America’s looming election crisis, explained in 3 charts

Are we barreling toward a legitimacy crisis in this election?

The polls show a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, suggesting that the 2024 election, like the 2020 one, may be decided by narrow margins in a few battleground states. And like last time, polls suggest a sizable proportion of Republican voters seem poised to reject the results if Trump comes up short. 

If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll. 

That may include resorting to violence: Among Republicans who don’t believe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate, almost one-third said in an August poll by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University that they expected “a lot” or “a great deal” of political violence after the November election. That doesn’t mean that violence is inevitable — but after the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection, the possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand.  

These beliefs may stem from the fact that, among Republicans, Trump proved by far the most trusted source of information about election results, well above local and national news outlets. In an Associated Press/NORC/USAFacts poll from earlier this month, more than 60 percent of Republicans said they believe Trump himself is the best place to get the facts about results. 

The problem with all this, of course, is that the former president has been very consistent in falsely claiming that he won the 2020 election, and in casting doubt on the legitimacy of US elections ahead of the 2024 contest. 

During his first debate against Harris, Trump again refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, walking back his comments in a podcast interview earlier this month in which he said he “lost by a whisker.” And despite facing criminal charges for pressuring election officials to overturn the results in 2020, Trump has not indicated that he will accept the results in November. 

“We have to have good elections. Our elections are bad,” he said during the debate.

Trump has also threatened to prosecute “those people that CHEATED” in the 2024 election and subject them to long-term prison sentences if he wins. 

His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), also said in a podcast appearance this month that he wouldn’t have certified the results of the 2020 election if he had been in Congress at the time. “I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and ask the country to have a debate,” he said. 

Trump’s long-running insistence that he won in 2020 appears to be having an effect over time, with several surveys measuring greater buy-in of his lies about the election from voters today than in the past. A December Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 36 percent of US adults did not believe Biden was legitimately elected, compared to 29 percent two years prior. And in a Pew Research poll conducted earlier this month, 27 percent of US adults said that Trump did nothing wrong in trying to overturn the election results, up from 23 percent in April.

The pervasiveness of Trump’s lies about the election seems to have also contributed to Republican fears about the future of democracy, which polling suggests are more acute than among Democrats. Republicans were much more likely to say American democracy isn’t working and that it would end in their lifetimes than Democrats in a March Quinnipiac poll.

Overall, surveys suggest that many Americans believe there’s a real possibility that Trump won’t accept the election results. An August ABC/Ipsos poll found that only 29 percent said they believed Trump was prepared to accept the results regardless of the outcome. 

Add it all up and the picture is troubling: If the election is close — and all indications are that it will be — we seem to be set up for a genuine legitimacy crisis if Trump were to lose. It’s yet another indication of US democracy’s perilous state and how Trump has bent American politics to his will.

Can the center hold? 

Trump’s words and actions — and his followers’ beliefs — stand in contrast to Harris’s and her supporters. 

In her Democratic National Convention speech last month, Harris committed to a peaceful transfer of power. Democrats show the same commitment: The August ABC/Ipsos poll found that 92 percent were prepared to accept the results, regardless of the outcome, in contrast to 76 percent of Trump supporters. 

That said, recent reports about Trump allies laying the groundwork to undermine the election results in some key states could certainly end up raising questions for some Democratic voters about the legitimacy of the results if he wins. 

In Georgia, for instance, members of the state elections board associated with the Trump-aligned “stop the steal” campaign have signed off on new rules that allow local elections officials to make “reasonable inquiry” into election irregularities — without defining what might constitute a “reasonable” inquiry. That could potentially lead to frivolous challenges that could complicate the certification of what is expected to be a close election in Georgia. 

Moreover, the polarized state of the country means a Trump victory, especially a narrow one, would likely prompt the kind of massive peaceful protests the country saw in the wake of the 2016 election (though, of course, accepting the results and peacefully protesting them is entirely different from storming the Capitol and attempting to stop the peaceful transfer of power). 

As we near Election Day, it’s well worth taking a step back and assessing the state of American democracy in 2024. One of the two major party candidates refuses to accept his defeat four years ago and shows every sign of doing the same thing again this year if he loses. His supporters are right there with him. 

That the election remains close raises the risk of a true crisis but is also a reminder of how, because of Trump, what was once unthinkable is now reality.