“A Democratic Stress Test — The 2020 Election and Its Aftermath”

Bright Line Watch:

The 2020 election and its aftermath presented severe challenges to U.S. democracy. The election was conducted during a pandemic that required fundamental changes in how Americans cast and counted ballots. The incumbent president refused to commit in advance to a peaceful transition of power if he lost, and continues to refuse to recognize that defeat as legitimate (though he has finally relented to letting the transition begin and signaled that he would accept an Electoral College defeat). During this process, many GOP leaders have endorsed the president’s baseless claims of electoral fraud, even publicly suggesting that state legislatures could override the popular vote in awarding electors. Yet the election ultimately succeeded in ways few dared hope. Most notably, polling places and mail balloting operated effectively and mostly uneventfully under unprecedented conditions. And despite a barrage of accusations and litigation, no evidence has surfaced of systematic malfeasance or mismanagement. 

To assess the importance and consequences of these events, Bright Line Watch fielded parallel surveys of political science experts and of a representative sample of Americans to assess the importance and magnitudes of these events. In this post-election survey, which was fielded from November 12–25, we asked our public sample questions about the legitimacy of the election results, their confidence that votes were cast and counted fairly, their beliefs about voter fraud, and their willingness to condone political violence. We asked our experts to rate the likelihood of 23 scenarios related to the November election and the transition to a new administration that could produce political crises, and to evaluate a number of recent events related to the election. As in previous surveys, we asked both groups to assess the quality of U.S. democracy overall and to rate performance on 30 distinct democratic principles. 

We report a number of key findings below from both the public and the experts we surveyed:

Public

  • Compared to before the election, confidence in the election process and the legitimacy of the outcome became much more polarized between supporters and opponents of President Trump.
  • Most notably, confidence in the national vote count plummeted among Trump supporters, declining from 56% before the election to 28% afterward.
  • Similarly, belief polarization about voter fraud grew still wider — in particular, even larger majorities of Trump supporters now believe that fraud is rampant compared to before the election.
  • More encouragingly, willingness to condone political violence declined slightly after the election.

Experts

  • Expert forecasts in October correctly identified the six nightmare scenarios that did actually transpire as among the eight that they forecast as most likely, but generally overestimated the probability of outcomes seen as somewhat or not very likely (none of which actually took place).
  • Experts believe it is highly likely that President Trump will continue to refuse to recognize Biden’s presidency and to obstruct the transition, and that the President will take actions to protect himself and those around him from legal exposure after leaving office. They regard problems with the Electoral College and the formal recognition of Biden’s presidency as unlikely.
  • Large majorities of experts regard Trump’s attacks on U.S. elections and the press as serious or grave threats to American democracy. By contrast, experts do not consider mail balloting to pose a threat to democracy and are divided over Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court appointment.

We present our results in three parts. First, we review the public’s perception of various aspects of the November election. We then describe experts’ assessments of the election and events in its immediate wake. Finally, we step back to gauge how both the public and the experts rate the performance of American democracy both overall and across thirty core democratic principles.

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