One Sunday afternoon in November, several of President Jimmy Carter’s former aides and advisers met on Zoom for a private call. Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State, made an appearance, along with Dick Gephardt, the former House Democratic leader. Les Francis, a former deputy White House chief of staff in the Carter administration, was watching the waiting room for late arrivals while, from his log house in the foothills outside of Denver, Gary Hart, the former senator from Colorado, was having difficulty logging on.
For three or four years, the Carter administration veterans had been meeting like this to keep in touch. But more recently, as Republicans went from initial, brief discomfort with the Jan. 6 attack to rallying behind former President Donald Trump’s false assertions that the election was stolen, their conversations had begun to become more urgent, focusing on the state of American democracy. And the assessment was grim.
Trump had tried to overturn an election. Now, with the GOP widely expected to control the House and, potentially, critical statehouses in 2024, it appeared at least possible that a second attempt by Trump or some like-minded Republican to seize or cling to power undemocratically might just succeed.
“It’s time to ring the alarm bells, and it’s time to say to people, ‘Hey, wake up. There’s nothing written that democracy always has to exist,” Gephardt told them. “In fact, most writers on democracy say that the average life of a democracy in history is about 300 years. Well, we’re moving into the 300-year mark. So, this is an alarming situation.”
He said, “It’s scary as hell.”
Yet as members of the Carter group discussed the prospect of democracy’s collapse, there was another crisis that troubled them just as much: The fact that, as a voting issue, so few Democrats seemed to care.
Even after the experience of 2020 and the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and even as Republicans in the midterms parrot Trump’s falsehoods — democracy has polled relatively low on the electorate’s list of concerns. The Jan. 6 committee hearings were encouraging. But Democrats competing in elections this year have not been pressing the issue anywhere near as hard as other concerns.
Of the more than $300 million spent by Democrats on broadcast advertisements this year throughout the country, ads that mentioned Jan. 6, the insurrection, democracy or stolen elections accounted for less than 4 percent of all spending, according to an analysis compiled for POLITICO by the ad tracking firm AdImpact. That’s less than Democrats spent on subjects ranging from energy and the environment to education, roads and infrastructure, abortion, health care, Trump and guns.
And the problem was even worse than that. In some cases, Democrats were themselves taking anti-democratic positions, spending millions of dollars in Republican primaries to elevate hard-right candidates they viewed as more beatable opponents in the fall. It didn’t seem to matter that some of those candidates were election conspiracy theorists — or that Democrats, if their own candidates faltered in November, could be helping them win.
To some members of the Carter group, the discussion surrounding democracy was beginning to feel like the early days of the climate movement, when scientists and some Democrats spoke urgently about a looming crisis, but were often mocked or ignored. Starting late last year, I was granted access to some of their Zoom calls and was in contact with some participants more directly, and the question that kept coming up was how to mainstream their concerns about democracy — and do it more quickly than the climate’s still-halting march into the political consciousness.
“It’s that tired old metaphor of the frog and the water,” Bo Cutter, a veteran of both the Carter and Clinton administrations, told me recently. “If you raise it with people who are … actively involved in policy and politics, you tend to get sort of a patronizing pat on the head and a, ‘Well, America has always come through in the end’ kind of thing.’”
“It’s incredibly hard for people to come together around something like this,” he said. “There’s just so much else on people’s minds.”
Earlier this year, when I visited Francis, the organizer of the Carter group calls, at his home in Camino, Calif., in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Sacramento, he said he’d been heartened by the amount of coverage democracy was getting on Sunday morning talk shows and in national newspaper opinion pages.
But it was mostly talk. In the midterm campaign, the Democratic Party was pinning its hopes for November not on some upswell in reverence for democracy, but on public outrage over the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and, to a lesser degree, cooling inflation and President Joe Biden’s improving legislative record, including the recent passage of a major tax, health care and climate change bill.
It’s possible the strategists making those decisions have it right — that they value the nation’s democratic enterprise just as much as their predecessors but have concluded the only way to protect it is by keeping Democrats in as many offices as they can. If accomplishing that means focusing ads on issues voters care more about than democracy, or intervening in a Republican primary, there may not be much downside.
One Democratic strategist who advises major party donors told me, “Most Americans can’t even spell democracy.”
Whether they can or not might fall beside the point. If anything, the Democratic Party’s prospects look marginally better today than they did just a few weeks ago. Democrats are still widely expected to lose the House, but perhaps not by the margins they once feared. And they may hold onto the Senate.
But to Francis, a former executive director of both the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party was missing the longer view. He sat back in his home office chair and groaned.
Democracy, he said, “is more important to the survival of the country than, frankly, daycare for kids or prescription drug prices.”
“This may be generational,” said Francis, who is 79. “But for people of my generation who came of age politically in the 1960s, and we were involved with civil rights, anti-war, student rights, all these things, we just are having a hard time believing that this is happening, it’s happening in our lifetime, and it’s happening on our watch.”
The midterms are now less than three months away. Trump may announce his 2024 campaign any day. And Republicans in this year’s primaries have been nominating gubernatorial and secretary of state candidates who, if elected, could influence the outcome of the next presidential election, overseeing the machinery of the election and its certification at the state level.
The worst-case scenario, said Hart, a two-time presidential candidate, would be “the 2020 election quadrupled: Every state count challenged in state courts and federal courts, all 50 cases going to the Supreme Court, and who knows how this Court’s going to rule on things like that.” Cutter described that prospect as a “doomsday scenario” with more than trivial odds.
None of this is news to Democrats. Biden recently sat for a conversation with historians at the White House at which comparisons reportedly were drawn to the run-up to the Civil War. And if Democrats were going to do anything about it, it would largely be on them, with majorities of Republicans still clinging to the false belief that the last election was rigged. To several of the Carter group people I spoke with, the party wasn’t doing nearly enough.
“The question we all have is, ‘Is there time to fix it?’” Francis said. “I have to say I’m doubtful.”
He said, “We still haven’t reached critical mass on recognizing the severity of the problem.”
Ever since the 2020 election, a hodgepodge of Democratic and nonpartisan groups has been focusing more intently on issues surrounding the health of our democracy. Major institutions like the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP have engaged in efforts to combat state-level voting restrictions. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, is chairing a super PAC opposing the 147 Republican members of Congress who went in with Trump and voted against certifying the 2020 election. Run for Something, a Democratic-candidate recruiting group, announced a long-term plan in April to find and support thousands of candidates for local offices overseeing elections. And in Michigan — a critical swing state and home to one of the GOP’s more overt efforts to overturn the last election — a leading democracy and voting rights group announced this month an independent expenditure effort that will run digital ads and focus volunteer efforts on defeating election deniers.
Last month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California defended such interventions, describing them as political decisions “made in furtherance of our winning the election.”
And there’s an argument to be made that she’s right. In 2012, then-Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri was all but written off before she intervened in the Republican primary to elevate a weak opponent, Todd Akin, whose campaign imploded after his remarks about “legitimate rape.” One Democratic National Committee member told me, “The practicality of it has been proven in several races.” And given the significance of party affiliation in Washington, he said — when it comes to elections, but also everything else on the Democratic agenda — it may be worth it if it helps a Democrat win.
Criticism of the practice may also overstate the risk. There’s a likelihood in some contests that Republicans would have voted for the hard-liner in the primary regardless of anything Democrats did. Highlighting a Republican’s Trump-ian credentials may help him or her in a primary, but it can also serve to define them at a critical moment early in the campaign, blunting any effort they might make to walk back their positions in the general election.
“Having them defined early means there is a subset of voters who are never going to consider them” in the general election, said David Turner of the Democratic Governors Association. “It’s educating them about how extreme they are.”
Still, there is a queasiness within the Democratic Party about it. For Democrats who had been elevating concerns about democracy, the interventions in Republican primaries — in some cases on behalf of election deniers — seemed this year to be dicier than in the past. Moreover, it undercut the idea that Democrats were treating democracy as an existential concern.
In a sign of the fracture within the party over the practice, about three dozen former Democratic House and Senate members, including Gephardt and Hart, signed on to an open letter criticizing it this month.
Hart called the meddling “beneath us” and “the worst kind of political manipulation.” And at his home in California, Francis said, “It plays into the cynicism of the public who thinks it’s all just a fucking game.”
“It’s not a game,” Francis said. “Governing and democracy is serious business.”
Last week, Francis said he was thinking of ways to “start inventorying what is going on on the pro-democracy side, what activities are underway, where’s the leadership, who’s doing the public opinion research and the messaging, where are the gaps.”
“Somebody needs to pull them together, it seems to me,” he said.
Yet Francis worried Republicans were way ahead of Democrats on the issue. While Democrats were still talking about raising the public’s awareness, election denialism had become one of the chief motivating forces on the right, with Republicans nominating candidates in this year’s midterms who reject the results of the last election and could have enormous influence over future ones.
“What we’re doing is such a drop in the bucket,” Francis said. “The question is how to turn this into a movement. And it hasn’t yet, not in the same way that it has turned into a movement on the right.”
Francis said he doubted anything meaningful could be accomplished before the midterm election. And he wasn’t optimistic, either, about 2024.
“No,” he said. “No.”
He paused, then added, “I’m deathly afraid of where we’re going, and where we’re going to end up.”