Hours before the results started coming in on November 5, when Democrats were still full of hope, the exit polls released by the major news networks contained a striking piece of data that gave supporters of Kamala Harris reason for optimism. 

Voters chose the “the state of democracy” as their top priority over any other issue. Harris, taking notes from President Joe Biden, had spent much of the campaign portraying former President Trump as an existential threat to American norms, echoing the dominant message of her party for the past eight years. 

In some ways, this worked. The 34 percent of voters who chose democracy as their deciding issue favored Harris by 62 points. But the problem for her campaign was that, with the exception of abortion, voters who cited other issues as their top priority, such as the economy, immigration, and foreign policy, broke heavily for Trump. 

This failure of the Democrats’ focus on democracy points to a bigger problem: many voters do not believe that democracy is benefitting them or that the American political system is worth preserving. (Republicans also care about democracy for different reasons, believing that the 2020 election was stolen and Trump was prosecuted by “the deep state.”)

The warning signs were flashing—and top Democrats ignored them. 

A Pew Research poll from September 2023 found that only 4 percent of US adults believed that the political system was working extremely or very well. More than six in 10 expressed little to no confidence in its future. At the same time, only 16 percent of the public said they trusted the federal government always or most of the time, the lowest level of faith in Washington in nearly seven decades. A poll by the New York Times days before the election found that 45 percent of the public did not believe American democracy did a good job of representing ordinary people. 

“People care about democracy but it needs to be more than just ‘elect me and not the other person.’ That’s not democracy, that’s just a campaign.”

By talking so much about preserving democracy without outlining an alternative vision for improving it, or showing how democracy can tangibly improve people’s lives, Harris and other Democratic leaders were perceived as defending a status quo that many Americans revile. “Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions—the ‘establishment’—that most Americans distrust,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former national security adviser, wrote after the election. 

The pre-election New York Times poll found that 58 percent of voters thought that the country’s political and economic system needed major changes or a complete overhaul. By largely defending that system, Democrats allowed Trump to run as the change candidate. As former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer pointed out, “Trump won the voters who said that the ‘ability to bring about change’ was the most important quality in a candidate by 50 points.”

In his first major speech of the 2024 campaign, which coincided with the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, President Biden described democracy as “America’s sacred cause.” At the outset of his presidency, Biden said that the nation, and indeed the world, was facing a battle between democracy and autocracy. His goal was to “prove democracy still works.”

But many voters don’t view American democracy that way. They see a system that is plagued by money and corruption, one dominated by elites and self-interested politicians who skew the rules to benefit themselves.

The policies Biden thought would restore public faith in democracy—like the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill—proved unpopular or were ignored by a skeptical public. The administration also did a terrible job of selling and explaining these policies—nearly a year after the IRA’s passage, 7 in 10 voters said they had heard little or nothing about the law’s provisions. Biden even seemed to predict the trouble ahead. He worried that the IRA’s benefits would not come fast enough to convince voters that “Joe did it.”

As we noted in 2022, during the January 6 hearings, the idea of running on democracy “doesn’t work as well if everything, the very system itself, is broken. The material benefits of democracy must flow to people from the institutions to earn all this defense.”

There is an ongoing and worthwhile argument about whether Biden delivered on his economic promises. But, the basic facts remain the same. Biden began a campaign, and Harris followed it through, that was all about defending the basic norms of American democracy. This won in 2020, when voters were eager to regain a sense of normalcy. But, in 2024, it began to feel—fairly or not—like the promises had not materialized. Bidenonomics might pay off someday. It didn’t seem to help enough people right now.

This failure went beyond just economics. When Democrats had control of Washington for the first two years of Biden’s presidency, they failed to pass policies on voting rights, abortion, and gun control that a majority of Americans favored because they could not overcome the structural impediments to majority rule, namely the Senate filibuster, that are deeply embedded in America’s political system. 

Biden stubbornly resisted calling for filibuster reform during the first year of his presidency, failing to use his political capital when it might have mattered. When Harris said, on the campaign trail, that she would sign legislation reinstating Roe v. Wade or restoring the Voting Rights Act, voters were left to wonder why Democrats hadn’t already done that. Harris gave few indications of how she would differ from a Biden presidency on that score.

Too often, the Democrats’ message of saving democracy began and ended with defeating Trump. “The Biden campaign’s defense of democracy was not about a bold agenda of better democracy, it was about electing Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at the New America Foundation. “Harris inherited that and didn’t have time or energy to reframe it, other than some nods in her speeches to the voting rights bills. People care about democracy but it needs to be more than just ‘elect me and not the other person.’ That’s not democracy, that’s just a campaign.”

Democrats also actively shut down any discussion of the structural flaws to American democracy. At a pair of fundraisers in early October, Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz said that “the Electoral College needs to go. We need a national popular vote.” Two-thirds of the public favors that position. But Walz was forced by the Harris campaign to quickly disavow the remark and the comment was portrayed in the press as yet another gaffe by an unscripted and inexperienced candidate. It was immediately deemed off-limits to criticize a system that devalued the votes of 85 percent of Americans, violated basic notions of one person, one vote, and was rooted in slavery and white supremacy. 

Other cracks in the system were dismissed as well. In the 2023 Pew poll, the number one thing that Americans hated about the US political system was the amount of money in politics and the corruption it breeds. Eighty-five percent of Americans believed that “the cost of political campaigns makes it hard for good people to run for office” and 80 percent said big campaign donors have too much influence on decisions made by members of Congress. 

Yet Democrats, instead of running against the unchecked power of the moneyed elite, actively worked to further deregulate campaign-finance laws to compete in the oligarch arms race, petitioning the Federal Elections Commission to allow political action committees to coordinate directly with campaigns. That ended up benefitting Republican billionaires like Elon Musk, who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. When Harris raised $1.5 billion, and her allied Super PAC took in $900 million, it was viewed as a sign of enthusiasm for her candidacy, with little acknowledgment that Democrats might be bragging about the very thing that voters disliked most about the political process.  

The Democrats’ failure to show how they would not only preserve, but ultimately strengthen and reform American democracy, boxed them into the unenviable position of defending the skewed institutions that the public blames for their everyday problems. Because they were presented with no alternative vision for how to improve a broken democratic process, Americans chose the candidate who they believed was more likely to tear that system down. “If the message of democracy is just we’re going to keep this system of democracy that people feel isn’t working, you can see why that doesn’t resonate with a lot of people,” Drutman said.

A majority of voters in 2024 weren’t convinced that voting for Democrats would save democracy or that the real-life consequences of losing democratic rights would be worse than the status quo. Going forward, Democrats have to go back to being the party of political and economic reform that challenges rather than celebrates a political system that is leaving too many people behind.

Trump owns Washington once again and if his early nominations are any indication, he’ll do a disastrous job of running it. But Democrats can’t just be anti-Trump. They can’t just be pro-democracy. They need to convince skeptical voters that democracy is worth saving in the first place and that a better system can ultimately replace the flawed one we’ve got now. 

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the premiere of “Dune: Prophecy,” titled “The Hidden Hand,“ now streaming on Max. Eight months after the premiere of the movie “Dune: Part 2,” it’s time to go 10,000 years into the story’s past with HBO’s prequel series “Dune: Prophecy.” Since the show is set in the distant […]

There’s a whole new generation of Atreides and Harkonnen families introduced in HBO’s prequel series “Dune: Prophecy,” set 10,000 years before the events of Denis Villeneuve’s two “Dune” movies. Since the show is set so far in the past, there aren’t any traces of Timothee Chalamet as Paul Atreides, Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen or […]

After the success of director Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two,” Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures produced a spinoff series surrounding the Bene Gesserit, which serves as a prequel to the first “Dune” reboot. If you want to watch it online, “Dune: Prophecy” airs on HBO and streams on Max (via Prime Video) starting […]

As of this writing, the third film in director Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” series has yet to receive an official greenlight. (The project technically remains in development.) Nonetheless, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery and producer Legendary Television have already begun the work of converting the movies’ billion-plus dollars in combined box office into a multimedia franchise; […]

To prepare for her starring role in “Dune Prophecy,” a sci-fi series set thousands of years in the future, Emily Watson turned to the Tudor dynasty. She spent hours at London’s National Portrait Gallery looking at paintings of Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and Anne Boleyn, women who, at least for a time, […]

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

By tapping former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency, President-elect Donald Trump opted to put his planned radical rollback of climate policy in the hands of a staunch ally who is skilled at projecting an image of a moderate conservationist.

As a Republican representing a Long Island district “almost completely surrounded by water,” as Zeldin often said, he successfully fought in Congress for coastal resilience and nature preservation projects and expressed hope for bipartisan compromise on climate, calling it “a very important issue.”

But Zeldin never advanced any proposal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and like other congressional Republicans in the Trump era, consistently voted against those proposals. He came closer than any Republican in 20 years to capturing his state’s highest office by campaigning on a pledge to overturn the state’s ban on fracking.

“I think at times he spoke moderately when it was convenient to do so, but I don’t think that’s the Lee Zeldin that New York has seen for at least the past four years,” said Sam Bernhardt, the New York-based political director for Food & Water Action. He thinks the most telling item in Zeldin’s record is his vote against certifying the 2020 election.

“He did that because Trump told him to, so I think we can extrapolate that most of Lee Zeldin’s work at EPA will likewise be things that Trump has told him to do,” Bernhardt said.

In a Fox News interview on Monday, shortly after his selection was announced, Zeldin made clear that the president-elect has given him a long list of regulations to roll back.

“The president was talking about unleashing economic prosperity through the EPA,” Zeldin said. “There are regulations that the left wing of this country have been advocating through regulatory power that end up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction. And President Trump, when he called me up, gosh, he was rattling off 15, 20, different priorities.”

The agency that has spent the past four years spearheading policy to cut greenhouse gas pollution throughout the US economy would shift gears within “the first 100 days,” said Zeldin, into becoming a vehicle for Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

Zeldin is a markedly different choice than the leaders Trump chose to head up the EPA during his first term. Trump’s first EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, was an Oklahoma attorney general who had sued the agency repeatedly, leading Republican states’ push-back against President Barack Obama’s climate initiatives.

But upon arriving in Washington, Pruitt quickly became entangled in multiple controversies—over his travel practices, his use of government employees for personal errands, and his relationships with lobbyists. Pruitt resigned under pressure and was replaced by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, a behind-the-scenes player on Capitol Hill and in the EPA. He stirred less drama as he pursued the Trump deregulatory agenda, ultimately rolling back more than 100 environmental rules.

Zeldin comes to the EPA not as a combatant or a bureaucrat, but as a politician with a record of successfully delivering Republican messages in Democratic strongholds. Trump trusted Zeldin to act as a surrogate for him on the campaign trail—from Iowa at the beginning of the race through to Georgia and Pennsylvania at the end.

“He certainly is a savvy political operator,” said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell, which represents a range of energy-industry clients. 

“He wasn’t particularly well known for taking in-depth positions on EPA issues, but I’m not surprised that he gets a position like this,” Maisano said. “I’m certain what he’ll do is be a good leader, and a good spokesman for the president’s energy and environment agenda.”

Zeldin in recent years has advocated unleashing fossil fuel production without challenging climate science outright. That also sets him apart from Pruitt and to some extent, Wheeler, both of whom were proteges of one of Congress’ most outspoken climate science deniers, the late Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who died earlier this year.

Zeldin was one of 12 Republicans who voted with House Democrats in 2019 in favor of a ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines.

In 2019, during a debate on the first climate legislation to reach the House floor in a decade, Zeldin praised the Democratic sponsors for “their intentions and advocacy” on a measure that sought to hold the Trump administration to the goals of the Paris Agreement. But he still reeled off the reasons why he agreed with Trump’s decision to exit: there had not been enough debate or study of its potential economic impact, the measure had never come before Congress for a vote and China and India should be forced to make greater cuts.

“We needed a better deal for the world and other countries to step up and do more, more transparency and debates, and a vote here in Congress,” Zeldin said. “That is in the best interests of all our constituents. Hopefully, we can agree on the numbers and a process going forward, and we can work together on a bipartisan basis.”

But no bipartisan effort would ever emerge in Congress to deal comprehensively with the need to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution as aggressively as scientists say is needed to avoid catastrophic climate risk. Zeldin, like all Republicans in Congress, voted against the legislative solution that the Biden administration hit upon, the massive incentives and subsidies for clean energy contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The future of the IRA is now unclear, with Trump about to regain the presidency and Republicans poised to take control of Congress. And the other crucial part of Biden’s climate agenda—regulations on vehicles, power plants, and the oil and gas industry—are on the chopping block. Zeldin has been given the axe.

Zeldin, a native of Suffolk County, became one of the youngest attorneys ever in New York State at the age of 23. He then served four years on active duty in the US Army, deploying to Iraq in 2006, and holding roles as an intelligence officer, a prosecutor, and a magistrate. Zeldin continues to serve as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve.

In 2020, he talked about the damage that Superstorm Sandy did in his district eight years earlier when he spoke out in favor of water resources development legislation that later became part of the omnibus budget bill Congress passed and Trump signed.

“The widespread devastation emphasized the dire need to ensure our communities were better prepared for the future,” Zeldin said, speaking in favor of prioritizing and increasing spending limits for dredging and coastal storm risk management projects along the Long Island coast.

Zeldin also helped lead a long and ultimately successful effort to preserve Plum Island on Long Island Sound, which has become a key habitat for birds, seals, fish and coral. The federally owned island had been at risk of being sold off for development.

He was one of 12 Republicans who voted with the majority of House Democrats in 2019 in favor of a ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, a measure that the Senate never acted on.

But there were limits to Zeldin’s advocacy of coastal protection. He unsuccessfully sponsored legislation in 2016 that sought to block presidents—in particular, Obama—from creating any national monuments in the exclusive economic zone along the coasts of the United States. “I do this on behalf of commercial fishermen on Long Island and throughout the nation who, like so many other hard-working Americans, are increasingly under assault from the executive overreach of this administration,” Zeldin said at the time.

Over his four terms in Congress, from 2015 to 2023, Zeldin generated a pro-environmental voting record of 14 percent, according to the League of Conservation Voters, or LCV. That’s a high score relative to other House Republicans (their average was 4 percent in the last Congress), but environmental advocates said it signaled a lack of concern over the issues that he would be in his purview at EPA.

“Trump made his anti-climate action, anti-environment agenda very clear during the campaign,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, LCV’s senior vice president for government affairs. “During the confirmation process, we would challenge Lee Zeldin to show how he would be better than Trump’s campaign promises or his own failing 14 percent environmental score if he wants to be charged with protecting the air we breathe and the water we drink, and finding solutions to climate change.”

If Zeldin’s past statements are any guide, he is likely to vow to protect clean air and water, even while touting the economic benefits of expanded fossil fuel development.

“We all have constituents who want access to clean air and clean water,” Zeldin said before his 2019 vote against holding Trump to the Paris Agreement goals. “It is something that, whether you are representing a district in Flint, Michigan, or you are in Tampa, Florida, or the east end of Long Island, we all want to advocate for that for our constituents.”

When he ran against Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 in his bid for New York’s top office, Zeldin advocated overturning the fracking ban that had been enacted under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “If New York would reverse the Cuomo-Hochul ban on the safe extraction of resources under many parts of the state, jobs will be created, energy costs will go down, communities will be revitalized, and our state can prosper again,” Zeldin posted on Twitter during his campaign. 

Zeldin lost, but garnered more votes than any Republican who ran for the state’s top office since former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller 50 years earlier. Maisano said that message apparently resonated with many New Yorkers, who live on the same geological formation, the Marcellus Shale, as their neighbors to the south.

“In many cases, the fracking ban in New York has been a scourge, because Pennsylvania is reaping the benefits and New York is not reaping anything,” Maisano said.

Trump, who is now seeking to lift restrictions on all oil and gas development in the nation, said Zeldin “will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”

Trump, who once frequently called climate change a “hoax,” but dropped that rhetoric before his 2016 presidential run, has honed a message on environmental protection that has allowed him to successfully campaign on a pro-fossil fuel agenda at a time when polls showed swing voters preferred clean energy and climate action. In Zeldin, Trump has found someone to lead that agenda who is skilled at the same kind of messaging.

John D. Kimble, a prominent longtime Hollywood talent agent at agencies including DHKPR, Triad and William Morris, died Sunday in Dallas. He was 79. Born in Kingsville, Texas, he was raised in Uvalde, Texas and graduated the University of Texas, El Paso with a theater degree. He started out hoping to act in Westerns, and […]

In the days following Donald Trump’s clear win, conspiracy theories about how votes were tampered with or how the election was stolen from Kamala Harris have spread on the left, with viral tweets, TikTok videos, and posts on Threads making a chaotic and spotty case alleging a fishy result.

“I’m beginning to believe our election was massively hacked,” wrote former journalist and documented conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen on Threads, neatly pouring every flavor of suspicion into one overfilled bottle. “Think Elon Musk, StarLink, Peter Thiel, Bannon, Flynn and Putin. 20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own.”

Infowars’ Alex Jones claimed Democrats attempted pro-Harris fraud but simply failed.

Such post-election delusions aren’t particularly surprising—as political science professors Joe Uscinski and Joseph Parent have written, indelicately but accurately, conspiracy theories are for “losers,” and tend to resonate when groups are “suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.” But what’s far stranger is that conspiracy theories about election tampering are somehow, still, also happening among the winners on the right. 

On the left, Harris voters attempting to make sense of their loss have turned to baseless fears that Trump-backing billionaire Elon Musk somehow tampered with the vote through Starlink. While that satellite internet company is wholly owned by his company SpaceX, it is not, contrary to many of these claims, used by any state to tabulate votes. There’s also the separate claim that 20 million votes are “missing” when compared to the last presidential election. That also isn’t true: results are still being tabulated, and the overall number of votes is on track to be extremely close to 2020’s total. On a broader level, Jen Easterly, the director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reports it has “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

The Meta-owned social media site Threads has been particularly full of left-and-liberal election denialism. As journalist Taylor Lorenz explains, the situation illustrates “how Meta’s efforts to downrank and minimize journalistic content on the app have helped to create a vacuum in which misinformation thrives unchecked and users are unable to find reliable, accurately reported news.” It’s also a clear sign that some social media users are finding that dabbling in election conspiracy theories earns much-craved attention and engagement, with some posts alleging a Starlink plot racking up thousands of views.

There were early signs America was heading toward a post-election season characterized by broad suspicions of fraud: in an October 3 Marist poll, 58 percent of respondents said they were either “concerned” or “very concerned” that voter fraud might occur this year. Of course, fears of voter fraud have haunted American elections for almost as long as we’ve been a country, and have been harnessed by politicians and activists since the early 19th century to motivate their own base to vote—and to change the rules to try to keep some voters, especially immigrants and the poor, from the polls. 

In the run up to last week’s vote, Trump and his allies regularly pushed such fears, raising the false specter of American voters being overwhelmed at the polls by illegal non-citizen voters. That came on top of years of similar claims, and against the backdrop of Trump’s false contention he won the 2020 election. But while the firehose of voter fraud accusations slowed down dramatically after Trump’s win last week, it didn’t stop entirely.

In the very early morning of November 6, not long after polls closed, Mike Adams, who runs the conspiracy site Natural News, wrote that “Dems still have a chance to cheat their way to ‘victory’ in the hours ahead, and trucks of ballots are now seen unloading tens of thousands of ballots in Philadelphia.” While multiple conspiracy peddlers reported on a supposed convoy of trucks bringing fraudulent ballots to Pennsylvania, most dropped the claim after Trump’s win in the state was secured.

Conspiracy theories are for “losers….suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.”

A similar pattern played out in Arizona, where TruthSocial and right-wing Twitter users claimed early on that voter fraud was occurring against Donald Trump. The day after the election, far-right news site Real America’s Voice devoted a lengthy segment to “apparent voter fraud” in Arizona. “This is such a shady state,” commentator Ben Bergquam proclaimed, claiming that “they are allowing people to vote who they know are not registered voters. They’re allowing fraudulent votes.”

But when Trump’s victory in the state became clear on November 11, prominent Trump fans and conspiratorial news sites maintained that fraud had somehow taken place in down-ballot races, even if it had not in deciding the presidency. After Democrat Ruben Gallego triumphed over ultra-conservative Kari Lake in Arizona’s Senate race, Rogan O’Handley, a conservative commentator who uses the handle DC Draino on Twitter, claimed without evidence (as Lake has) that Gallego was “cartel-linked,” and suggested that had something to do with his win: “I’ll give you a hint. It’s fraud.”

Twitter’s “Election Integrity Community” also focused its muddled attention on Arizona, as well as on the Wisconsin Senate race. In an otherwise triumphal tweet the night after the election, Musk himself conspiratorially wrote that the “few states that didn’t go red are mostly ones without voter ID requirements. Must be a coincidence,” punctuated with an eye-roll emoji. His America PAC tweeted a similar claim earlier in the day; these claims ignore that 36 states already request or require some form of voter ID. Many of the ones that don’t are ideologically Democratic-leaning states where Harris was heavily favored to win.

In what seems to be an emerging narrative on the far-right, Infowars conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones claimed that Democrats tried to carry out election fraud on behalf of Harris and simply failed. “I think the face of the police and the poll watchers and the lawyers, they went, ‘We just can’t do this anymore, this is too obvious,’” he declared. “And then boom, we saw Trump win. That’s not even conjecture. That’s what happened.” 

But true to form, Jones also couldn’t resist pointing to supposed fraud somewhere, darkly claiming that “glitches” flipping seats from Republican to Democrat had been “exposed” by Lara Trump and Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming chief of staff. That narrative echoed one pushed by Gateway Pundit, which speciously seized on a report that the apparent winners of some county-level races in Michigan could change as votes continue to be tabulated, a process known colloquially as “counting votes.”   

Even Donald Trump himself had to find ways to reconcile an uncomplicated victory with his incessant advance warnings of fraud. He turned to newly relevant slogan, posting a red-tinted photo of a crowd of his supporters, overlaid with the words “TOO BIG TO RIG.”

Raquel Garcia has been fighting for years to clean up the air in her neighborhood southwest of downtown Detroit.

Living a little over a mile from the Ambassador Bridge, which thousands of freight trucks cross every day en route to the Port of Detroit, Garcia said she and her neighbors are frequently cleaning soot off their homes.

“You can literally write your name in it,” she said. “My house is completely covered.”

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Welcome to Edition 7.19 of the Rocket Report! Okay, we get it. We received more submissions from our readers on Australia's approval of a launch permit for Gilmour Space than we've received on any other news story in recent memory. Thank you for your submissions as global rocket activity continues apace. We'll cover Gilmour in more detail as they get closer to launch. There will be no Rocket Report next week as Eric and I join the rest of the Ars team for our 2024 Technicon in New York.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Gilmour Space has a permit to fly. Gilmour Space Technologies has been granted a permit to launch its 82-foot-tall (25-meter) orbital rocket from a spaceport in Queensland, Australia. The space company, founded in 2012, had initially planned to lift off in March but was unable to do so without approval from the Australian Space Agency, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. The government approved Gilmour's launch permit Monday, although the company is still weeks away from flying its three-stage Eris rocket.

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Since Donald Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have both done what the now-president-elect and his fellow Republicans refused to do in 2020: publicly accept loss and advocate for a peaceful transition of power.

In a Thursday morning speech outside the White House, Biden told Americans, “We accept the choice the country made.”

“I’ve said many times,” he continued, “you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.” He added, “Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Bring down the temperature.”

The remarks, both unifying and a call for calm, sharply contrasted with the Trump campaign’s rhetoric in the final stretch of the election, which included Trump just this weekend saying he would be “ok” with journalists being shot at. Biden’s speech was also radically different from the near-constant conspiracy theories Trump and his allies promoted after Trump lost the 2020 election—which, as recently as today, he has continued to insist he won.

President Biden: "Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable … The American experiment endures. We're going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged. We need to keep going." https://t.co/627FiKv7Sz pic.twitter.com/hZoGsFc7yl

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2024

Seemingly alluding to Trump’s attacks on the voting system, Biden on Thursday also added that he hoped “we can lay to rest a question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent, and it can be trusted, win or lose,” he said. Of course, now that Trump has won, the GOP suddenly appears to agree with this, despite the fact that they and their candidate spent years sowing doubt in the electoral system—including up until election night.

The president also told Americans who voted for Harris they had to keep the faith and keep peacefully fighting for what they believe in. “Setbacks are unavoidable,” Biden said. “Giving up is unforgivable.”

“The American experiment endures, we’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged,” the president added. “We need to keep going, and above all, need to keep the faith.”

Harris struck a similar tone during her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday. “The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris told the crowd. “But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

Harris also acknowledged that “folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” but urged her supporters to still accept the election results.

“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she continued. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.”

The dual speeches came at a moment of widespread concerns that American democracy and so many civil liberties hang in the balance with Trump’s return to power. But with a future so unknown—and even frightening—to many, both Harris’ and Biden’s post-election remarks reminded Americans what leadership looks like: recognition of, and respect for, the will of the people, and a reminder that the future of American democracy remains worth peacefully fighting for.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Democracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy?

Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. Our starting point wasn’t simple, but it was frank. We would travel cross-country to see how Americans live and hear what they say democracy looks like in their daily lives. 

We decided to follow in the footsteps of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s and wrote an assessment about why democracy seemed to be succeeding here but had failed in other places. We began with the first words of Tocqueville’s 1835 volume of Democracy in America:  

“Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of social conditions,” he wrote. “I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society.”

For Tocqueville, the “equality of social conditions” is a core principle of democracy that, broadly, meant the absence of aristocracy—a societal state in which, on individual levels, there are few divisions between the people based on birth, wealth, or social status. (Although Tocqueville did note that this equality was one to be found solely among white Christian men. The prejudice against Black Americans was then appearing to “increase in proportion to their emancipation,” he wrote, and he wondered how the United States would recover from being born of the mass genocide of Native Americans.)

“I have looked [in America] for an image of the essence of democracy, its inclinations, its personality, its prejudices, its passions,” Tocqueville concluded. “My wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it.”

We found a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever.

Nearly 200 years later, we set out to examine these social conditions—and to provide an updated record of the state of democracy, local and national, at this moment in American history. 

What we found was a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. A historical, generational, and ongoing inequality and a systemic exclusion—both racial and economic. Scholars like Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, have said this inequality has been abetted by the neoliberal system, which “poses the most immediate threat to civil society.”

Neoliberalism is loosely defined as the economic system in play from the late 1970s to the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, a study by the Pew Research Center found that even as the economy was growing following the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the gap in income between upper-income and middle- and lower-income households was also rising, with upper-income households seeing more economic growth faster. In 2023, the World Inequality Database reported that the United States is the only country in North America and Oceania in which more than 20 percent of national income goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, with nearly 50 percent going to the top 10 percent.

We found that this crisis of inequality has festered into near-total disillusionment and consequent democratic atrophying on community levels, what Tocqueville referred to as a “loss of spirit,” which he warned could lead to tyranny. Yet we also observed an impulse to form hyperlocal microcosms of democracy to help keep the community alive on an individual level—in Tocqueville’s words, “spirit of association” or “self-governing” that generates democratic participation. 

Crisis, in this sense, is a paradox, a kind of duality—a sort of pharmakon, as philosopher Jacques Derrida might say—both the sickness that kills democratic participation and perhaps the medicine that restores it.      

In Paradise, California, a wildfire decimated the community while activating a group of individuals to restore its livability and ensure its survival.

The November 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state’s modern history—devastated Paradise, a town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, killing 85 people in Butte County, displacing 50,000, and destroying roughly 14,000 homes. There, we were told persistently and insistently what a great leveler the fire had been. On Valley View Drive, “the richest street in Paradise,” where “you get the full-sized candy bars on Halloween,” $500,000 homes were reduced to fences left standing guard around empty lots. As federal and nonprofit humanitarian aid came and went, residents grew tired of the restrictions and empty promises they said came with it. They started to decline the help and decided instead, despite being unable to lean on neighbors since so many had lost homes and jobs themselves, to use the community to build the safety net all the outside aid could not. It was through the disaster and around its resulting adversity that the community came to congeal. 

I couldn’t help thinking back to our time in Detroit in July 2019. There, we had a chance encounter with an elder named Elemiah Sanders. I was standing on the street, looking at a burned-out home, when Sanders called out to me from behind: “Young lady! What are you all out here doing?” I introduced myself and our project. He looked around before offering his thoughts: “The people lost their spirit,” he told me about his neighbors. “They don’t participate. I think it might be one of those things where we need a disaster to come up and raise up the neighborhood, but I hope it’s not that way.” 

When independence and authority are no longer accessible to the community, Tocqueville urged, when the liberty to self-govern with representational significance that promotes equality is impeded, the ability and desire to swim against the current, to fight to participate when it is felt that participation has been wrenched from the people, wearies, making certain that the institutions and their communities both falter. Spirit withers. It’s just our human nature. Tocqueville insisted: “Patriotism does not long prevail in a conquered nation.” And I came to realize that was true on hyperlocal levels as well.

In Warner Robins, Georgia, the spirit of patriotism is such a part of life and what residents believe democracy to be that it’s in its official motto: EDIMGIAFAD, or Every Day in Middle Georgia Is Armed Forces Appreciation Day. The city between Houston and Peach counties is home to Robins Air Force Base, and American flags appear on house after house as you drive through its neighborhoods. But at the time of visiting in August 2018, the city also had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. 

Larry Curtis, a manager of the drones called “Blue Seaters” on the Air Force base and owner of the Curtis Office Suites, said it all comes down to both “the haves and the have-nots” abstaining from participation, “not calling out local injustice like misallocation of funds,” because the “haves feel comfortable and the have-nots feel like it won’t make a difference.” 

The afternoon Curtis drove us onto base, the gray skies expected thunderstorms. It was no matter to Curtis, he kept driving all the same, past two officers holding M16s and pulling a car over, giving us the breakdown of the city’s economically organized geographical divide. He took us out onto Watson Boulevard, which was the zero degree—on one side was the north side, or “the blighted areas,” and on the other was the south side. A church marquee on the north side of Watson read, “When you reach the end of your rope, look up.”

I asked Curtis what was the biggest problem Warner Robins faced. He answered first with just one word, “equality,” and then went on to explain. “Because when you see one part of town and then the other, you see it’s not equal, even down to cutting the grass,” he began. “In the nighttime, you see the lights—there’s no lights on this [north] side of town. The street lamps are out and you can’t get nobody to come out and fix it. The money’s on the south side,” he continued, before adding, “I hate to say the word ‘racial’—I’m more about what’s wrong and what’s right.”

“At the city council meetings, they ask every other week about getting the lights fixed and getting the grass cut,” he said. “So the big problem is really down at city hall.” 

We went to one of those city council meetings and watched residents address council members one after the other, to little or no response. It was clear there was a kind of agitated exhaustion among the residents, where they were almost too tired to keep speaking up just to remain unseen and unheard, but all there was to do was keep speaking up, so they did—the few who had the persistence and made the time to deliver it, for the sake of the many who had largely, as Curtis said, given up. 

Democracy is not working, he told us, because the people don’t exercise their right to vote. Instead, he added, they just accept things for what they are, making it hard to know how to help create change.

Despite voting being one of the answers we heard most frequently to the question of what democracy is, it was this loss of spirit, which Tocqueville referred to as a side effect of losing the power to self-govern, we witnessed atrophying democratic participation. And that loss of spirit is not always a choice. In vastly different communities occupying vastly different parts of the country, that loss of spirit in relation to voting was the same, albeit for different reasons. 

In Memphis in 2018, we spoke with ex-offenders working hard to put their lives back together through the community organization Lifeline to Success, only to continue to confront what was for many of them an unthinkable and unending punishment: felony disenfranchisement. They felt subjected to a system of governing they have no say in, despite having paid their dues to society, and that their lives were being irrevocably shaped by decisions being made for them that they might not have made for themselves.  

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2021, locals referred to themselves as a colony, with no say in the colonizer’s impact on their lives. Puerto Ricans, as citizens of a territory of the United States, are not granted the right to vote in presidential elections. Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast known outside Puerto Rico as the former US Navy bomb training range and testing site, is known by Viequenses as “the colony of a colony.” The sense of silenced despair was especially pronounced as residents, many of them veterans, struggled with everything from meeting basic needs to transportation and the inexistence of medical care amid astronomically high cancer rates—the result of American military pollution, specifically from plutonium and Agent Orange. 

With respect to voting, of the dozen locations we traveled to across the country, one stands out: New Hampshire. We bounced around more than a dozen towns—places like Laconia and Meredith; Tilton, Salisbury, and Moultonborough; Wilmot, Concord, Andover, and Franklin— visiting town hall meetings, schools, families living off the grid, and libertarians, and each town was largely the same. Participation in local direct democracy was not only high, it was an important and ongoing source of pride in the community. Asked why it was such a central part of life in the “live free or die” state, residents said it had always been that way and was a matter of the personal nature of caring for democracy and a sense of duty. But homogeneity also helps. New Hampshire is more than 60 percent white, with an average household income of $90,000 and a 2.6 percent unemployment rate, as of 2024. Self-governing in the best interest of the whole community is often an infinitely smoother negotiation, a process almost unimpeachably straightforward, when most of the members of that community share a relatively secure lived experience.  

In most communities we visited, an enduring existential struggle with poverty was at the root of a communal loss of spirit, offset by the will of just a few individuals to fight back.

When the coal industry largely responsible for building up McDowell County—the poorest county in West Virginia and among the poorest in the nation—dried up, it took most of the economy, resources, and population with it. The coal industry and the county seat, the city of Welch, were at their peak in the 1950s, with a sudden surge in population from roughly 700 to 100,000 and a thronging city center, but machines began to take over the work of men. The county became the first in the country to receive modern-era food stamps after a 1960 visit by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—a program residents said decimated the community, because, they said, they needed jobs, not food stamps. More than once, residents referred to their county as “America’s forgotten county,” left to themselves and out of the national conversation when it was no longer carrying the weight of the state’s economy. Today, McDowell County is notorious as the coal country that changed its often-Democratic vote to Republican in the 2016 presidential election. 

By 2019, most of Welch’s downtown area was shuttered—what remained were a few small businesses, local government services, and the Welch News, the last remaining news source in McDowell County. Missy Nester, the owner and publisher, told us that she would “print until she ran out of paper.” But the paper was forced to fold in the summer of 2023.

“Our people have nothing,” Nester told the Associated Press in July of that year. “Like, can any of y’all hear us out here screaming?”  

Nester and the Welch community had pulled together to save the newspaper in 2018 after learning that the owner had plans to close its doors. The Welch News had an entirely voluntary team of local drivers who drove a six-hour route through the hills to hand-deliver papers to readers’ homes. Often, they took bread and milk deliveries with them for the elderly who seldom saw anyone but them, and they checked in on every resident they handed off to. It was an intensely personal system that inspired awe unlike much else does.

“We have been the forgotten place for so long that we’re just used to taking care of each other,” Nester said. “We vote to take care of ourselves.”

In some places, like among a sizable Somali immigrant community in Garden City, Kansas, in 2021, people struggled to build a community infrastructure from scratch where there had never been one at all. What little support they’d once had was provided by the nonprofit outreach organization LiveWell, which offered assistance programs and services to the growing population, but funding dried up and the community was left on its own to face everything from obstacles to medical care, to a bomb threat and the racism that came with it, and landlords that financially exploited refugees. The challenge became how to organize a community that was outward facing, that could integrate itself into American society while holding on to its cultural customs when the people could only turn inward for help, creating—naturally—something far more insular. 

I thought a lot then about the importance Tocqueville placed on the idea of “assimilation” as a means of survival, of a group’s adaptability to the social mores of the new Americans as the evidence of whether or not it would ultimately endure American democracy. I thought about, on the one hand, how well the people of New Hampshire felt democracy was working for them and the role of cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity in that, and, on the other hand, I thought about the damage the demand for adaptability, the forced assimilation, has done to entire populations of people who don’t fit into that homogeneity. 

Could democracy ever withstand the pressures of governing over the pluralist society we not only have become, but have really always been? It’s a conversation I had with Latrice Tatsey, a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, while watching her children ride at a rodeo in July 2019. In fact, it was a conversation I seemed to be having with many Blackfeet leaders.

The history of the attempted forced assimilation of the Native Americans at the hands of American settlers is, by now, no secret. Today, it is largely recognized as a genocidal effort that decimated the populations of the country’s nations and tribes not just by the violence of slaughter, but by the violence of cultural destruction and dispossession as well. The result is conditions of living—and sometimes dying, as young people face the challenges of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide—caught between “Western influence” and Native tradition, in which leaders have had to work on ways to “keep the cultures indigenous to their peoples alive,” John Murray, the Blackfeet’s tribal historic preservation officer, told me.

“Is it democracy that ruined it all?” he asked. “Corporate democracy?”

It was a question that had come up more than once for us on the road, as people wondered where the line money draws across for whom democracy works and for whom it does not stops. Could even a perfect democracy subsist within the context of America’s particular brand of capitalism? Does the subsistence of one subset of people require the continued subjugation of another—or all others? 

“We’ve had a very difficult struggle, always at the mercy of the government for survival,” Virgil “Puggy” Edwards, a member of the Blackfeet Constitutional Reform Committee, said as he gave a rundown of the Blackfeet history he was working on that day at the office, where he takes care of archiving and documentation.

Paradoxically, this work the community does to keep culture, family, and tradition alive for the Blackfeet is largely democratic, Tatsey said. It comes down to a duality of spirit, of patriotism, and for the Blackfeet, democratic participation goes back long before the arrival of the first pilgrims to American shores.   

“Our family has adapted to live in both worlds, even though we’re all in this one with our cultural values system, and living in the Western values system—no matter what trauma our people have gone through, they’ve been able to adapt, and that’s why we’re still here today,” she said. “Democracy is, for me, just how our people function for immemorial time, because what you have in our tribal makeup is leaders who, in order to have that leadership role, they had to prove themselves to the people and earn feathers,” she continued. “And so for us, it was what you did for your people and how you were going to guide your people that made the people stand behind you.”

Amid a presidential election—that naturally occurring crisis of democracy, as Tocqueville called it—burning like a wildfire across the country, the slow burn of our secondary crisis, that of the inequality of social conditions, is smoldering. The people, having become incendiary themselves, are a lit powder keg—the spark barreling through the wick. We return to Tocqueville’s words: 

“Of all powers, that of public opinion is the hardest to exploit. It is often just as dangerous [for representatives] to lag behind as it is to outpace it.”

The real test of our democracy, for either side of the party line, will be how we get through it—to the other side of not just the wildfire, but of the slow burn. How we make ourselves hard to exploit and make it hard to exploit each other. 

Tocqueville believed that our loss of spirit would either paralyze our participation, further heighten our passions, and risk a break of the state, or be the catalyst for us to rise up and save what we each believe to be at stake. If we are able to marvel at these communities’ capacity for togetherness in crisis as a feel-good feat of democracy in spite of “democracy” itself, then we should be, to the same extent, able to learn from it that the power of democracy, to self-govern, must sometimes be the power to use democracy to wrench self-governing back. The power to use democracy against itself, for its own good. 

We will perhaps find that the only way to fight for American democracy is for the true equalizer to be us (if we want it). If we must fall to Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” let it be because our heightened passions have unified not against each other, but to number the people together greater than the flawed system of governance so that the tyranny belongs to us all. 

And if it gets too heavy and “you reach the end of your rope,” like that church marquee on the north side of Watson Boulevard in Warner Robins preached, just “look up.” The real work of regeneration comes after the fire. 

Democracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy?

Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. Our starting point wasn’t simple, but it was frank. We would travel cross-country to see how Americans live and hear what they say democracy looks like in their daily lives. 

We decided to follow in the footsteps of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s and wrote an assessment about why democracy seemed to be succeeding here but had failed in other places. We began with the first words of Tocqueville’s 1835 volume of Democracy in America:  

“Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of social conditions,” he wrote. “I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society.”

For Tocqueville, the “equality of social conditions” is a core principle of democracy that, broadly, meant the absence of aristocracy—a societal state in which, on individual levels, there are few divisions between the people based on birth, wealth, or social status. (Although Tocqueville did note that this equality was one to be found solely among white Christian men. The prejudice against Black Americans was then appearing to “increase in proportion to their emancipation,” he wrote, and he wondered how the United States would recover from being born of the mass genocide of Native Americans.)

“I have looked [in America] for an image of the essence of democracy, its inclinations, its personality, its prejudices, its passions,” Tocqueville concluded. “My wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it.”

We found a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever.

Nearly 200 years later, we set out to examine these social conditions—and to provide an updated record of the state of democracy, local and national, at this moment in American history. 

What we found was a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. A historical, generational, and ongoing inequality and a systemic exclusion—both racial and economic. Scholars like Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, have said this inequality has been abetted by the neoliberal system, which “poses the most immediate threat to civil society.”

Neoliberalism is loosely defined as the economic system in play from the late 1970s to the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, a study by the Pew Research Center found that even as the economy was growing following the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the gap in income between upper-income and middle- and lower-income households was also rising, with upper-income households seeing more economic growth faster. In 2023, the World Inequality Database reported that the United States is the only country in North America and Oceania in which more than 20 percent of national income goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, with nearly 50 percent going to the top 10 percent.

We found that this crisis of inequality has festered into near-total disillusionment and consequent democratic atrophying on community levels, what Tocqueville referred to as a “loss of spirit,” which he warned could lead to tyranny. Yet we also observed an impulse to form hyperlocal microcosms of democracy to help keep the community alive on an individual level—in Tocqueville’s words, “spirit of association” or “self-governing” that generates democratic participation. 

Crisis, in this sense, is a paradox, a kind of duality—a sort of pharmakon, as philosopher Jacques Derrida might say—both the sickness that kills democratic participation and perhaps the medicine that restores it.      

In Paradise, California, a wildfire decimated the community while activating a group of individuals to restore its livability and ensure its survival.

The November 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state’s modern history—devastated Paradise, a town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, killing 85 people in Butte County, displacing 50,000, and destroying roughly 14,000 homes. There, we were told persistently and insistently what a great leveler the fire had been. On Valley View Drive, “the richest street in Paradise,” where “you get the full-sized candy bars on Halloween,” $500,000 homes were reduced to fences left standing guard around empty lots. As federal and nonprofit humanitarian aid came and went, residents grew tired of the restrictions and empty promises they said came with it. They started to decline the help and decided instead, despite being unable to lean on neighbors since so many had lost homes and jobs themselves, to use the community to build the safety net all the outside aid could not. It was through the disaster and around its resulting adversity that the community came to congeal. 

I couldn’t help thinking back to our time in Detroit in July 2019. There, we had a chance encounter with an elder named Elemiah Sanders. I was standing on the street, looking at a burned-out home, when Sanders called out to me from behind: “Young lady! What are you all out here doing?” I introduced myself and our project. He looked around before offering his thoughts: “The people lost their spirit,” he told me about his neighbors. “They don’t participate. I think it might be one of those things where we need a disaster to come up and raise up the neighborhood, but I hope it’s not that way.” 

When independence and authority are no longer accessible to the community, Tocqueville urged, when the liberty to self-govern with representational significance that promotes equality is impeded, the ability and desire to swim against the current, to fight to participate when it is felt that participation has been wrenched from the people, wearies, making certain that the institutions and their communities both falter. Spirit withers. It’s just our human nature. Tocqueville insisted: “Patriotism does not long prevail in a conquered nation.” And I came to realize that was true on hyperlocal levels as well.

In Warner Robins, Georgia, the spirit of patriotism is such a part of life and what residents believe democracy to be that it’s in its official motto: EDIMGIAFAD, or Every Day in Middle Georgia Is Armed Forces Appreciation Day. The city between Houston and Peach counties is home to Robins Air Force Base, and American flags appear on house after house as you drive through its neighborhoods. But at the time of visiting in August 2018, the city also had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. 

Larry Curtis, a manager of the drones called “Blue Seaters” on the Air Force base and owner of the Curtis Office Suites, said it all comes down to both “the haves and the have-nots” abstaining from participation, “not calling out local injustice like misallocation of funds,” because the “haves feel comfortable and the have-nots feel like it won’t make a difference.” 

The afternoon Curtis drove us onto base, the gray skies expected thunderstorms. It was no matter to Curtis, he kept driving all the same, past two officers holding M16s and pulling a car over, giving us the breakdown of the city’s economically organized geographical divide. He took us out onto Watson Boulevard, which was the zero degree—on one side was the north side, or “the blighted areas,” and on the other was the south side. A church marquee on the north side of Watson read, “When you reach the end of your rope, look up.”

I asked Curtis what was the biggest problem Warner Robins faced. He answered first with just one word, “equality,” and then went on to explain. “Because when you see one part of town and then the other, you see it’s not equal, even down to cutting the grass,” he began. “In the nighttime, you see the lights—there’s no lights on this [north] side of town. The street lamps are out and you can’t get nobody to come out and fix it. The money’s on the south side,” he continued, before adding, “I hate to say the word ‘racial’—I’m more about what’s wrong and what’s right.”

“At the city council meetings, they ask every other week about getting the lights fixed and getting the grass cut,” he said. “So the big problem is really down at city hall.” 

We went to one of those city council meetings and watched residents address council members one after the other, to little or no response. It was clear there was a kind of agitated exhaustion among the residents, where they were almost too tired to keep speaking up just to remain unseen and unheard, but all there was to do was keep speaking up, so they did—the few who had the persistence and made the time to deliver it, for the sake of the many who had largely, as Curtis said, given up. 

Democracy is not working, he told us, because the people don’t exercise their right to vote. Instead, he added, they just accept things for what they are, making it hard to know how to help create change.

Despite voting being one of the answers we heard most frequently to the question of what democracy is, it was this loss of spirit, which Tocqueville referred to as a side effect of losing the power to self-govern, we witnessed atrophying democratic participation. And that loss of spirit is not always a choice. In vastly different communities occupying vastly different parts of the country, that loss of spirit in relation to voting was the same, albeit for different reasons. 

In Memphis in 2018, we spoke with ex-offenders working hard to put their lives back together through the community organization Lifeline to Success, only to continue to confront what was for many of them an unthinkable and unending punishment: felony disenfranchisement. They felt subjected to a system of governing they have no say in, despite having paid their dues to society, and that their lives were being irrevocably shaped by decisions being made for them that they might not have made for themselves.  

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2021, locals referred to themselves as a colony, with no say in the colonizer’s impact on their lives. Puerto Ricans, as citizens of a territory of the United States, are not granted the right to vote in presidential elections. Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast known outside Puerto Rico as the former US Navy bomb training range and testing site, is known by Viequenses as “the colony of a colony.” The sense of silenced despair was especially pronounced as residents, many of them veterans, struggled with everything from meeting basic needs to transportation and the inexistence of medical care amid astronomically high cancer rates—the result of American military pollution, specifically from plutonium and Agent Orange. 

With respect to voting, of the dozen locations we traveled to across the country, one stands out: New Hampshire. We bounced around more than a dozen towns—places like Laconia and Meredith; Tilton, Salisbury, and Moultonborough; Wilmot, Concord, Andover, and Franklin— visiting town hall meetings, schools, families living off the grid, and libertarians, and each town was largely the same. Participation in local direct democracy was not only high, it was an important and ongoing source of pride in the community. Asked why it was such a central part of life in the “live free or die” state, residents said it had always been that way and was a matter of the personal nature of caring for democracy and a sense of duty. But homogeneity also helps. New Hampshire is more than 60 percent white, with an average household income of $90,000 and a 2.6 percent unemployment rate, as of 2024. Self-governing in the best interest of the whole community is often an infinitely smoother negotiation, a process almost unimpeachably straightforward, when most of the members of that community share a relatively secure lived experience.  

In most communities we visited, an enduring existential struggle with poverty was at the root of a communal loss of spirit, offset by the will of just a few individuals to fight back.

When the coal industry largely responsible for building up McDowell County—the poorest county in West Virginia and among the poorest in the nation—dried up, it took most of the economy, resources, and population with it. The coal industry and the county seat, the city of Welch, were at their peak in the 1950s, with a sudden surge in population from roughly 700 to 100,000 and a thronging city center, but machines began to take over the work of men. The county became the first in the country to receive modern-era food stamps after a 1960 visit by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—a program residents said decimated the community, because, they said, they needed jobs, not food stamps. More than once, residents referred to their county as “America’s forgotten county,” left to themselves and out of the national conversation when it was no longer carrying the weight of the state’s economy. Today, McDowell County is notorious as the coal country that changed its often-Democratic vote to Republican in the 2016 presidential election. 

By 2019, most of Welch’s downtown area was shuttered—what remained were a few small businesses, local government services, and the Welch News, the last remaining news source in McDowell County. Missy Nester, the owner and publisher, told us that she would “print until she ran out of paper.” But the paper was forced to fold in the summer of 2023.

“Our people have nothing,” Nester told the Associated Press in July of that year. “Like, can any of y’all hear us out here screaming?”  

Nester and the Welch community had pulled together to save the newspaper in 2018 after learning that the owner had plans to close its doors. The Welch News had an entirely voluntary team of local drivers who drove a six-hour route through the hills to hand-deliver papers to readers’ homes. Often, they took bread and milk deliveries with them for the elderly who seldom saw anyone but them, and they checked in on every resident they handed off to. It was an intensely personal system that inspired awe unlike much else does.

“We have been the forgotten place for so long that we’re just used to taking care of each other,” Nester said. “We vote to take care of ourselves.”

In some places, like among a sizable Somali immigrant community in Garden City, Kansas, in 2021, people struggled to build a community infrastructure from scratch where there had never been one at all. What little support they’d once had was provided by the nonprofit outreach organization LiveWell, which offered assistance programs and services to the growing population, but funding dried up and the community was left on its own to face everything from obstacles to medical care, to a bomb threat and the racism that came with it, and landlords that financially exploited refugees. The challenge became how to organize a community that was outward facing, that could integrate itself into American society while holding on to its cultural customs when the people could only turn inward for help, creating—naturally—something far more insular. 

I thought a lot then about the importance Tocqueville placed on the idea of “assimilation” as a means of survival, of a group’s adaptability to the social mores of the new Americans as the evidence of whether or not it would ultimately endure American democracy. I thought about, on the one hand, how well the people of New Hampshire felt democracy was working for them and the role of cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity in that, and, on the other hand, I thought about the damage the demand for adaptability, the forced assimilation, has done to entire populations of people who don’t fit into that homogeneity. 

Could democracy ever withstand the pressures of governing over the pluralist society we not only have become, but have really always been? It’s a conversation I had with Latrice Tatsey, a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, while watching her children ride at a rodeo in July 2019. In fact, it was a conversation I seemed to be having with many Blackfeet leaders.

The history of the attempted forced assimilation of the Native Americans at the hands of American settlers is, by now, no secret. Today, it is largely recognized as a genocidal effort that decimated the populations of the country’s nations and tribes not just by the violence of slaughter, but by the violence of cultural destruction and dispossession as well. The result is conditions of living—and sometimes dying, as young people face the challenges of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide—caught between “Western influence” and Native tradition, in which leaders have had to work on ways to “keep the cultures indigenous to their peoples alive,” John Murray, the Blackfeet’s tribal historic preservation officer, told me.

“Is it democracy that ruined it all?” he asked. “Corporate democracy?”

It was a question that had come up more than once for us on the road, as people wondered where the line money draws across for whom democracy works and for whom it does not stops. Could even a perfect democracy subsist within the context of America’s particular brand of capitalism? Does the subsistence of one subset of people require the continued subjugation of another—or all others? 

“We’ve had a very difficult struggle, always at the mercy of the government for survival,” Virgil “Puggy” Edwards, a member of the Blackfeet Constitutional Reform Committee, said as he gave a rundown of the Blackfeet history he was working on that day at the office, where he takes care of archiving and documentation.

Paradoxically, this work the community does to keep culture, family, and tradition alive for the Blackfeet is largely democratic, Tatsey said. It comes down to a duality of spirit, of patriotism, and for the Blackfeet, democratic participation goes back long before the arrival of the first pilgrims to American shores.   

“Our family has adapted to live in both worlds, even though we’re all in this one with our cultural values system, and living in the Western values system—no matter what trauma our people have gone through, they’ve been able to adapt, and that’s why we’re still here today,” she said. “Democracy is, for me, just how our people function for immemorial time, because what you have in our tribal makeup is leaders who, in order to have that leadership role, they had to prove themselves to the people and earn feathers,” she continued. “And so for us, it was what you did for your people and how you were going to guide your people that made the people stand behind you.”

Amid a presidential election—that naturally occurring crisis of democracy, as Tocqueville called it—burning like a wildfire across the country, the slow burn of our secondary crisis, that of the inequality of social conditions, is smoldering. The people, having become incendiary themselves, are a lit powder keg—the spark barreling through the wick. We return to Tocqueville’s words: 

“Of all powers, that of public opinion is the hardest to exploit. It is often just as dangerous [for representatives] to lag behind as it is to outpace it.”

The real test of our democracy, for either side of the party line, will be how we get through it—to the other side of not just the wildfire, but of the slow burn. How we make ourselves hard to exploit and make it hard to exploit each other. 

Tocqueville believed that our loss of spirit would either paralyze our participation, further heighten our passions, and risk a break of the state, or be the catalyst for us to rise up and save what we each believe to be at stake. If we are able to marvel at these communities’ capacity for togetherness in crisis as a feel-good feat of democracy in spite of “democracy” itself, then we should be, to the same extent, able to learn from it that the power of democracy, to self-govern, must sometimes be the power to use democracy to wrench self-governing back. The power to use democracy against itself, for its own good. 

We will perhaps find that the only way to fight for American democracy is for the true equalizer to be us (if we want it). If we must fall to Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” let it be because our heightened passions have unified not against each other, but to number the people together greater than the flawed system of governance so that the tyranny belongs to us all. 

And if it gets too heavy and “you reach the end of your rope,” like that church marquee on the north side of Watson Boulevard in Warner Robins preached, just “look up.” The real work of regeneration comes after the fire. 

Earlier this week, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. used a Zoom call to tell his supporters that Donald Trump had promised him "control" of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal agency that includes the Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, as well as the Department of Agriculture. Given Kennedy's support for debunked anti-vaccine nonsense, this represents a potential public health nightmare.

A few days after, Howard Lutnick, a co-chair of Trump's transition team, appeared on CNN to deny that RFK Jr. would be put in charge of HHS. But he followed that with a long rant in which he echoed Kennedy's spurious claims about vaccines. This provides yet another indication of how anti-vaccine activism has become deeply enmeshed with Republican politics, to the point where it may be just as bad even if Kennedy isn't appointed.

Trump as Kennedy’s route to power

Kennedy has a long history of misinformation regarding health, with a special focus on vaccines. This includes the extensively debunked suggestion that there is a correlation between vaccinations and autism incidence, and it extends to a general skepticism about vaccine safety. That's mixed with conspiracy theories regarding collusion between federal regulators and pharmaceutical companies.

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As the Popo Agie River wends its way down from the glaciers atop Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains toward the city of Lander, it flows into a limestone cave and disappears. The formation, known as the Sinks, spits the river back out at another feature called the Rise a quarter of a mile east, a little more voluminous and a little warmer, with brown and rainbow trout weighing as much as 10 pounds mingling in its now smooth pools. The quarter-mile journey from the Sinks to the Rise takes the river two hours.

Scientists first discovered this quirk of the middle fork of the Popo Agie (pronounced puh-po zuh) in 1983 by pouring red dye into the river upstream and waiting for it to resurface. Geologists attribute the river’s mysterious delay to the water passing through exceedingly small crevasses in the rock that slow its flow.

Like many rivers in the arid West, the Popo Agie is an important aquifer. Ranchers, farmers, businesses, and recreationists rely on detailed data about it—especially day-to-day streamflow measurements. That’s exactly the type of empirical information collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Five years ago, Donald Trump told Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to go ahead and invade Syria—an unexpected capitulation to personal pressure from the Turkish strongman that upended US policy, allowing Turkish attacks on Kurdish fighters seen as staunch US allies.

Trump’s green light to Erdogan during an October 6, 2019, phone call forced US troops in Syria to hastily flee from posts near the Turkish border and shocked Washington, drawing bipartisan condemnation of the president’s decision.

The Turkish troops who invaded went on to display “shameful disregard for civilian life, carrying out serious violations and war crimes, including summary killings and unlawful attacks that have killed and injured civilians,” Amnesty International charged. News reports said at least 70 civilians were killed while hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by the invasion.

The okay to invade was one of various ways that Trump helped Erdogan while in office. Trump intervened with the Justice Department to aid a Turkish national bank, Halkbank, which was accused of helping Iran evade US sanctions. Prosecutors have argued the bank helped to finance Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The case against the bank implicated allies of Erdogan, who had authorized the sanctions-evasion scheme, a witness in the case said. Under personal pressure from Erdogan, Trump also pressed his advisers, including DOJ officials, to drop a case against the bank built by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, according to accounts of former Trump administration officials.

Geoffrey Berman, at the time the US attorney in Manhattan, later said in a book that he received pressure from acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker in 2018 and that Whitaker’s successor, Bill Barr, pressed him to settle the case on terms favorable to Halkbank. Berman charged that Barr urged him to grant immunity to Turkish officials with ties to Erdogan and suggested hiding those deals from a federal court—a step Berman said would be illegal. Berman and Barr did not respond to requests for comment.

Turkey’s invasion of Syria, oddly, caused problems Halkbank. The criticism Trump faced for allowing Erdogan to invade appeared to embarrass the US president. He responded by attempting to reverse course. In a bizarre public letter, he threatened to “destroy” Turkey’s economy. “Don’t be a tough guy,” Trump wrote. During this spat, Trump and his advisers, including Barr, dropped their opposition to indicting Halkbank. Berman later recounted that Trump’s “falling out” with Erdogan resulted in a “green light to indict Halkbank. And we did it within 24 hours.”

Trump’s approval of Turkey’s invasion of Syria, and his reaction to the criticism it drew, has received limited attention during the 2024 campaign. But it highlights several of Trump’s weaknesses in managing US foreign policy.

Though he casts himself as an effective negotiator, in office Trump consistently accommodated autocrats, offering concessions without winning concomitant benefits, former aides said. “He would interfere in the regular government process to do something for a foreign leader,” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told the Times in 2020. “In anticipation of what? In anticipation of another favor from that person down the road.”

Bolton wrote in a book that Trump in 2019 told Chinese President Xi Jinping that his decision to detain Uighur Muslims in concentration camps was “exactly the right thing to do” and urged Xi to “go ahead with building the camps.” In another meeting that year, Bolton wrote, Trump “pleaded” with Xi to help Trump’s electoral prospects by purchasing US soybeans and wheat. Trump apparently hoped the trade would win him votes in rural states hurt by his trade war with China.

This tendency to appease autocrats who flatter him is part of Trump’s personalization of foreign policy, a tendency to make diplomacy about his own interests, rather than those of Americans.

Then there are the conflicts of interest. Trump, in late 2015, acknowledged that “I have a little conflict of interest” in dealing with Turkey, due to his licensing deal that paid him for his name to appear on two glass towers in Istanbul. The 2020 leak of some of Trump’s tax returns revealed that he had in fact received at least $13 million, including at least $1 million while he was the president, through the deal. A man who helped broker Trump’s licensing deal later lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Turkish interests.

If he is elected again, Trump’s business interests will result in similar conflicts with Vietnam, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, among others. Through his family, he would also have business-related conflicts with Albania, Qatar, Serbia, and Saudi Arabia, which has paid $87 million to a fund set up by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

It is not clear to what extent financial interests—as opposed to flattery or a wish for the approval of autocrats—influences Trump. The problem is that Americans don’t know what interests he follows.

But it is likely that Erdogan expects Trump will be accommodating if he wins, perhaps starting with Halkbank. A federal appeals court recently ruled that the bank’s prosecution can proceed, following the bank’s effort to claim sovereign immunity.

Turkish interests allegedly spent heavily to corruptly influence New York Mayor Eric Adams, who is accused of ordering that Turkey’s 36-story consulate be allowed to open despite safety concerns. If Adams would help fix a fire code issue, what might Trump do for Erdogan?

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Donald Trump has said that if he is elected president again, he will use the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies. We should believe him, because he attempted to do just that in his first term, with some success. And he will be better prepared to execute his plans if he returns to the White House.

NPR recently tallied more than 100 times Trump called for the prosecution or jailing of his perceived foes. His stated targets include Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and his family, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, James Comey, Bill Barr, John Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, federal prosecutors, election officials, journalists, and pro-Palestinian protestors. He reportedly wanted retired military officers who criticized him, Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, called back to active duty so they could be court-martialed. He suggested that Mark Milley, who previously served as Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed.

The frequency of those threats makes them seem silly. Trump probably isn’t going to sic prosecutors on all those prominent people. But his record suggests he is serious about using the power of his office against many critics. Contrary to the claims of defenders like J.D. Vance—who said recently that Trump “didn’t go after his political opponents” while in office—Trump made sustained public and private efforts while in the White House to order up probes into critics and political opponents. Trump succeeded in numerous cases in having foes investigated, media reports and accounts of former aides show.

Lock Her Up

After calling for Hillary Clinton’s prosecution on the campaign trail, Trump, despite briefly disavowing the idea, pushed throughout his presidency for Clinton’s prosecution. This campaign came in public tweets and private pressure on aides, and was mounted alongside his anger over investigations into his campaign’s contacts with Russian agents in 2016. Trump pressured all three of his attorneys general to open or advance investigations targeting Clinton. They partly resisted but substantially complied.

Many people recall Trump’s fury at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from matters to the 2016 election—which led the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. But despite that pledge, Sessions partly appeased Trump by instructing the US attorney for Utah, John Huber, to reexamine Clinton’s use of a private email server and allegations about the Clinton Foundation. Sessions’ order came amid Trump’s repeated public calls for him to look into Clinton’s “crimes.” After firing Sessions in 2020, Trump privately urged acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to push Huber to be more aggressive, the Washington Post reported. When Huber’s investigation ended in 2020 without finding wrongdoing by Clinton, Trump publicly attacked the prosecutor as a “garbage disposal.”

But by then, Trump’s third AG, Bill Barr, had appointed John Durham, the Connecticut US attorney, to launch an investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. Barr named Durham on heels of misrepresenting Mueller’s report, which found that the Trump campaign “expected to benefit” from secret Russian help in 2016. The Durham appointment also came after reports that Trump and his advisers were seeking revenge against his investigators.

Durham’s effort floundered legally, with the acquittal of two of the three men charged with crimes related to the investigation. But the probe, which lasted four years, fared better as an exercise in arming Trump with talking points. Durham appeared to consider that part of his job, though he has publicly disputed that. When the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2019 issued a report that found no evidence the FBI’s Trump investigation was politically motivated, Durham, in consultation with Barr, issued a strange statement disagreeing, without offering any evidence for why.

Durham decided to charge Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who worked for Democrats in 2016, with lying to the FBI, despite evidence so thin two prosecutors quit in connection with the charge. Sussmann was acquitted in 2022, but through filings in the case, Durham publicly aired allegations about Clinton campaign efforts to advance the Russia story, details that did not appear necessary to his case. Right-wing news outlets in February 2022 jumped one such-Durham motion to falsely report the Clinton’s campaign had spied on Trump White House servers. In his final report in 2023, Durham extensively cited material he acknowledged was dubious possible Russian disinformation in an effort to suggest Clinton had helped drive the FBI probe into Trump.

FBI

After firing James Comey as FBI director in 2017, which resulted in Mueller’s appointment, Trump pressed for the Justice Department to prosecute Comey for mishandling sensitive government information by allegedly orchestrating leaks that were damaging to Trump. According to the New York Times, this pressure led to “two investigations of leaks potentially involving” Comey. The DOJ declined to charge Comey.

Other former FBI officials who drew Trump’s ire—former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok, originally the lead FBI agent on the Russia investigation—faced DOJ probes after Trump railed against them. Sessions fired McCabe the day before his 2018 retirement, in what appeared to be a deliberate act to deny him a pension and benefits. Prosecutors in 2019 tried to charge McCabe for allegedly lying to FBI officials about media contacts, but in an unusual move that suggests a weak case, a grand jury declined to return an indictment.

John Kerry

In a March 2019 press conference, Trump said former Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the 2015 deal freezing Iran’s nuclear weapons development, could be prosecuted for violating the Logan Act, a 1799 law barring private US citizens from negotiating with foreign governments in disputes with the United States. Trump was irked at Kerry’s ongoing contacts with Iranian officials and by past threats by Mueller’s team to charge former national security adviser Michael Flynn with violating the act. Trump told reporters that Kerry should be charged, but “my people don’t want to do anything,” adding, “Only the Democrats do that kind of stuff.

False. Trump’s public and private efforts had by then already secured DOJ scrutiny of Kerry. Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told the Times he’d witnessed Trump demand Kerry’s prosecution “on at least a half dozen occasions” in 2018 and 2019. Trump also made the case in tweets and public statements. Days after one of Trump’s tweets, in May 2018, a top DOJ official had told prosecutors in Manhattan to investigate Kerry’s contacts with Iranians, according to the Times. Geoffrey Berman, at the time the US attorney in Manhattan, wrote in a 2022 book that the Kerry probe appeared to result from Trump’s edict. “No one needed to talk with Trump to know what he wanted,” Berman wrote. “You could read his tweets.”

Trump succeeded in sparking investigations into his critics and political foes by continually pressing subordinates to deliver actual prosecutions, as former aides like Kelly, Bolton and White House counsel Don McGahn have revealed. In some cases, the resulting probes appear to have been solutions settled on by officials attempting to manage Trump’s pressure with partial measures.

But in a new term, Trump will surely be more aggressive and even less restrained, as his public threats make clear. The Supreme Court’s July declaration that the president has absolute immunity from prosecution for many types of official conduct will leave him with few worries about facing legal consequences for his own actions. And the aides who partly restrained him before will be gone, replaced by more sycophantic enablers.

As Trump pledges to pervert presidential power to prosecute critics, Americans have to take him at this word. If he wins, who is going to stop him?

Joe Scott, a West Point graduate with an MBA and a background in finance, ran for Broward County elections supervisor in 2020. At the time, he thought his previous stints as an account manager for a technology company and a facilities administrator at a health care firm would make him a “good fit” for a job that would ostensibly preoccupy him with a mélange of humdrum desk-work.

He was surprised, however, to find how much his military experience in Iraq would come in handy.

With an unhurried demeanor, a lanyard, and a warm smile, Scott comes across more like a beloved social studies teacher moonlighting as a football coach than a soldier. But in the late-2000s, he was an Army captain embedded with the Iraqi military during some of the country’s earliest democratically run elections. In an effort to prepare for hotspots of unrest, the Iraqi leadership of Scott’s battalion pitched going door to door to ask locals how they planned to vote; Scott had to explain to the officer that having uniformed and armed Iraqi military members interrogate locals about their voting plans was “not a good look.”

“It was a different world,” he says of the Middle Eastern country’s shaky, fledgling democracy. “Although,” he adds, “America is kind of moving that way.”

The day after Scott was sworn in as Broward’s elections supervisor, in January 2021, election deniers—incited by Trump’s lies about a stolen election—stormed the US Capitol. He called his wife to ask if she was watching the news. “The Handmaid’s Tale is going down right now,” he recalls telling her. “This is real, right?”

He realized then that in the fleeting moments between the end of his campaign and first week of his new role, the job of “being an election official really changed.”

In the months and years since Trump turbocharged election angst, Scott has had to deal with politically motivated actors spreading misleading information about voting procedures and conspiracy-slinging citizens, some of whom have made physical threats against him and his staff. His experience is not the exception but the norm among the people who have taken up this line of work.

Nearly 40 percent of local election workers have experienced harassment or abuse, according to a recent survey conducted by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. Dozens of threats have been so serious as to warrant full FBI investigations, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which noted these threats were concentrated in the states Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020. Multiple election officials have even been victims of “swatting,” a dangerous hoax in which a caller reports a fake crime with the intention of triggering a substantial law enforcement response at the home or workplace of their unsuspecting target. These tactics don’t only put election workers at risk, they also intimidate voters. A year after the January 6 attack, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism asked Americans whether they felt safe at voting locations. Fewer than half said yes.

But if elections are becoming increasingly unhinged, election officials are also making significant efforts to improve their institutions and the public’s trust in them. Clerks and supervisors are fortifying their physical structures with bulletproof glass and GPS-tracked ballot bags and dedicated power supplies and motion detectors. They’re collaborating with law enforcement, and with one another, about how to prepare for and respond to threats in the first presidential race since Donald Trump and his most fervent supporters tried to overturn the 2020 election’s results. This time around, officials like Scott are hoping for a more tranquil transition period. But they’ve also prepared for the worst.

Scott recently showed me around his new election headquarters, which serves as a processing center for vote-by-mail ballots, the recount site for elections that are within half a percentage point, and the place where paper ballots are scanned into Broward’s auditing system. With security guards, a gated parking lot, badge-entry doors classified by clearance level, and windows for inquisitive (or incredulous) civilians to watch over ballot processing, the $103 million building was hardened to withstand both Category 5 hurricanes—and the growing ranks of election conspiracists. Scott notes the building’s design was an exercise in balancing the public’s desire for election transparency with everyone’s need for physical safety. He had managed similar dynamics before.

“Part of my tour in Iraq was preparing for and making sure that those elections went off without any major security things happening,” Scott tells Mother Jones about his service, which earned him a Bronze Star Medal and a Combat Action Badge. “We wanted to make sure people felt safe going to the polling places.”

Nearly 20 years later, that’s exactly what he and fellow US election workers are doing domestically.

Last month, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was the intended recipient of a package intercepted by a postal center. Its contents included an unknown powder; its return address was labeled “United States Traitor Elimination Army.” The FBI is investigating its origins.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was the intended recipient of a package with an unknown powder—its return address was labeled “United States Traitor Elimination Army.”

She said the package was in addition to more than 1,000 threats she received since last September. pic.twitter.com/i7C84mQdEd

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) October 28, 2024

Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said the package was in addition to more than 1,000 threats she has received since last September. One extremist made a threat to her life while she was in the hospital having a C-section; other threats have been sexual in nature. But rather than panic about potential election-related violence, Griswold has channeled her efforts into preventing it.

“We are in this scenario where election officials like myself have to plan for really unnecessary disasters.”

The 40-year-old has worked to reform Colorado’s election landscape, including championing the passage of state election laws, among them one that made it a felony to compromise voting equipment. That was something former Colorado election worker Tina Peters did in 2021 when she allowed an unauthorized person to access data from election machines, images from which were eventually posted on conspiracy-riddled websites. (Peters was recently sentenced to nine years in prison.) Other new regulations Griswold has backed have made it illegal to retaliate against election workers and to have guns near election sites.

Since 2020, Griswold has made available at least $5 million in grant money for more physical security at election sites, which has allowed counties to take measures such as installing bulletproof glass or having Narcan on hand in case fentanyl is deployed as a chemical weapon. “We are in this scenario where election officials like myself have to plan for really unnecessary disasters,” she tells me. “There is no reason we should have to be planning for these domestic conspiracies and the effect it has on our elections, but we have to.”

Election officials elsewhere have been similarly proactive. In St. Charles County, Missouri, the only thing that separated in-person absentee voters from elections staff in 2020 was a row of desks. Kurt Bahr, the county’s Republican director of elections, recently installed a full wall with a locking door and customer service windows to provide a barrier so his employees “feel more secure in case any voter is overly agitated.”

Sante Fe, New Mexico’s clerk has installed GPS tracking devices on all traveling ballot bags. In case someone alleges fake ballots were introduced into the closed system, clerk Katharine Clark can say, “Au contraire. I have this dashboard, and that shows me exactly where my ballot bags are.”

Clark, a Democrat, has also added an accelerometer that measures vibration inside her county’s ballot tabulator to decipher if anyone improperly touched it overnight. Further, her county is issuing personal alert devices for all presiding judges and has hired additional security that will “have eyes and ears on all the public sites.”

One of the remaining challenges election officials face is deciding when a disturbance reaches a threshold that requires the help of law enforcement. “It’s kind of like the definition of pornography,” says Bahr of Missouri. “You know it when you see it.”

Tina Barton has made it her mission to foster coordination between law enforcement and election officials. She learned the importance of this when she became the target of conspiracy-crazed election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

On Tuesday, November 10, 2020, she walked into her fluorescent-light filled office at Rochester Hills, Michigan City Hall, where she had served as the city’s election clerk for eight years. She saw a blinking light on her desk line. It was a voicemail from an unknown caller.

“Ten million plus patriots will surround you when you least expect it, and your little infantile Deep State security agency has no time to protect you…We’ll fucking kill you,” said the voice, which also threatened bringing a knife to Barton’s throat. “You will fucking pay for your fucking lying-ass remarks…We will fucking take you out. Fuck your family, fuck your life.”

The culprit was eventually identified as Carmel, Indiana’s Andrew Nickels, who has since been sentenced to 14 months in prison; but the victim of the call was effectively hand-selected by the Republican National Committee. After Michigan was called for Biden, then–RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel claimed that fraud had abounded in the state, and case in point were the “2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats but were Republican ballots,” said McDaniels at a press conference on November 6. “And this took place in Rochester Hills.”

There was a minor issue in Rochester Hills, but it was discovered and corrected well before Nickels left the voicemail. Around 1 a.m. the day after the election, Barton—who had at that point worked more than 18 hours straight—noticed that the county’s website showed a handful of absentee precincts from her county were not showing up. She informed the county, whose officials said they had not received one of Barton’s files. She ran a report and discovered the file was not missing, but saved under the wrong name.

The county advised Barton that the solution was to purge the old file and rerun the absentee precincts, then save that information under the correct file name. But within 24 hours of that step on Wednesday, it was discovered that both files had somehow been added to the county’s total. Immediately, before noon on Thursday, the incorrect file was removed from the system.

Even if the issue was not corrected—it was—Biden won the state by more than 150,000 votes: roughly double the number of people who live in Rochester Hills. An audit led by Republican state legislators would later confirm, in June 2021, that Michigan’s elections were lawfully run, and that temporary mishaps didn’t affect final outcomes. All the while, Barton was perpetually on edge. At the grocery store, she’d think, “Did that person walk too close to me? Why are they everywhere that I’m going?” she tells me. “You become hyper-vigilant about every single thing, and start to view every single thing in person as a possible threat. And that can be really overwhelming.”

While investigators were still working to identify her aggressor, a group called the Center for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE) was forming in response to threats against election officials like Barton. It was founded in 2022 by a cross-partisan group of current and former national, state, and local election officials, members of law enforcement, as well as nonprofits across the political spectrum. Barton, a Republican who has since left her election clerk role, is now a vice chair.

Over the last two years, she’s convened nearly 150 CSSE training sessions across more than 35 states, bringing together thousands of election workers, members of law enforcement, facilities managers, hazmat teams, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and more to help the various stakeholders preemptively form lines of communication among themselves in preparation for what used to be extraordinary complications: Reports of mysterious substances, menacing phone calls, open-carry demonstrations outside polling sites, accusations of non-citizens voting, bomb threats, and more.

Barton and her co-instructor, former Sheriff for Larimer County, Colorado, Justin Smith, travel to various jurisdictions, pose hypotheticals emergencies such as these, and break the attendees into randomized groups to strategize best practices. “Then we’ll take that opportunity after we’ve heard what they’ve said to see if we have some more things to either challenge them on, or to push their thinking on,” Barton says. CSSE has also made instructional videos and guides for groups and officials who can’t facilitate in-person training.

Election workers, many of whom have already been threatened, are usually eager to accept CSSE’s guidance. But in the beginning, it was sometimes a harder sell to law enforcement personnel, who generally feared engaging in anything political and didn’t realize how rampant election-related intimidation had become. Smith would help convince them by comparing the need for police engagement in election settings with the need for police in school settings.

There were school shootings before Columbine, but the 1999 tragedy was an “awakening period” during which both law enforcement educators realized they needed to work together to prevent future catastrophes. Similarly, Smith says, “2020 was not the first time we were having problems in elections,” but the scale of chaos from that cycle was a turning point requiring groups like CSSE to help bridge the divides between the various relevant parties.

Barton and Smith’s work is just one part of a growing movement in which individuals are collaborating across professions and party lines to prevent chaos-mongers from affecting people’s constitutional right to vote in 2024. Another nonpartisan organization, the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions PLEJ was founded in 2022 to facilitate engagement between election officials who share challenges and, with PLEJ’s help, solutions.

Joe Scott of Broward County is a member of PLEJ, as are 89 more of the largest local election jurisdictions across 33 states. Collectively, the group’s members administer elections for 40 percent of the US electorate. At a September PLEJ panel hosted in Washington, DC, Republican and Democratic election officials from eight states came together to talk about their security plans and structures. Carolina Lopez, the executive director of PLEJ and a member of CSSE, says that the officials often invite each other to their sites to trade tips. “Instead of every little fiefdom building something, we’re putting all of our resources together,” says Lopez.

The fraternization may never have happened so quickly—or at all—if Trump hadn’t repeatedly claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him, provoking people like Andrew Nickels to assail local bureaucrats like Tina Barton. CSSE and PLEJ didn’t exist then, and they do now.

Unfortunately, so do new threats. “I’m actually really hopeful as we go into the 2024 general election,” says Barton. “I’m also cautious.”