I have written this piece for Slate. It begins:

For the last two years, I have been writing about my grave concerns over the future of American democracy. With developments over the last week, culminating on Monday night with the loss of election denier Kari Lake for governor in the key swing state of Arizona, I’m a little less worried. If we were two minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock before last week’s midterm elections, we are now back to 10 minutes to midnight. Given how people are always asking me how worried I am about our country’s democracy, I thought it worth sharing why I’m a bit less terrified, and what dangers still lie ahead for 2024 and beyond.

Back in September 2020, I wrote for Slate a piece with the title, “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.” ..

Things only got worse after Election Day in November. Donald Trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden but he called the election rigged and stolen. He refused to concede. He and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results. He tried to pressure state and federal officials, including the vice president, to overturn the election results. He inspired the January 6 violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and he refused to take immediate steps to call it off and let Congress finish the counting of the Electoral College votes.

After Joe Biden took office, things did not quiet down. Rather than fading into the sunset, Trump doubled down on his stolen election rhetoric and remained the leader of the Republican Party, inspiring a base of support utterly convinced of Trump’s 2020 victory; a CNN poll in September 2020 found 59 percent of Republicans stating that belief in a stolen 2020 election was an important part of what it means to be a Republican.

As Trump’s vise on the Republican base tightened, a slew of candidates ran for offices that had real control over how elections are run and results certified. Lake of Arizona and Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania ran as their states’ Republican nominees for a governor saying they would not have certified the 2020 election for Joe Biden. A cadre of election denialist Republican candidates for secretary of state ran under the “America First” banner, led by election deniers such as Jim Marchant of Nevada and Mark Finchem of Arizona. Scores of other Republican candidates for office ran espousing election denialism.

In all of the swing states, the election denialist candidates lost for governor or secretary of state. In Michigan, Democrats took back control of the state legislature, making state legislative action impossible to try to steal a 2024 election victory for Trump in the state if he loses the vote. Democrats may take control of the state Senate in Pennsylvania, blocking an avenue there too.

Mike Pence is finally, belatedly, speaking out about how Trump endangered him and his family by egging on the rioters who were trying to get him to unilaterally reject Electoral College votes for Biden and throw the election to Trump. And now the lame duck session of Congress is poised on a remarkably bipartisan basis in the Senate to pass a set of reforms to the arcane 1887 Electoral Count Act that Trump tried to exploit to turn his election loss into victory.

How did we make such progress? The same election deniers that pleased Trump and the Republican base repelled enough sane Republicans who oppose stolen elections to hold back their votes. The New York Times reported Monday that Trump had told U.S. Senate candidate David McCormick running in the Pennsylvania Republican primary that “If you don’t deny it, you won’t win.” McCormick didn’t deny it, failed to get Trump’s support, and he lost the primary to Trump-supported Mehmet Oz by fewer than 1,000 votes. Oz went on to win the Republican primary but lose the general election to Democrat John Fetterman.

Across the ballot, in the places where it mattered, Democrats, Republicans, and others poured money into defeating election-denying candidates. The message was that if these people were willing to say, against all reliable evidence, that the last election was stolen, how could you trust them to run the next one? Democracy was on the line. This time, the line held.

We will now be going into 2024 in much better shape than I expected at this point.

But now is not the time for popping champagne glasses and declaring the risk of election subversion over. Why not?…