Beyond the Results, the Midterms Can Tell Us a Lot About How American Democracy Is Faring

Disputes
Will losing candidates concede? Both parties are dueling over their opponents’ preemptive casting of doubt on the validity of this year’s election results. Hundreds of Republican candidates have taken fire for their baseless questioning of the 2020 election, as well as the fact that many of them in battleground races have declined to respond when asked if they would accept whatever happens this year. Democrats, meanwhile, have been taken to task for setting the stage to potentially deem some results illegitimate. The bottom line is that battles on the validity of the results could extend well beyond election night.

Turnout
How many voters cast a ballot? Average midterm turnout in the last forty years has been about 40 percent. In presidential election years, that jumps to 57 percent. Interestingly, the most recent U.S. elections significantly boosted these averages. The 2018 midterms generated voter turnout not seen in non-presidential elections since 1970—60 percent—and the 2020 presidential election brought out a larger percentage of Americans—66 percent—than any time since the turn of the twentieth century (that’s 1900, folks). Donald Trump was clearly a “yuge” (to use his vernacular) motivator for voters across the political spectrum. Conventional wisdom has long held that high turnout is a sign of a healthy, flourishing democracy. This is an understandable, even instinctive idea. The larger the proportion of a nation’s citizens who have enough faith in voting to take the time to participate in their democracy, the more closely the levers of government will reflect a population’s collective will. This analysis has its counterarguments, however. Some analysts argue that high turnout could accelerate polarization and signal problematic levels of anger in the electorate.

Polling
How accurate were the polls? This question may seem unimportant once the actual results are in, but it speaks to the health of democracy in the United States. In the past, polls have served as an important check—one of the last remaining checks—against the “bubbles” in which so many Americans have found themselves. No matter how few acquaintances you might have had who voted differently than you, no matter how much you marinated yourself in media catering solely to your ideological preferences, thanks to polls you could have at least some sense of how your preferred candidate might actually do. Polls have helped set, or at least temper, bubble-set expectations. When the polls were accurate, and voters had realistic expectations going into election night, losses were easier to digest. Following some recent high-profile misses, however, as well as rising skepticism about institutions in general, polling is on the ropes. A poll about polling a few years ago found that 52 percent of Americans were “doubtful about polls they hear about in the media,” with just 36 percent of Republicans saying that polling is “mostly or almost always accurate.” Mistrust plays out not only on the poll-consumption side of the equation but also on the numbers of certain Americans who are even willing to speak to pollsters. Polling inaccuracies next Tuesday could further erode that confidence, striking yet another blow to a potentially moderating influence in our politics.

The United States’ steady upward trajectory has been built on a foundation of domestic strengths—a stable democracy first among them. A weakened American democracy is an ominous prospect, not only for us but also for a twenty-first-century world beset with enormous challenges. As we buckle up for a rough-and-tumble political week ahead, it will be easy to get caught up in our politics as usual, whether our candidates won or lost, and, soon after, what the next Congress will mean for policy. But our first priority should be to assess what these elections have told us about what the future holds for our democratic system.

Christopher M. Tuttle is Senior Fellow and Director of the Renewing America Initiative at CFR. This article is published courtesy of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).