It’s 2024 and, in the United States, political advertising budgets have been expended, babies have been kissed (or, in a few cases, bitten by the incumbent president), candidates and their supporters exhausted their armouries of verbal abuse for one another, and the voters have, at long last, made their decisions. Now, the hard part begins.
Wait. Now the hard part begins? But campaign season is over!
Yes, but Americans really don’t like each other, they don’t trust each other, and they have middling faith at best in the vote-counting process. They’re increasingly inclined to bust heads to resolve differences. So, the easy stuff is over. Now, the hard part begins.
“As Election Day approaches, many registered voters are quite concerned about the integrity of the vote and what will happen in the aftermath of the election,” according to an AP-NORC survey published last week. “Nearly a quarter of registered voters expect inaccuracies in the vote counts across the country, and many fear post-election political violence.”
Inaccuracies in the vote count are inevitable, though they’re usually kept to a dull roar and people tolerate occasional glitches and rare examples of fraud. But that’s what you expect in an environment of trust, which is no longer what we have. Going into this election, after years of wrangling about voter ID, early voting, and who can be relied on to count ballots, only about 60 per cent of voters have faith in the accuracy of the vote in state and local elections, reports AP-NORC. Just 48 per cent trust national results.
Voters — those who didn’t mail their ballots — went to the polls amid news stories about a student from China who doesn’t have U.S. citizenship facing charges for illegally voting in Michigan. And Maricopa County, in the swing state of Arizona, warns that it could take two weeks to produce a tally of votes. These reports aren’t settling people’s concerns.
Given the unimpressive level of trust in democratic procedures, it’s no shock that many Americans consider the country’s system of government wobbly, at best. In March, 81 per cent of respondents to the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service Battleground Civility Poll said, “they believe democracy in America is currently being threatened.”
Who is doing the threatening? This wouldn’t be America if we weren’t pointing fingers at each other. Seventy-eight per cent of Democrats told Georgetown’s pollsters that “MAGA Republicans” are an “extremely” or “very” serious “threat to democracy.” Sixty-nine per cent of Republicans said the same about the “radical left.” Sizeable majorities of both groups called each other’s congressional representatives a “threat to democracy.”
If you face a threat to the country’s political system, what do you do to deal with it? Well, becoming part of the problem is certainly on the table for a sizeable minority of Americans. An April PBS NewsHour/NPR/Maris poll found 20 per cent of respondents insisting they “may have to resort to violence to get the country back on track.” That included 12 per cent of Democrats, 18 per cent of independents, and 28 per cent of Republicans.
There are hints that some of this may become self-fulfilling. When the Deseret News teamed up with HarrisX pollsters in August to ask Americans about political violence, 83 per cent of Democrats said they feared “violence from Republicans who don’t accept the election results if Vice President Harris wins,” while 76 per cent of Republicans said they expected such a reaction from Democrats if Trump won.
Last week, in a follow-up poll of Utahns by the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics, 46 per cent of self-identified Republicans and 38 per cent of self-identified Democrats said violence against the government could be justified (for those actually registered as members of the two parties: 52 per cent of Democrats and 43 per cent of Republicans saw violence as justifiable). Presumably, they meant when opponents take power.
There’s precedent, unfortunately. Famously, Donald Trump’s supporters rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after their candidate lost his bid for re-election. Sometimes glossed over, though, is that Trump’s opponents rioted in Washington, D.C. at his 2017 inauguration.
Politically motivated violence has become all-too common as people trade punches, firebombs, and bullets over partisan disagreements. Offices and ballot drop-off boxes have repeatedly been torched. Last week an Arizona man was indicted for shooting at a Kamala Harris campaign office, fists have been thrown in recent days at people wearing campaign paraphernalia or objecting to its presence. Donald Trump was targeted by two would-be assassins, the first one of whom drew blood.
“In under a decade, violence has become a shockingly regular feature of American political life,” Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats wrote in September. “Indeed, the election in November could well be not only the most consequential in modern U.S. history but also the most dangerous.”
Pape thinks tensions result from America’s transition to a multiracial democracy and the country’s difficulty in accepting that evolution. Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, believes instead that it’s a battle between “normies and the elites” over the internet’s democratization of information and the loss of status and gatekeeping power by those who once comfortably exercised control.
I’ll add that we’ve made politics excessively high stakes. When the state intrudes into all areas of life and presumes to exercise veto power over personal choices and important values, people may understandably come to believe that elections are too important to lose. Smaller decentralized government would reduce conflict by giving us less to fight over.
Whether for those reasons — or some other explanation — elections in the United States are now exhausting and dangerous. Election workers armour their offices and sign up for “active shooter” drills. American voters prepare to battle each other over who gets to torment opponents from elected office.
The 2024 political campaign may be over, but we still must hope for a peaceful conclusion to our deep and endless political disputes.
National Post