and Donald Trump are essentially evenly matched on the question of who best protects democracy. He cited an NBC News poll from Monday in which 43% of voters supported Biden, while 41% chose the former president. “Pollers view those who voted for Trump as being just as concerned about democracy as those who voted for Biden,” he concluded.
I wish that were true. In reality, democracy is only a matter of voting on one side of politics; the other side is making our system less democratic by making it harder for voters to vote. You will be forced to do so.
The Times and Siena polls were helpful here. The magazine asked voters what they were most concerned about about the election, including “some people voting illegally” or “some voters not having a fair opportunity to vote.” did.
The country was split down the middle, with 46% worried about illegal voting and 48% worried about voter suppression. That’s because the partisans were completely divided: 82% of Republicans were more concerned about voters voting illegally, while 76% of Democrats said voters were more concerned about voters getting a fair chance to vote. I’m more concerned about not being able to do it.
This rift has led to radically different voting policies from state to state, depending on which party has influence. The newspaper’s Patrick Marley says Democratic-controlled Michigan will make it easier to vote in 2024 than 2020, while North Carolina, where Republicans have a veto-proof legislative majority, will face new hurdles at the ballot box. was reported to be being built.
And House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), during a recent pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to win praise from President Trump, spoke out about the federal government requiring proof of citizenship for people registering to vote. submitted a bill. Trump believes that the election he lost must have been fraudulent, so Johnson’s efforts must have warmed the former president’s heart.
This is not an honest disagreement about whether voting should be easier or harder. Since there is no evidence that fraud is a problem in our system, new barriers to voting and voter removal are being rationalized to solve a problem that does not exist.
Voting by noncitizens in federal and state elections is already illegal everywhere, with a study by the Brennan Center for Justice concluding that “votes by noncitizens account for 0.0003 percent to 0.001 percent of all votes cast.” Another Brennan Center report estimated the overall rate of voter fraud to be between 0.0003% and 0.0025%.
When someone proposes a policy change based on claims that are unsupported by facts, it is natural to suspect that the proposal is motivated by something other than solving a real problem. The Times-Siena poll provided important clues in this regard. While 95% of Democrats said Biden was the “rightful winner” in 2020, only 31% of Republicans said so. Their objection is to the outcome, not the process.
Voting changes introduced to make voting easier during the pandemic, including simplified early and mail-in voting and widely available ballot drop boxes, led to the highest turnout in our history. Keep in mind what has been brought to you. Holding a successful election amid a health crisis was a huge victory for democracy, and by the way, Trump received 11.2 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016, thanks to emergency reforms. Still, Republicans appear to want to withdraw their participation.
What determines whether both sides are equally concerned about an issue is the degree to which that issue motivates their respective electoral coalitions. And here the data is clear. Democracy is a central concern for Democrats in a way that it is not for Republicans. It’s not even close.
In a March Quinnipiac poll, voters who cited preserving democracy as the most urgent issue facing the country favored Biden over Trump in a head-to-head vote by a margin of 85% to 12%. Thirty-two percent of Democrats say preserving democracy is their top campaign issue. Only 5% of Republicans did so.
Legendary political scientist Robert A. Dahl wrote in his book Democracy and Its Critics that democracy is “a system in which people govern themselves as political equals and have all the resources they need to do so. and the vision of owning institutions. Removing barriers to participation is more consistent with this goal than creating them.
I wish Biden was wrong when he said democracy was on the ballot this year. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
