Throughout the presidential campaign, Democrats made democracy a major theme of their campaigns. Exit polls showed that in a choice of five issues, the two most important were “state of democracy” at 34%, and the economy at 31%. Abortion was a distant third at 14%, closely followed by immigration at 12%, and foreign policy at 4%.
Although “the state of democracy” was important to voters, it didn’t necessarily benefit Democrats. From the exit polls, 73% of the electorate said democracy was threatened rather than secure (25%), but among the voters who said democracy was threatened, Trump won by 2 (50-48). A sizable percentage of the 2024 electorate (39%) said democracy was very threatened, yet this group voted for Trump by 5 (52-47).
From our Winston Group post-election survey, we found that “threats to democracy” was the second most widely heard campaign message from Democratic candidates (17%), second to abortion (30%). With the Democrats’ emphasis on the message that Trump was a threat to democracy, why didn’t the issue translate into votes for Democrats?
In a January 2022 survey for Winning the Issues, we asked voters about the statement that some have said that there is a significant threat to democracy in our country today. A majority of the country agreed with that statement (68-18 agree-disagree) with majority agreement across party (71% of Republicans believing, 68% of independents, 66% of Democrats). But there were different definitions of the threats.
• Democrats saw the two greatest threats to democracy as Republicans undermining minority voting rights at the state level /voter suppression (36%) and right-wing extremist movements (19%).
• Republicans defined the biggest threats to democracy today as voter fraud (including non-citizen voting and lack of security with mail-in ballots) (34%) and federal government overreach and mandates (29%).
• Independents’ top concerns included a mix from the two parties’ definitions: federal government overreach and mandates (20%), voter fraud related issues (20%) followed by right-wing extremist movements (16%) and voter suppression/undermining minority voting (14%) .
• Across party, influence of the news media was seen as another significant threat to democracy, coming in at about the same level among all three groups (10% among Republicans, 10% among independents, 9% among Democrats).
Voters have different interpretations of threats to democracy, but in the 2024 campaign, Democrats only saw it from their perspective — a major miscalculation. For more analysis, see our post-election report.