Could the next presidential election be stolen?

Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University, is concerned that that’s precisely what may happen in 2024. Levitsky is co-author, with fellow Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt, of the international bestseller, How Democracies Die. The book argues that modern democracies are subverted not by military coups, but by weakening key institutions such as the judiciary and the press.

Levitsky wrote recently in The Atlantic, “The greatest threat to American democracy today is not a repeat of January 6, but the possibility of a stolen presidential election. Contemporary democracies that die meet their end at the ballot box, through measures that are nominally constitutional. The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will ‘legally’ overturn an election.”

Although Trump failed to overturn the 2020 election results, Levitsky said on The Vermont Conversation, “I see 2020 as a dress rehearsal.” Republicans “appear to not only have the ability, but the interest and the will to overturn an election.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote How Democracies Die during the first year of the Trump presidency. Joe Biden carried around a marked-up copy of the book during his 2020 campaign and often cited it. I asked Levitsky, having observed four years of Trump, if he now believes he missed anything when describing how democracies are subverted.

“What we missed was the transformation of the Republican party,” he replied. “We didn’t view the Republicans as an authoritarian party. …We could not have imagined a majority of House Republicans voting to overturn the election…[or] the vast bulk of the Republican party ultimately condoning Trump’s inciting of the January 6 storming of the Capitol. And we could not imagine the Republican party across the country taking steps to prepare in all likelihood to steal or try to steal the 2024 election. That is the behavior…of an authoritarian party.”

“Parties become authoritarian when they really come to fear losing,” he asserts, and “a party based almost exclusively on white Christians has a hard time winning elections.”