Democratic candidates surged at the ballot box to retake the House and Senate under Republican President Donald Trump. It was a midterm pendulum swing that has often been seen after a single party assumes control of both the White House and Congress. The convincing results came amid months of false claims by President Donald Trump of rigged elections and rampant voter fraud – as well as attempts by the Department of Justice to seize states’ voter rolls.
Robert Shapiro is a Professor of Political Science and Professor and Vice Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and the co-editor of a special issue of Political Science Quarterly that asks the question: What Is the State of American Democracy? Robert spoke with WAMC’s Lucas Willard about how the midterm election results change his outlook.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Robert Shapiro: By virtue of the big election, any threat to voting on election day, with federal agents and officials kind of pouncing on precincts and so forth, that threat did not happen, which was not particularly surprising because election days are pretty intense, chaotic things where at the precincts, the officials running the election have to, you know, run a pretty tight ship there, and it's hard to imagine how that would be disrupted. And this really speaks to the dedication of the workers and the state election apparatuses in both Democratic and especially Republican states as well. So that aspect of the threat to democracy, I think, looks like it may have fizzled out, and there were no claims of fraud and the like owing to the big victory, and owing to the fact that a lot of Republicans won as usual and it's expected in a great many states.
Lucas Willard: So, I wanted to look at this forum, which asks: what is the state of American democracy? And there are really two key ideas that the researchers included in the forum present. One is this perspective of authoritarianism, and that President Trump's claims of election fraud and a rigged contest against Joe Biden in 2020, in all of his efforts to influence election outcomes, is the basis for this perspective. And then there is this sort of democratic realist perspective, which assumes that yes, there's going to be a lot of these really unprecedented actions by President Trump, but at the core of it, there is an American political system and a decentralization of elections that acts as a defense against the most extreme impulses by President Trump. Now, as you just explained, the election last night was very convincing for one party, and we've yet to see President Trump jump up and claim massive voter fraud, really. But tell me about these two perspectives and why you think it is worth exploring in this forum.
Robert Shapiro: Well, I think the decentralization of how elections are run is very crucial here, and obviously it's contained within the Constitution itself. And it's worked out in such a way that it becomes a, you know, guardrail with regard to democracy. But the other piece of this, and this is pretty significant here - Trump was able to pack the court, so to speak, with conservatives. Now the conservatives, and the originalists and so forth, have basically moved the court and the law in a conservative direction with regard to social values issues, freedom of religion, and voting rights in the context of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and so forth. And also, basically, defending the power of the president in a lot of respects. But it's pretty clear, and there really wasn't much indication to the contrary when it came to the counting of the vote and the integrity of the vote and the like. Two things are at work: one is the fact that the states control the elections. That's in the Constitution. That's pretty hard to dispute. And in that context, there are limits to what the president can do. And the key thing that happened this week when President Trump tried to basically control 20,000 votes in California, the court basically said, “We won't have any of this.” And there was some concern whether or not the courts would, you know, behave in that way because there's some conservative members of the court who are perceived as pretty untrustworthy, and there's a question of how many of those there are, and we know that there are two to focus on, but two is far from the majority. And I think that signal from the court is a pretty strong one. And I think both the size of the Democratic victory in that election and that signal from the court should put an end to that particular kind of threat to elections, and also with any attempt to affect the seating of new members of Congress and things of that sort. I think that would be perceived as so outrageous and beyond the pale. And the courts are not going to you know allow for that.
Lucas Willard: Now there are still plenty of Republicans who are commenting on last night's election. House Speaker Mike Johnson gave a large speech about socialism and Marxism. He called those ideas a threat to America. He talked about how communism has led to the deaths of people around the world. It seems like there's no letting up in the political rhetoric at this time, at least with accusations of authoritarianism from the right, talking about how the DSA members and the Democratic Socialists who were elected present a threat to democracy in that way, and then the discussions in this forum about authoritarianism and this perspective under Trump and his false claims about the elections. Do you expect these arguments to continue and intensify over the next two years, or do you think that as Trump faces the end of his presidency, that there will be a softening of this kind of talk?
Robert Shapiro: Well, I think the Republicans may in fact try to continue that, and that may be important for them as we move to the 2028 election. But this idea of making claims about communism…there's some working under the assumption that the electorate really sees communism as a threat in the way communism was perceived as a threat in the 1950s. Communist governments around the world are few and far between here, and are really outliers in a lot of respects. And even, I mean, Russia, The Soviet Union, was a major bulwark of communism. And that obviously shifted and completely changed. And, I think here we're talking about pointing to authoritarianism, you know, in different parts of the world. But also, with regard to the movement within the Democratic Party to the left - I mean, the interesting question will be to see how much this will catch on further, moving into the 2028 election. There have been some clear visible successes of the candidates with Democratic socialist orientations, and then the other issue, you know, lurking in here is the Israel-Palestinian conflict as well. And that's perhaps part and parcel of that. And that in fact may be a better issue for the Republicans to deal with in certain respects. But these victories for that wing of the party have been still few and compartmentalized in certain states and in certain contexts, although the result of the Senate race in Michigan, I think is very significant, because that's the highest level of office where that has found success. And so this is an open question. And also where this will play out is basically in intra-party politics and conflict within the Democratic Party, and that will be a point of contention there. And there are two ways of thinking about that: one is moving the Democratic Party further to the left at all costs, versus being more cautious about it to take advantage of the fact that the Democrats control the House and the Senate. And they have a prime opportunity to once again have unified democratic government in 2028, which would be necessary for the Democrats to unravel the things that Trump has done in terms of national policy, and to slowly deal with the fact that Trump has had as his biggest legacy the transformation of the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, which is basically a 6-3 court along perceived ideological lines. And so, a win in 2028 is very important from the standpoint that elections have consequences, and that's really the only way to get things done.
