By ALI SWENSON and LINLEY SANDERS
NEW YORK (AP) — About three in four U.S. adults believe the upcoming presidential election is critical to the future of American democracy, though which candidate they think poses the greatest threat will depend on their politics, according to a poll. preferences.
The research of The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that most Democrats, Republicans and independents view the election as “very important” or “extremely important” for democracy, while Democrats have a higher level of intensity on the issue. More than half of Democrats say the November election is “extremely important” to the future of American democracy, compared with about four-in-ten independents and Republicans.
Democrat Pamela Hanson, 67, of Amery, Wisconsin, said she has serious concerns about the future of the country’s democracy as the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is elected.
“His statements tend to suggest that he is a king or a dictator, a person who is solely in charge,” Hanson said. “I mean, the guy is out of control in my opinion.”
But Republican Ernie Wagner of Liberty, New York, said it is President Joe Biden’s administration — which includes Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee — that has abused executive branch power.
“Biden has tried to eliminate student loans, and the courts have told him it is unconstitutional to do so,” Wagner, 85, said. “He weaponized the FBI to get his political opponents.”
The poll’s findings suggest that many Democrats continue to see Trump as a threat to democracy, even though he has tried reverse the results of the Elections 2020embraced the rioters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 and threatened to do so seeking retribution against his opponents if he wins re-election.
But they also indicate that many Trump supporters agree with him that Biden poses the real threat to democracy. Trump and his allies have accused Biden of arming him the Ministry of Justice as it filed charges against the former president for his efforts stop certification of the 2020 election and the retention of classified documents, although there is no evidence that Biden had any involvement or influence in the cases.
Trump has portrayed himself as a defender of American values and has portrayed Biden as one “destroyer” of democracy. He said several times after he survived an assassination attempt last month that he “took a bullet for democracy.”
The poll, conducted in the days after Biden dropped out of the race and Harris announcing her campaign is a first glimpse of America’s vision for a reformed contest.
A majority of both Democrats and Republicans say democracy could be in jeopardy in this election depending on who wins the presidency. The answers are generally consistent with the findings when the question was last asked in an AP-NORC poll in December 2023.
Hanson, the Wisconsin Democrat, said she worries that Trump would use the measure in a second term. conservative-dominated US Supreme Court to set aside important freedoms. She is also concerned that he will fill his cabinet with loyalists who do not care about the well-being of everyone in the country, and who will strip agencies that regulate key functions of society.
But Wagner, the New York Republican, dismissed those concerns and pointed to Trump’s time in office.
“When he was in the White House, we had peace, we had prosperity and we had energy independence,” he said. “What’s undemocratic about that?”
He said he did not think Trump’s intentions in the run-up to and on January 6 were criminal.
“I just think he was misguided,” Wagner said.
Some independents are also carefully considering the stakes of the upcoming elections for the country’s democratic future.
“I believe this is the most important election of my lifetime,” said Patricia Seliga-Williams, 53, of LaVale, Maryland, an independent who is leaning toward voting for Harris.
Seliga-Williams said she barely survives on $15 an hour as a breakfast attendant at a hotel and remembers Trump handling the economy and immigration well. But she didn’t like it when he recently joked that that’s what he plans to do a ‘dictator’ on the first day in the office.
“We all know Donald Trump could rule the country,” she said. “But he is just too aggressive anymore, and I don’t think I can rely on that as a voter.”
Not everyone agrees that this year’s presidential election will be a turning point for the country’s democracy, and there are very different reasons for it, the AP-NORC poll shows. About two in ten Americans say that US democracy is strong enough to withstand the outcome of the election regardless of who wins, while another two in ten believe that democracy is already so badly broken that the outcome no longer matters.
The poll also shows that commitment to democracy during the elections are felt more by the elderly than by the young. About half of adults aged 45 and over say the outcome of the election is extremely important to the future of democracy, compared with about 4 in 10 adults under 45.
“Making the claim that the other candidate is trying to destroy democracy doesn’t really make sense to me,” said Daniel Oliver, 26, an independent from a Detroit suburb. “I think we have things in place that should protect against the kind of attempts to destroy democracy. We have other branches of government. There are people who believe in votes. So it would be difficult for a candidate to take power and become some kind of dictator.”
He said he will look for candidates to talk about issues he is more interested in, such as reducing inflation and investing in clean energy sources.
Biden And Trump spent months arguing about whose second term would be worse for democracy. The president nodded to the consequences as he ended his campaign last month, saying in his Oval Office speech that “defending democracy is more important than any title.”
Harris has focused more on the concept of “freedom” in the early days of her campaign. She has said that Trump’s re-election could cause Americans to lose the election freedom to votethe freedom to be safe from gun violence and freedom for women to make decisions about their own body. Her debut campaign ad last month was set to Beyoncé’s 2016 song “Freedom,” and it has since become a campaign song for her at rallies.
Harris made no mention of democracy at her first two presidential campaign rallies, but returned to the topic last week in remarks to members of the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority in Houston, saying that “our basic freedoms are on the ballot, and so are for our democracy.”
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The survey of 1,143 adults was conducted July 25-29, 2024, using a sample from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points for all respondents.
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