President Joe Biden has made the threat that former President Donald Trump poses to democracy a key focus of his presidency, and has hammered it home as a major part of the general election now that Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee. Political strategists have been trying to determine for years how effective that messaging has been — and at first glance, a new poll from Fox News suggests Biden’s push has been working.
The survey found that “the future of American democracy” was the most important issue for respondents in deciding their vote for president, edging the economy out of the top spot for the first time since March. In total, 68% of registered voters said they ranked it as “extremely” important and another 20% deemed it “very” important.
But a look under the hood shows that rather than a rare bipartisan consensus, this instead speaks to how much Trump’s false narrative about 2020 has become gospel for the GOP.
Rather than a rare bipartisan consensus, this instead speaks to how much Trump’s false narrative about 2020 has become gospel for the GOP.
The crosstabs for that question show that a strong majority in every listed demographic ranked democracy’s future as extremely important in deciding their vote. That includes 74% of Democrats as well as 64% of Republicans and 61% of independents. The numbers only get more eyebrow-raising from there, as those who call themselves liberal (73%) and very conservative (75%) sync up, as well as 74% of Biden supporters and 62% of Trump supporters.
If these voters were all on the same page about the threat to democracy, you’d assume that a similar number would see a similar path toward protecting it. But a few questions later, it becomes more clear that the two sides are likely talking past each other. When pollsters asked respondents whom they trust to do a better job on the issue, Biden held a slight lead, 52% to 46%. There is a starkly partisan divide on that front, with 93% of people who voted for Trump in 2020 thinking he’d perform better, versus just 6% who think Biden would. Meanwhile, 4% of Biden 2020 voters said that Trump would fare better at defending democracy, while 94% of those voters believe Biden would safeguard democracy better.
As confusing as it may be at first to think that Trump, the person who worked overtime to overturn the 2020 election’s results and has called every election he’s lost rigged, could be seen as pro-democracy, it does fit with a certain bizarro logic. It’s a belief that logically follows if you incorrectly believe that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, as 62% of Republicans do, according to a Washington Post survey from January. A poll from Monmouth University last year likewise found that 68% of Republicans still believe that Biden won only because of that supposed fraud, as Trump still falsely claims.
What we’re seeing is the result of MAGA Republicans boosting the big lie of 2020 into a dogma that casts Trump as the defender of democracy. A summit last week hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action featured a parade of conservative figures lining up to repeat that talking point, Semafor’s Dave Weigel reported. In their telling, people like former White House aides Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, who were convicted of contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas from the Jan. 6 committee, are political prisoners. The efforts to invoke the 14th Amendment to remove Trump from the ballot were election interference and “January 6 was a ‘fedsurrection’ that Nancy Pelosi could have stopped,” as Weigel put it.
What we’re seeing is the result of MAGA Republicans boosting the big lie of 2020 into a dogma that casts Trump as the defender of democracy.
Fox News’ finding also tracks with other surveys that have been taken since Trump left office. When Biden spoke before the 2022 midterms about the threat democracy faces, he cited a poll from The New York Times that showed “an overwhelming majority of Americans believe our democracy is at risk, that our democracy is under threat.” As I wrote then, it was clear that “when you start to examine what that means, you come face to face with the cracked lens that Trump and his acolytes have conditioned their supporters to look through.”
Since then, we’ve had more evidence that this was the case as polling continues to show that a majority of Americans think “democracy is under a major threat,” as a Grinnell University survey put it last year. But we lack consensus on what that means. As Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer put it in his Substack, simply “asking people about just ‘democracy’ doesn’t work. The term means very different things to different people and groups, the visions of what American ‘democracy’ should be, what type of order a functioning democracy should generate, differ widely.”
His observation is borne out when you look at one of the most interesting, but least definitive, questions in Fox News’ survey: “When you hear about threats to the future of American democracy, [what] does that make you think more about?” Respondents were given the choice between “the end of free and fair elections” (30%) and “the end of certain rights and freedoms” (53%), with another 14% saying “both” and 2% saying “neither.” Here too there was a surprisingly lopsided result across demographics, as the latter won out — but without a definition of what those “rights and freedoms” are, it’s hard to determine if there’s any real agreement there or if it just sounded scarier to respondents when asked.
Beyond muddling polling results, this Trumpian narrative in the GOP has solved what has been a seemingly impossible circle to square: How do you convince voters that elections are rigged but that they should still vote? The answer appears to be to tell them that yes, Democrats cheated in 2020 — but if they watch very closely this time and turn out in droves, this time could be different. When combined with Trump’s continued insistence that a loss this fall could only come from fraud, and Republican officials’ willingness to support him, that’s a further crumbling of belief in election results among a dangerously large part of the electorate.
