When it’s working, American democracy is a peace process—its institutions were devised to settle radical disagreements nonviolently. On rare occasions, though, the institutions have failed. Is this another such moment? Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists monitoring threats to democratic practices, has conducted a survey on the robustness of America’s democracy in the face of what it calls “nightmare scenarios.” Election Day is less than a week away, and Donald Trump has indicated that he’ll respect the result if he wins—but he has also been waging an unprecedented campaign to gin up belief in voter fraud. Should he lose in anything but a blowout, he seems poised to try to discredit the electoral process by casting doubt on the mechanics of voting and counting and by manipulating the vote in the Electoral College through spurious legal challenges, among other strategies. Which tactics seem most likely to damage democratic processes, given America’s institutional soft spots? More important, will Americans keep the peace, even as the President riles them?
Earlier this month, the Bright Line Watch team—led by Gretchen Helmke, of the University of Rochester, Susan C. Stokes, of the University of Chicago, and my colleagues John M. Carey and Brendan Nyhan, of Dartmouth College—posed such questions to some ten thousand academic political scientists in the United States. More than seven hundred, “across a diverse range of subfields,” responded, offering opinions about the vulnerabilities of America’s democratic institutions. The team simultaneously commissioned a YouGov survey of twenty-seven hundred citizens “selected and weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population.” The survey asked them not the diagnostic questions posed to the political scientists but, to complement those, whether and in what ways they thought the vote could prove fraudulent. The team then divided those citizens into self-identified Trump “approvers” and “disapprovers” (the survey did not require respondents to identify as registered Republicans or Democrats, but it did establish which parties they felt “closer” to). The team examined the answers to determine how seriously Trump’s claims are believed—and, more important, what both groups might be prepared to do about it. “We asked a battery of questions regarding the ways fraud might be perpetrated,” Carey told me. “What’s fascinating, and cautionary, is the degree to which the President’s supporters and his opponents are—no surprise—living in completely disconnected information ecosystems.”
The political scientists were asked to rate the likelihood of twenty-eight electoral scenarios in which things could go wrong, intentionally or not, from polling places being closed to the House of Representatives deciding the winner. Interestingly, many potential threats didn’t particularly disturb them: Russian hacking, for example, or a coronavirus-related emergency order that could curtail voting in various states, or “faithless electors” deciding the outcome in the Electoral College. The academics apparently think America’s electoral institutions are rooted enough that inherent weaknesses in law and formal decision-making procedures are not likely to be a source of major problems.
What does worry them (and, in fact, many others in the public arena) is the potential for bad faith deriving from party tribalism, which can roil supporters as the election proceeds: long lines at the polls on Election Day, notionally produced by efforts at voter suppression, or the likelihood that Trump will attack the “blue shift”—the tendency of returns in narrow state contests to favor Democrats in the hours and days after the polls close, largely because of the lag time in processing urban and mail-in ballots. They are most concerned, it seems, that false social-media claims will incite rage against any result that does not go Trump’s way, and they fear that, if Trump loses, he will, indeed, refuse to concede and may also encourage violence during voting and ballot counting.
On that ground, the YouGov survey of citizens is hardly reassuring. Both sides seem to agree on just one positive point: that poll workers at the local level, in towns and counties, can be counted on to tally votes in a trustworthy manner. Around eighty per cent think that their own votes will be counted fairly, a kind of proxy for a belief that their neighbors will be fair. Moreover, around three-quarters of respondents on both sides have “confidence that votes will be counted as intended” at the state level, although that confidence is shaken when the other side controls both houses and the governorship of the state. (Trumpists are somewhat more skeptical than anti-Trumpists on this score, even though Democrats face full Republican control in the key battleground states of Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Iowa.)
But confidence drops about twenty points when the respondents consider vote-counting on the national level—a curious attitude, because there is no vote counting on the federal level (except for, say, in the District of Columbia). Instead, the point seems to reflect a concern that not all states will count and certify their votes appropriately. Apparently, it is enough to ask about the nation as a whole to trigger a kind of reciprocal cynicism. There is “vast partisan divide over voter fraud,” the team reports. With little more than Trump’s railings and tweets to go on, about three-quarters of Trump approvers think that “thousands of illegal votes are cast each election” by non-citizens, as a result of people pretending to be someone else or of Democratic Party operatives stealing or tampering with ballots. (About a quarter of Democrats believe similar things about the voting process.)
Things get even dicier when these attitudes bleed into opinions about the legitimacy of a government led by the other side. Only forty-four per cent of Trumpists said that they’d regard a Joe Biden victory as legitimate; presumably, voter fraud would be to blame, and any government that Biden would lead would be correspondingly tainted. At the same time, only thirty-four per cent of anti-Trumpists would regard the President as the rightful winner. The team did not speculate about why they found a more skeptical attitude among anti-Trumpists. But it probably reflects their anger at the G.O.P.’s naked efforts at voter suppression, and the frustration they feel prospectively about the chance that Biden, who is likely to win the popular vote decisively, could lose by a thin margin in the Electoral College.
By far, the most troubling result of the survey reflects attitudes toward acts of political aggression. Using a roster of research questions provided by the political scientists Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, the Bright Line Watch team asked whether “it is ever justified” to harass the opposing party over the Internet, or to send “threatening messages” to its leaders. The questionnaire did not specify whether the messages would target an actual person—as opposed to, say, his or her chances of reëlection—or whether the respondents themselves would ever consider sending one. Regardless, about twenty per cent of Trumpists and a somewhat smaller proportion of anti-Trumpists were O.K. with both.
Citizens were then asked another vague yet obviously grave question: whether it could ever be justified to “use violence to advance one’s goals (generally)” or to “use violence if the other party wins the 2020 election.” Again, the question did not specify if the violence might entail the destruction of property or physical harm to people. Nor did it ask whether the respondents themselves would ever act—just if they thought there could ever be situations in which they might consider others taking such actions tolerable. The survey was conducted after, among other incidents, a heavily armed, loosely organized rightist group, Michigan United for Liberty, had gathered at the state capitol to protest a stay-at-home order from the Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer; indeed, before the survey was completed, Whitmer became the target of a foiled kidnapping plot allegedly mounted by another self-styled rightist militia, which calls itself the Wolverine Watchmen. Still, twenty-six per cent of Trump supporters said that they could condone some violence if he loses, and twenty-one per cent of his opponents could if he wins. “These numbers skyrocket,” the team writes, “if partisan opponents use violence first.” In that case, forty-six per cent of Trump supporters and thirty-six per cent of Trump opponents could see some form of “retaliatory violence” as justified.
“These numbers are worrisome given the potential of social media and cable news to quickly amplify cases of political violence across the country, which could both encourage copycat behavior as well as prompt support for retaliation,” the report states. How might such cases be precipitated? John Carey and Brendan Nyhan offered a couple of “nightmare scenarios.” Imagine that Trump is ahead in Florida on Election Night, and the governor, Ron DeSantis, an avid Trump defender, claims irregularities in Miami-Dade County’s voter rolls and halts the vote count before any blue shift can be factored in—a decision that is then supported by the Republican majorities in the state legislature and Senate. Imagine that Democrats from Miami and Orlando then go to Tallahassee, to stage a peaceful protest at the state capitol. If some of them destroy property—or are even just rumored to—imagine, given what we have seen transpire so far, the potential reactions from Tallahassee’s surrounding counties—Wakulla, Liberty, and Calhoun—where many ardent, gun-owning Trumpists live.
Nyhan was particularly anxious about a scenario involving the Supreme Court. “Think about the Electoral College hanging on Pennsylvania, where on Election Night Trump holds a narrow lead but mail-in ballots look certain to pull the state into Biden’s column,” he told me. “What if the Supreme Court, with newly seated Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the majority, upholds the Pennsylvania G.O.P.’s objection to counting mail-in ballots that arrive after November 3rd, suspending the count and handing the election to Trump?” In fact, on Wednesday evening, the Court decided, 4–4, not to reconsider the case before the election—Barrett did not cast a vote—so the extended count period holds. But it isn’t likely to be the last such challenge. (On Monday night, the Court, without Barrett, decided 5–3 to, in effect, prevent Wisconsin from extending its deadline to receive absentee ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but potentially delayed in the mail.)
Reading the Bright Line Watch report, none of this straining of American institutions seems merely hypothetical. “The report underscores the very real threat of significant political violence,” Nyhan says. “That outcome might not be likely, but it’s intolerably plausible in what should be a stable democracy. We need to renew our shared commitment to the peaceful transfer of power—and not just for this election.” Violence, he might have added, has seemed at times as American as cherry pie, but so has the peaceful transition to new leaders. The age of Trump may test that precedent, too.
