On Tuesday November 5th, 2024, I will come home from school, drop off my backpack, and go to my nearest polling place to cast a vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I will not vote out of enthusiasm for a Democratic Party that I find deeply unsatisfying and too moderate, but because the horrors of the United States political sphere have coerced me into voting in the name of “preserving democracy.” I will be voting for the first time, and in what should feel like a moment of joy and importance gleaned from the growing responsibility of my civic duty, I will instead be incredibly frustrated.
In 2024, one thing unites all across the great American political divide: fear of the outcome of the presidential election. Look at any news source right now: everyone, from TikTok creators to MSNBC to Fox, is sure that the 2024 election is the most important election, full stop. Hear Sean Hannity, referencing the words of Donald Trump, say on his July 12th segment that “We are a nation in decline; I’ve never been more nervous about the future of this country and the state of the world than I am right now.” Listen as Rachel Maddow tells us during her May 7th segment that “As the rule of law has bent and been broken by Trump and his movement, we’ve also seen the democratic system bend and get broken by Trump and his movement.”
In this rare moment of agreement—based, of course, in fundamental disagreement—the rhetoric of Trump’s potential victory in the 2024 election as the ultimate threat to democracy has emerged from the Democratic Party. This view is nothing new; the idea of Trump as a threat to democracy gained prevalence after his baseless claims of mass election fraud and the following insurrection on January 6th, 2021. However, as the 2024 election draws nearer and the threat looms larger, its pertinence and immediacy only increases.
There are two main factors driving this idea; first is the fear of election denial following the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. While definitely relevant, that discussion has been played out to every possible extent within the last three and a half years. The second (and more interesting) factor is concern over what a second Trump term would mean for American institutions of democracy themselves. This category is a wide one, and fears span the potential for a conservative supermajority on an already conservative Supreme Court to the now ubiquitous threat of Project 2025, which has finally made its way into general public consciousness.
Produced by the Heritage Foundation as their latest in a 45 year history of Mandate for Leadership agendas dating back to the Reagan years and destined to feature heavily in the Republican policymaking agenda should Trump win the 2024 election, Project 2025 is suddenly on everybody’s minds and lips. While Trump has tried to distance himself from it, the Heritage Foundation has been a core part of conservative policymaking for decades, and no amount of denial will change that history and probable future. It’s impossible for Trump to legitimately distance himself from Project 2025 when 26 out of its 36 authors served in his administration.
Project 2025 promises to reform the Department of Justice, excising the Civil Rights Division that enforces federal voting laws. Additionally, Project 2025 proposes the end of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, which works to secure elections against misinformation, disinformation, and AI threats. Those reforms are just some of the myriad deeply concerning changes that would leave the rights of many Americans across the country unprotected.
The election-related provisions of Project 2025 are most relevant to the idea of this election determining the future security of American democracy. If Trump is elected, while not every single proposal in Project 2025 will come to fruition, ideas like these will permeate Republican policymaking during his term. That is a real threat to democracy, and a scary one at that.
Yet, there’s much more to the story. A more startling issue lies beneath that surface-level but terrifying reality. Our democracy is more than just threatened by a potential second Trump term; it is already bashed and broken.
This moment is undoubtedly important. However, Trump and Project 2025 are treated as “once-in-a-lifetime” level threats; now is the time to act, and if we fail now, we fail forever. This fatalistic view may be based in real possibility, but it also ignores how issues with American democracy stretch beyond the looming threat of the 2024 election and Project 2025. It ignores how American democracy’s already broken state contextualizes Trump’s current “threat to democracy.” Relating to the concerns around Project 2025, the U.S. has struggled with staggering voter suppression throughout its history and through the modern day. The most prominent examples include Jim Crow laws, which implemented poll taxes and literacy tests that purposefully disproportionately affected Black Americans in the South, gerrymandering, which is still a huge issue today and involves purposefully drawing districts to guarantee specific political outcomes based on population concentrations, and the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which involved striking down an important article that helped prevent individual states from implementing voter suppression tactics.
These institutionalized suppression tactics were and are harmful enough, but the environment they’ve helped to create provides a more existential threat. Widespread voter suppression has led to widespread disillusionment with American political institutions, which in turn has made for an atmosphere of apathy and frustration that maintains incredibly low voter turnout. While this election cycle has the potential to threaten American democracy, whatever form of American democracy that currently exists barely represents the American people.
In recent times, voter engagement is incredibly low with between 35 and 60 percent of voters not voting in a given election. Some of this low voter turnout stems from difficulty of access; with issues like having to wait in line for more than an hour, missing registration deadlines, and not being able to take off work, significant amounts of voters and non-voters alike experience frustrating barriers. However, while responsible in part for many of the low voter turnout problems, these more tangible issues alone do not tell the whole story.
The American citizenry is infected with apathy and disillusionment. In an article by FiveThirtyEight that interviewed eligible voters before the 2020 election on their perspective on voting, many responses show just how deep this apathy has spread. One interviewee discussed difficulties at a polling place that took away confidence in the voting system, others complained about lack of information, but many had more basic explanations as to why voting was difficult or not something they planned on doing. Many felt like their vote wouldn’t matter because of the state they lived in, that they didn’t really have enough choice in the whole process, or that there was no one they felt would truly represent them. These are just a sample of the numerous other reasons listed in the poll, all pointing to distrust and disillusionment with American political institutions.
Even more alarming for the state of our democratic system is that the 2020 election had the highest percent eligible turnout in over a century, but that turnout was driven by desperation and fear rather than basic motivation to participate in democracy. Instead of thriving out of a sense of civic duty and excitement over good candidates, our democracy seems to produce its most engaged citizenry when it’s in a state of distress. Additionally, even though 2020 turnout was relatively high at 66% of the voting-eligible population, that number still falls short of truly representing a large swath of the American public.
Of course, low voter turnout directly affects marginalized and disadvantaged groups at a higher rate. Suppression tactics tend to focus on low-income and non-white communities, creating a circular effect that constantly threatens the health of our democracy. Because American democracy has historically underrepresented or fully left out marginalized groups altogether, many feel unwanted by their institutions and are often unmotivated to participate in democracy, which in turn only worsens how democratic institutions treat them. Our current democracy does not accurately represent the citizenry it’s built to serve because of low voter turnout and apathy, and that foundation is what allows symptoms like election denialism and the voter suppression provisions of Project 2025 to pose more existential threats in the present day. While there is little proof that increased voter turnout would automatically turn the tide against a Trumpian “end of democracy”, it’s clear that the current state of U.S. political institutions cannot be relied on to accurately portray the needs of the people.
Apathy and disillusionment are compounded by other systemic issues that hinder democracy within the American political system, including the stifling nature of two-party politics. Third-party candidates simply don’t get elected to federal office, and even at the local level, it’s rare to find an elected official not affiliated with the Democratic or Republican Party. Across the world, other democracies host robust, multi-party systems that span the length of the political spectrum. In the United States, options are incredibly limited by the political apparatus; the U.S. presents a right-leaning political window and traps the public into deciding between a relatively moderate liberal party and an increasingly far-right conservative one. Even as progressive ideas begin to seep more and more into the American political mainstream, their actual enactment is constantly hampered by the moderate slant of establishment Democrats.
And so, with the calming and reassuring context that everything is much, much worse and more complicated than the outcome of the 2024 election alone, I come back to the voting booth. My vote will represent the lack of democracy in American politics. It will show how our institutions, which are supposed to represent us, have completely and utterly failed to uphold that mission. I want to vote for a candidate who will promise more for the American people than the relatively moderate, establishment Democrats have ever promised before. I deserve the opportunity to vote for a candidate in a (nonexistent, mainstream) American leftist party without essentially throwing my vote away. No part of that desire is realistic in our current system.
I will vote. I will vote because I do fear the consequences of a second Trump presidency. I will vote because when the president of the Heritage Foundation says on live TV that “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be,” there is only one legitimate way to show my dissent in the voting booth. And in doing this difficult thing, I will be a rare case compared to the millions disillusioned by a deaf political apparatus. The blame is not on them–what allegiance do they owe to a system that has failed them? Rather than representing an exercise in functioning American democracy, my vote will represent its fundamental flaws.
