Opinion American democracy is in trouble — even if Harris wins
“Vice President Kamala Harris is now the narrow favorite to win the presidential election, based on my reading of polls and other election analyses. But American democracy is still in a lot of trouble.
There are five likely scenarios for the 2024 election and its aftermath. And none of them are great. I have ordered them here, from most to least ideal:
1. Harris comfortably wins the presidency, and Democrats carry both houses of Congress.
The best case is a repeat of four years ago. The news media declares Harris the president-elect either on election night or a few days later. Her margin of victory is a few swing states, not just one. Even if Donald Trump and his allies contest the election results, there is virtually no chance he can get to 270. So other Republican politicians and the media don’t take Trump’s claims that seriously, and more important, conservative judges largely rule against him in election-related cases.
Harris would be a superior president to Trump on democracy grounds. She doesn’t have a long record of breaking with democratic norms and values, such as refusing to accept defeat in an election she clearly lost.
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A Democratic Congress would also be better for democracy than the alternative. America really needs pro-democracy legislation. I particularly want to see restrictions on state and local provisions designed to make it harder to vote, on gerrymandering and on undisclosed “dark money” being used in campaigns. I don’t view those ideas as partisan, but Democratic officials are more likely to support them than Republicans.
Also, Democratic control of Congress means the government can operate more efficiently. A Republican-controlled House would almost certainly make it harder to raise the debt ceiling and pass routine funding bills, while conducting endless investigations of Harris’s administration. That has been the pattern since Bill Clinton’s tenure: Republican Houses sabotage functional government when a Democrat is president. (More on a Republican Senate in a bit.)
But I worry that if a liberal Black woman from California were elected president, conservative activists and groups would be even more convinced that America is becoming a country that they no longer recognize and feel comfortable in. That could lead to increased right-wing political violence or, at least, the kind of delegitimization of the president that we saw when Barack Obama was in office and some conservatives claimed he was not a natural-born citizen.
Also, like four years ago, I am skeptical Trump will ever concede defeat or his supporters will accept it. It would be really bad for democracy to have huge blocs of the electorate feel that their chosen candidate had twice been robbed of victory.
“The best-case scenario is Harris wins, and Trump will not accept the election results. It’s hard to imagine him just going off into the night,” Harvard University’s Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of an influential book called “How Democracies Die,” told me when I interviewed him recently.
He added, “The fact that that’s the best-case scenario … suggests there are a lot of worst-case scenarios.”
2. Harris wins and congressional Republicans shut down governing.
A fairly likely scenario for this fall, according to current polls, is that Harris wins the presidency but Republicans gain control of the Senate. (Election analysts differ over which party will win the House.) That would put Harris in an unusually bad situation. Every president since George H.W. Bush has started his first termwith his party in control of both chambers of Congress.
A Republican-controlled House would lead to policy gridlock. But Republicans could cause even bigger problems if they hold the Senate. In 2015 and 2016, the last time there was a Republican Senate and Democratic president, Republicans blocked virtually all judicial nominations. Most notable was the rejection of Merrick Garland, who would have replaced Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Harris might be stuck with Joe Biden’s Cabinet members, with Republicans unwilling to confirm replacements. Judgeships and key federal agency roles could go unfilled for years.
Perhaps Senate Republicans wouldn’t be super-obstructive. But I am not optimistic.
3. Trump wins but with an asterisk.
Trump could win the electoral college even though the plurality or majority of Americans vote for the Democrat, as in 2016. Another possibility is that the two candidates each get 269 electoral votes, and the election goes to the House. The winner would then be decided by who carries the majority of state delegations, a process likely to result in a Trump victory.
The possibility of a 269-269 split will be higher if Republicans in Nebraska find a way to change the mind of a single lawmaker standing in the way of a proposal that Trump is pushing to make the state winner-take-all in terms of its electoral votes, instead of allocating them by congressional district.
If Trump barely wins, I would expect a repeat of 2017 to 2020, with strong resistance to his most radical acts from left-leaning activists and groups, Democratic governors, liberal judges and much of the news media. Democrats would particularly feel wronged if Trump won the presidency after his allies changed election law in Nebraska only a few weeks before the election.
Trump would almost certainly still behave in antidemocratic ways, such as trying to end investigations of himself and pushing the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. But as his first term showed, Trump can be blunted if he faces widespread opposition.
4. Trump wins the popular and the electoral college vote; Republicans carry both houses of Congress.
If Trump wins a second time and by a bigger margin than before, nonpartisan organizations, particularly corporations and the media, might conclude that most Americans support his vision for the country. So there might be less institutional resistance to Trump than there was from 2017 to 2020.
Also, if a clear majority of Americans back Trump, a democratic outcome would be to let him govern — at least as long as he is not explicitly violating the Constitution.
I assume Democratic governors and left-leaning organizations still would battle Trump, particularly if he tried to carry out the mass deportations that he has proposed.
“If Trump wins again and implements his 2025 agenda or does what he has threatened he will do, it will certainly be a major hit, and democracy will be seriously damaged,” Ziblatt said. He added, “But this is an ongoing thing. People have to wake up the next day and figure out what do we do to recover our democracy. … This is not like Victor Orban or Vladimir Putin. There will be great resistance to efforts to act in an authoritarian way.”
5. Trump clearly loses the electoral college vote, but a state unfairly blocks certification of the results and Republican judges or the House installs him as the president.
The defining feature of a democratic nation is that elections are held and then the winners get to take office. If that doesn’t happen, we’re in serious trouble.
You could argue that more people in Florida intended to vote for Al Gore than George W. Bush in 2000, so America has already had a defeated presidential candidate put into office by conservative judges. But 2024 would be different. Trump and his allies tried to keep him in power in 2020 even though he lost by a large margin in the electoral college, and they have since appointed local and state officials who seem more on board with cheating to win. We could have, unlike 2000, a premeditated, planned and then executed overturning of the election results.
What’s happening in Georgia is particularly ominous. The state’s election board, controlled by Trump supporters, seems to be laying the groundwork to cause delays in vote counting in large, urban counties in the Atlanta area that are likely to favor Harris. Trump could declare himself the winner in Georgia, while Republican officials stall or outright refuse to count some Harris votes.
If Georgia judges go along with this scheme, it’s the most obvious scenario for Harris to receive the most votes in a state but not get its electoral votes.
Trump would enter office weakened if he won this way, similar to Scenario 3. He would have less power compared with Scenario 4. So this isn’t the worst outcome in terms of policy. But the precedent that the winner of the election gets to be in the Oval Office would be gone. It’s the worst possible outcome in my view.
Even if Scenario 5 doesn’t happen, American democracy is in a terrible place right now. One of the country’s two major parties has nominated an antidemocratic candidate and seems willing to use any means necessary to elect him, including the last-minute procedural changes being considered in Georgia and Nebraska. That candidate is popular enough with voters that he could win without any election-rigging. At worst, he will lose narrowly.
Political scientists tend to avoid a binary framing of democracy — that either a country is or isn’t a democracy. Instead, they refer to countries becoming more or less democratic. Whether or not Harris wins, American democracy is backsliding — and all indications are that decline will continue.”
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