The Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen and its lasting damage to American democracy

Behind this false belief is a concerted disinformation campaign funded by allies of former president Donald Trump. The campaign and high-profile supporters orchestrated rallies around the country that popped up days after the election took place. But even a year after Biden took office, the Big Lie continues to have a strong pull on the Republican Party.

The belief that U.S. elections are vulnerable to corruption threatens to undermine voters’ faith in democracy itself — and that faith, experts say, is part of what maintains the system.

“Historically, this is a pretty severe crisis,” said Robert Lieberman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the book “Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy.” “We are in a real … inflection point now. It compares with some of the darkest periods we’ve seen in our history.”

When Americans head back to the polls this fall, the electoral system itself will be on the ballot.

Flashback to 2020

Trump’s campaign mounted more than 60 legal challenges in battleground states, all but one of which were withdrawn or dismissed, and called for recounts in Georgia (twice) and part of Wisconsin. Trump traveled the country promoting conspiracy theories about his loss.

“We’ve built a pretty remarkable system in this country of professional, nonpartisan election administration,” said Lieberman. “And the Republicans now see that as a vulnerability or as an opportunity for them to capture that apparatus and use it in their favor.”

How did we get here?

According to Julia Azari, a political scientist at Marquette University who focuses on the American presidency and political change, historians argue among themselves about how old American democracy truly is. On one side is the idea that democracy is as old as the nation itself. But others argue that American democracy only truly began after women’s suffrage, at the turn of the 20th century, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which protected the right to vote for Black Americans.

Azari argues that, for decades, presidents crafted narratives about their victories that have helped to shape an “age of mandate politics.” It’s a way to justify the enormous power of the executive office, she argues, but has built in the American public a “tolerance for election fiction.”

“It kind of opened the door to lots of fictions about elections,” she said. “Elections are really about whatever symbolic story you can tell and you can sell and get people to believe.”

“The party division is overlapping with the racial division in a way that hasn’t happened in the United States in a very, very long time,” said Lieberman.

The election of Barack Obama proved what could happen when a multicultural coalition organizes. But after the U.S. elected its first Black president, an incredible backlash awakened.

The most visible face of that backlash was Trump, an elected leader with authoritarian tendencies.

The polling looks bad

That survey found that 62 percent of Americans say they’ll trust the 2024 election. That breaks down to 82 percent of Democrats compared with only 33 percent of Republicans. Only 58 percent of Americans reported trusting that elections are fair.

While there has always been a small partisan gap when it comes to confidence in the fairness of elections, Carey said, it’s usually of just a few points — not 50.

“Democracy is a multidimensional thing,” he said. “But at its core, it’s about choosing who governs through elections, and if the confidence in elections is not there — if what we call ‘losers’ consent’ is not there — then all the rest of it is in a precarious state.”

That polarization is bad news. Hyperpolarization is one of the warning signs that a democracy is in decline, and it can sow the seeds of violence. As people’s identities become wrapped up in what they believe, challenges to those beliefs become existential threats.

“Some percentage of Republicans believe all of these … anti-democratic things, but what actual percentage of that is that of our society?” she said. “And how many people need to believe these types of things to really erode democracy?”

That’s part of why small shifts in election administration are worrisome, said Risa Brooks, a political scientist specializing in comparative civil-military relations at Marquette University.

“It’s these mundane, boring, but kind of demobilizing or difficult-to-mobilize-around attenuations of democracy that I think we really need to be paying attention to,” she said. “The upshot of all of this happening together is that, one way or another, we potentially end up with outcomes and elections that are very inconsistent with what actual voters wanted.”

A few key actors in positions of authority could subvert a legitimate election in favor of their preferred candidate.

“Sometimes the vote-counter is more important than the candidate,” he said.

The Big Lie heard around the world

Other democracies are facing similar pressure, and what is happening in the U.S. is part of a pattern of “backsliding” around the world.

“Leaders who are elected via a fairly free and fair election then go on to use the tools of democracy, use its institutions, use its laws, to actually undermine the spirit or the quality of democracy itself,” Brooks said.

“In countries that have democratized or are considered democracies — there’s a recession there, they’re moving backward,” she said, citing changes in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere.

Worldwide, that wave looks different from the violent and extrajudicial coups that were once associated with the overthrow of democracies, Brooks said.

In the same way, she said, a dramatic event like Jan. 6 is not the start or end of that process in the U.S. The question is not whether the U.S. will devolve into another bloody civil war. Rather, she said, democratic institutions are being eroded from the inside.

The consequence of this occurring in the United States can be seen in its ratings on global measures of democracy. The United States was long considered the oldest continuous democracy in the world, according to the Center for Systemic Peace, another researcher of democracies.

But the country’s rating was downgraded in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection; now Switzerland holds that distinction.

About half of that survey’s 36,000 respondents said they believe media and government are divisive, and two-thirds believe that government “purposely” misleads people. Most people also believe that the press is too commercial and sensationalized.

And the biggest decreases in public trust occurred in democracies often considered some of the world’s strongest: Germany, Australia, the Netherlands and South Korea.

This is part of a pattern of democratic expansion and contraction, said Lieberman.

“There have been numerous times in American history when we’ve been at real risk of moving … away from a more complete and robust democracy and toward something constrained or autocratic,” he said. “Americans like to tell ourselves a story of the progressive realization of democratic ideals. But it’s been much more back and forth than that.”

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. To the contrary, Lieberman defines four conditions that lead to democratic breakdown:

“Every crisis of democracy the United States has had over the course of its history has involved one or some combination of these threats,” he said. “This is the first time that we’ve ever had all four present at once.”