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 AWN 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.”