Is the Republic Still Standing?

Dear Leading Ladies,

The polls closed last night but it will be days before the final tallies are in. We know there are already some disappointments as well as a few encouraging results, but we need time to dissect and analyze the outcomes.

In the meantime, we found some historical perspective in Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s article, “The Last Time Democracy Almost Died,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 2020. We hope you do, too.

We also encourage you to read the excerpt below of ‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy by David Leonhardt. It was published in The New York Times on September 22, 2022

“There are still many scenarios in which the United States will avoid a democratic crisis.

In 2024, Mr. Biden could win re-election by a wide margin — or a Republican other than Mr. Trump could win by a wide margin. Mr. Trump might then fade from the political scene, and his successors might choose not to embrace election falsehoods. The era of Republican election denial could prove to be brief.

It is also possible that Mr. Trump or another Republican nominee will try to reverse a close defeat in 2024 but will fail, as happened in 2020. Then, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, rebuffed Mr. Trump after he directed him to ‘find 11,780 votes,’ and the Supreme Court refused to intervene, as well. More broadly, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, recently said that the United States had ‘very little voter fraud.’

If a Republican were again to try to overturn the election and to fail, the movement might also begin to fade.

Oliver Contreras, NY Times

But many democracy experts worry that these scenarios may be wishful thinking. Mr. Trump’s most likely successors as party leader also make or tolerate false claims about election fraud. The movement is bigger than one person — and arguably always has been: Some of the efforts to make voting more onerous, which are generally justified with false suggestions of widespread voter fraud, predated Mr. Trump’s 2016 candidacy.

To believe that Republicans will not overturn a close presidential loss in coming years seems to depend on ignoring the public positions of many Republican politicians. ‘The scenarios by which we don’t have a major democracy crisis by the end of the decade seem rather narrow,’ Mr. [Yascha] Mounk of Johns Hopkins said.

And Mr. Levitsky [Steven Levitsky of Harvard] said, ‘It’s not clear how the crisis is going to manifest itself, but there is a crisis coming.’ He added, ‘We should be very worried.’

The most promising strategy for avoiding an overturned election, many scholars say, involves a broad ideological coalition that isolates election deniers. But it remains unclear how many Republican politicians would be willing to join such a coalition.

It is also unclear whether Democratic politicians and voters are interested in making the compromises that would help them attract more voters. Many Democrats have instead embraced a purer version of liberalism in recent years, especially on social issues. This shift to the left has not prevented the party from winning the popular vote in presidential elections. But it has hurt Democrats outside of major metropolitan areas and, by extension, in the Electoral College and congressional elections.

If Democrats did control both the White House and Congress — and by more than a single vote, as they now do in the Senate — they have signaled that they would attempt to pass legislation to address both the chronic and acute threats to democracy.

The House last year passed a bill to protect voting rights and restrict gerrymandering. It died in the Senate partly because it included measures that even some moderate Democrats believed went too far, such as restrictions on voter identification laws, which many other democracies around the world have.

The House also passed a bill to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., which would reduce the Senate’s current bias against metropolitan areas and Black Americans. The United States is currently in its longest stretch without having admitted a new state.

Democracy experts have also pointed to other possible solutions to the growing disconnect between public opinion and government policy. Among them is an expansion of the number of members in the House of Representatives, which the Constitution allows Congress to do — and which it regularly did until the early 20th century. A larger House would create smaller districts, which in turn could reduce the share of uncompetitive districts.

Other scholars favor proposals to limit the Supreme Court’s authority, which the Constitution also allows and which previous presidents and Congresses have done.

In the short term, these proposals would generally help the Democratic Party, because the current threats to majority rule have mostly benefited the Republican Party. In the long term, however, the partisan effects of such changes are less clear.

The history of new states makes this point: In the 1950s, Republicans initially supported making Hawaii a state, because it seemed to lean Republican, while Democrats said that Alaska had to be included, too, also for partisan reasons. Today, Hawaii is a strongly Democratic state, and Alaska is a strongly Republican one. Either way, the fact that both are states has made the country more democratic.

Over the sweep of history, the American government has tended to become more democratic, through women’s suffrage, civil rights laws, the direct election of senators and more. The exceptions, like the post-Reconstruction period, when Black Southerners lost rights, have been rare. The current period is so striking partly because it is one of those exceptions.

The point is not that American democracy is worse than it was in the past,” Mr. Mounk said. “Throughout American history, the exclusion of minority groups, and African Americans in particular, was much worse than it is now.”

“But the nature of the threat is very different than in the past,” he said.

The makeup of the federal government reflects public opinion less closely than it once did. And the chance of a true constitutional crisis — in which the rightful winner of an election cannot take office — has risen substantially. That combination shows that American democracy has never faced a threat quite like the current one.”

We are still hoping for the best, but preparing for what comes.

Therese (she, her, hers)
Judy (she, her, hers)
Didi (she, her, hers)
Mackenzie (she, her, hers)
Leading Ladies Executive Team
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