WASHINGTON – While inflation and immigration emerged as the dominant themes in this year's presidential race, another issue was prominent in the minds of voters for both major candidates: the stakes for democracy.
Half of voters identified democracy as the single most important motivating factor for their vote. That was higher than the share of voters who answered the same way about inflation, the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, abortion policy or free speech, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide.
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Notably, backers of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, the president-elect, saw the issue from different perspectives.
About two-thirds of Harris voters said the future of democracy was the most important factor for their votes. No other topic — high prices, abortion policy, free speech or the potential of the first woman to be elected as president — was as big a factor for her supporters. Harris especially leaned into this messaging toward the end of her campaign: She said Trump was a threat to undermine the country's founding ideals and she called him a fascist.
The sentiment was supported by former members of the first Trump administration who warned about his fitness for office. Trump refused the peaceful transfer of power while lying about his loss in the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden. And on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump also directed a mob of his supporters to the Capitol after telling them to “fight like hell.”
Audrey Wesley, 90, of Minneapolis cited Trump’s legal cases and his disregard for the law as one of the reasons she supported Harris.
“Our system is broken,” she said.
Wesley said one of the things that troubled her most was Project 2025, a detailed conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration. Trump has said he had not read the report, even though many members of his first administration had a hand in creating it.
"That’s very scary as to what he wants to do,” Wesley said.
The idea that democracy is under attack also motivated Trump voters, but in starkly different ways. About one-third of his supporters said democracy was the most important factor for their vote.
A further breakdown of the survey found that 9 in 10 Harris voters who indicated democracy was the single most important factor in their vote were somewhat or very concerned that electing Trump would bring the country closer to authoritarianism. About 8 in 10 Trump voters felt electing Harris would bring the country closer to authoritarianism. “Democracy voters” who supported Harris and Trump were equally concerned that the opposing candidate's views were too extreme.
The findings followed a consistent pattern in recent surveys by AP VoteCast and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. While democracy's future has been one of the few crossover concerns among a fractured electorate, people have differed on why they are worried about it and who is responsible for the threat.
Debbie Dooley, 66, and a co-founder of the tea party movement, had several important factors in her voting decision, all leading to concern over what would happen to the country under another Democratic administration.
“I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said when people fear their government, there is tyranny,” she said. “We had tyranny under the Biden-Harris machine.”
Dooley, a longtime Trump supporter, cited the nation's “open border” and concerns by many conservatives about crimes caused by migrants who had circumvented the law. The resident of Cumming, Georgia, also agreed with Trump's contention that the Biden administration had unleashed the Department of Justice on political adversaries.
“That’s something they do in Russia. That’s something they would do in China, not the United States, not here in the beacon of freedom for the world,” Dooley said.
Republicans have held congressional hearings for nearly two years but have provided little substance to the claim that Biden has “weaponized” the department.
Like many other conservatives, Dooley also felt social media companies had silenced their voices, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
”Thank God for Elon Musk," she said. "Twitter or X is a totally different place now than it was before he took over, so we have First Amendment rights. It's free speech.”
The survey found that nearly all “democracy voters” who supported Trump said freedom of speech was at least a factor in their vote. It was a less prominent issue for Trump voters who said democracy was a minor factor or not at a factor in their choice.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, said the opposing views about which side posed a threat to democracy are understandable because both campaigns had spoken about the other in those terms. And because democracy is an abstract issue, what constitutes a threat can vary.
“Harris talked a lot about democracy, and the Democratic coalition talked a lot about the threats to democracy,” he said. “So it's not surprising that many Democrats correctly perceived Trump as a threat and name it as one of the most important issues.”
The fact that Republicans echoed the claim against Harris would seem unusual, but one of Trump’s political strategies is to appropriate an attack against him and turn it around against his opponent. Nyhan said Trump did that successfully with the democracy argument.
Border protection, for example, could mean one thing to a Harris backer and something quite different to a Trump voter who might support the idea of the great replacement conspiracy theory — the notion that the influence of whites is being diminished through illegal immigration.
In her concession speech at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, Harris alluded to the importance of accepting election results even in a loss and peacefully transferring power, which Trump has conditioned on whether he would view the election outcome as fair.
“That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny,” Harris said.
Leah Wright Rigueur, a history professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, said the processes of democracy as expressed through the presidential vote won, for now.
“The 2024 presidential election was fundamentally, as far as I understand, an example of democracy in action. Trump won the Electoral College. Trump won the popular votes," she said.
The question is whether the country would be as peaceful if the outcome were different and how does the nation close that fissure in the future when a “very vocal cross section” of the American public sees democracy working only “when my side wins, but tyranny when your side wins?”
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Associated Press writer Michael Goldberg in Minneapolis contributed to this report.
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