The NPR Politics Podcast - US Democracy Is At Risk Of Failing, According To 64% Of Americans

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

The sentiment is felt most acutely by Republicans, two-thirds of whom wrongly believe that "voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election." That's according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll out Monday. A majority of Republicans and Democrats alike reject political violence, while more than 1 in 5 respondents say violence is sometimes justified to protect democracy or American culture and values. This episode: demographics and culture correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, national correspondent Joel Rose, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Sam in Tokitoki Grande, Brazil. Unlike my regular morning routine of listening to the Empire Politics podcast, I'm currently soaking up the sun and listening to the beautiful bird calls in the morning. This podcast was recorded at 208 p.m. on Monday, January 3rd, 2022. Wow, an exotic remote worker, maybe. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will still be trying to soak up as much sun as possible before heading back to Chicago in a few days. Okay, enjoy the show. Oh, it's all over. Meanwhile, we've gotten our, what, foot of snow here in DC today. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And we have

a guest today, Joel Rose of NPR's national team. Hey, Joel. Hi. All right. So we are talking about a poll today, a poll we get as we approach the anniversary of last year's attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was, of course, a violent manifestation of Trump loyalists' belief in the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. A year later, the country remains divided. But this new NPR-Ipsos poll shows broad agreement on one thing, that the country is, quote, in crisis and at risk of failing. Joel, there are some troubling results in here, perhaps chief among them. Seven in 10 Americans believe that, that the country is in crisis and at risk of failing. What more can you tell us about what's behind that number? Yeah, another startling number is that six in 10 Americans believe that U.S. democracy is in crisis and at risk of failing. And we found a majority of Americans agree with

that across the board, regardless of partisanship. But the sentiment is really strongest among Republicans. A big percentage of Republicans agree with the false claim that there was significant fraud in the 2020 election that affected the outcome. And about half of Republicans say they're not willing to accept the results of the 2020 election. That is virtually unchanged from last January in our polling. It's actually down a little bit from what we found last year. So almost two-thirds of all the respondents in our poll agree that democracy is more at risk now than it was a year ago. And among Republicans in particular, that number jumps to four out of five say democracy is more at risk now than it was one year ago. All right. So Mara, help us figure out how to think about this. This is a thing we hear a lot of worry about from political scientists, that we have this mass erosion of trust in institutions. A large segment of Americans just don't believe basic facts about who wins elections. Leaders are undermining trust in elections. There are reasons to be worried about democracy. Tell us about that link between trust and the

strength of a democracy. Well, low-trust societies are unstable societies, and it's hard to have democracy in a low-trust society because we have to believe that the votes are counted fairly. We have to have transparent processes for counting the votes. That's why you saw in all of these states where Trump supporters demanded recounts and audits over and over again, some local election officials said, look, we're going to do these audits and hopefully we're going to present the accurate truth to people and they're going to understand that these elections were fair and free from fraud. And they did that over and over again. There was no evidence turned up, even though many of these audits were performed by Trump supporters.

They could not find votes that were not counted for Trump that should have been. So what we know, which is so difficult about this situation, is evidence, facts, reality doesn't matter. We have one party that's just not reality-based, that as long as Donald Trump tells them the lie that the election was stolen from him, they're going to believe that. A party that only believes in the legitimacy of an election result if they win. Joel, I want to ask you about this and specifically what we found in this poll. Tell us more about the reasons that Republicans in particular are pointing to about why was the big thing for them. Two-thirds of Republicans in the survey agreed with the false claim that voter fraud helped Joe Biden

win the 2020 election, which, as Mara has said, you know, is a key pillar of the so-called big lie that the election was stolen from President Trump. And that has been thoroughly disproven, but many Republicans are simply not persuaded. I mean, and that kept coming out in the interviews that we did. You know, for instance, we talked to a man named Steven Weber from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and here is some of what he told us. I think the Democrats rigged the election because I saw how all of a sudden the numbers changed at like 3 a.m. And who the hell would vote for Biden? Well, 81 million people, right, voted for Biden compared to about 74 million for Trump. But Weber says he does not trust mail-in voting. He does not trust Democrats. He does not believe that they have the country's best interests at heart. And he still believes that the election in 2020 was stolen.

Clearly, a lot of other Republicans in our poll felt that way, too. All right. So what about Democrats? What kind of fears do they have? Democrats are also dismayed about the state of democracy, but they offer, you know, very different reasons. They are voicing concern about these restrictions on voting that have been passed by Republican controlled state legislatures last year. And they're struggling to make sense of the persistence of this belief in the fiction that President Trump won reelection.

I talked to a woman named Susan Leonard from Lyme, New Hampshire. Here's some of what she said. It's like a group mental illness has hit these people. I can't even wrap my head around it. I cannot believe this is happening in our country. I am scared. And I heard, you know, similar sentiments from other Democrats who just kind of can't quite understand what is going on and why, you know, they seem to be occupying a different reality from Republicans, because that seems to be, you know, the country we're living in. Well, and this is something that Mara brought up a little bit earlier, this lack of shared reality. And people do disagree also about what to call what happened on January 6th, our poll found. Not just what to call it,

though, but what even happened that day. Joel, tell us more about what our poll said there. You know, there was some area of agreement. Almost no one thinks that it was a reasonable protest. Republicans and Democrats, you know, each have their own versions of what happened that day. More than half of Democrats say that it was an attempted coup or insurrection. Republicans disagree. I mean, they are much more likely to call it a an attempted coup or insurrection. Republicans disagree. I mean, they are much more likely to call it a riot that got out of control. And Democrats told us they really want to see more accountability. Two-thirds say that President Trump and his allies broke the law in trying to overturn the election. And Republicans just don't agree. Most say the

president was within his rights to contest the election results, which, of course, many of them, you know, see as flawed. And many told us that Trump and his allies didn't go far enough in contesting the election results. Yeah. And, you know, other polls really are even more stark than ours when they ask the same kind of question. The Washington Post poll showed 60% of Americans thought that Trump was responsible either

a good amount or a great deal for what happened that day. 38 percent don't. Same thing with an ABC poll. So even though a majority of people think that he was responsible, and in our poll, a strong plurality consider an insurrection and a threat to U.S. democracy, the fact is that this stubborn 30 percent of Americans, big chunk of the Republican base, you know, believes that it's justified to use violence, that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. And no matter what question you ask, you just come back over and over again to that 30 percent of the electorate. All right. We have a lot more to talk about. We're going to take a quick break and we will dig more into this after that. And we are back. And obviously, this is not a good position to be in as a country with lots of people fearing for the future of our democracy.

But, Mara, I want to ask you a broader question here. What is your sense of what it would take to restore trust in government and the U.S. democratic system? It certainly isn't an easy fix. No, it's not an easy fix, especially when it's not in one party's interest to restore it. You know, in order to restore trust that ballots are counted fairly, you have to have a transparent process, which we do. You have to be able to have an impartial referee, the judiciary, rule in all these cases, which we did. And it doesn't seem to really make a difference. I think the thing that's really scary is that the lie that the election was stolen is existential for Republicans.

They cannot give it up. That's why it's a base motivator for them, but it's also a litmus test for what being a Republican means, especially if you're going to get Donald Trump's support. Why are only two Republicans in Congress speaking out against this? Even Mitt Romney has gone silent. I mean, that's what's scary. Unless you have two parties based in the same reality, start with the same facts, then work their way to different opinions, I don't know how you can have a functioning democracy. I really don't. So I think the first step, it would take something inside the Republican Party to turn it into a party that fights hard in the arena and then accepts the fact that sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. Right now, it's a party that doesn't accept the fact that they can ever lose a race except for

in a blue state. Now, Joel, I want to talk to you more about how intractable this kind of distrust in elections is among Republicans, because we got another data point from this survey about that, that Republican support for false claims about the election is remarkably stable. Time hasn't faded that belief even over the last year. What did we see here? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the numbers of Republicans who say they accept the outcome of the 2020 election has not budged. You know, the number who say that there was significant voter fraud that played a role in the election has not changed, even as, you know, that claim has been debunked over and over again.

And this was really striking to me, a significant number of Republicans, almost a third, there's that number again, right, like about 30%, told us it was actually that the January 6th attacks were actually carried out by opponents of Donald Trump, including Antifa and government agents. What's so interesting about that is even Donald Trump has dropped that argument. He's not saying they were in Antifa provocateurs. He was saying they were great patriots who were peacefully protesting. Even he isn't pushing that anymore. But what Joel is talking about is, look, this is an epistemological battle. This isn't about two different ideologies competing for the support of the electorate, capitalism versus communism or socialism versus something else.

This is about whether you believe in a lie or believe in facts. And the tragedy is, as the Virginia governor's race showed, is that Republicans can win big turnout free elections that have no fraud in them. They can do that, but they don't believe it. Well, I want to turn to one more finding from this poll, which is about election reform. I mean, there is deep distrust among many Americans about elections, albeit for incredibly different reasons, of attention to the changes in voting laws, at least at the state level that we saw last year. I mean, we asked about efforts to reduce access to absentee ballots and to early voting, to give state legislatures more power to determine, you know, the outcomes of elections. And majorities of voters on both sides of the aisle said, one, that they're, you know, that they were not really familiar with these things. But even when we explained what they were, majorities of voters on both sides of the aisle said they would make elections less fair and not more fair.

When we asked them in the poll what they think about some of the election reforms that have been proposed at the federal level, there was a little bit more support for those. For example, the proposal to standardize election rules across the states. That idea drew support from a majority of before we end here, which is you mentioned January 6th. And I'm sure a lot of Americans this week are thinking about that anniversary and asking themselves, could that happen again? Will politically motivated violence be a more regular part of American life? And, Joel, what did we find in this poll about that? Well, our poll found that a majority of both Republicans and Democrats reject political violence. And if you want to see the glass as half full, I guess you could consider that to be the good news. That's a quarter full glass. At best, right? But more than one in five poll

respondents say that violence is sometimes justified, either to protect democracy or American culture and values. And Republicans were more likely than Democrats to agree that it is okay to engage in violence to protect American democracy. That was kind of most stark when you look at Trump voters compared to Biden voters. 32% of Trump voters agreed in our poll compared to 22% of Biden voters. So that is a significant minority of the country that is not closing the door on political violence. All right, well, we are going to have to leave it there for today. Joel, thank you so much. You're welcome. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. I'm Mara

Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.