Nicholas Casey

One academic told of a future where the Senate refused to consider Supreme Court justices from the opposing party, leaving the bench size to fluctuate with partisan whims for years to come.

Another imagined violence breaking out between white supremacists and Antifa groups in the capital, if President Donald Trump lost the popular vote for a second time but was returned to the presidency by the Electoral College. Armed militias might emerge in the suburbs, as they once did in Ireland.

Valerie Bunce, a scholar on post-Soviet politics at Cornell University, told her fellow social scientists, gathered in Ithaca to discuss the future of American democracy, that she saw something that smelled like the fall of Communism in the last century.

“We were looking at this in the 1980s — and if you said then the Soviet Union would break up, people didn’t believe you,” she told two colleagues, who responded with an uneasy laugh. “I’m just trying to give you an idea of the kind of things that can happen here.”

Four years ago, when the political establishment remained convinced that Donald J. Trump would not triumph, the researchers at the conference could see the reasons he would. And after Trump became president, they predicted that he might break democratic norms and spur an impeachment. That seemed extreme to some.

“Joe Scarborough once came on MSNBC with a copy of a piece we’d written and said that we were ‘laughable,’” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University professor who has spent the last several years arguing that American democracy is facing challenges similar to those that brought down Latin American democracies in coups during the last century.

The consensus among the scholars is that modern America has never produced a president like Trump, but that other countries have. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela pioneered using Twitter to attack his enemies and hosted a TV show called “Alo, Presidente.” Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s current strongman, used the term “deep state” decades before Trump did.

The field of comparative politics — a discipline that contrasts the formation and fall of political systems around the globe — has long been an obscure realm of the ivory tower. But now it is selling books and has become fodder on cable news, and scholars say they’ve found themselves explaining American political upheaval to bemused diplomats of foreign embassies.

Though these scholars do paint a grim picture for the future of democracy, no one sees an American dictatorship in the offing. Many point to the 2018 midterm elections as signs that the Democrats — known in academic lingo as “the opposition” in these scenarios — remain a potent force. In this view, impeachment itself shows American checks and balances are still intact.

“Today democracies don’t die at the hands of generals, but at the hands of elected leaders — presidents, prime ministers,” began Levitsky in front of a packed lecture hall at Cornell last week. “Many citizens are not fully aware of what’s happening until it’s too late.”

For democracy to work, in Levitsky’s view, it’s best to see the system as a kind of a game in which both sides’ ultimate goal is to keep playing for indefinite rounds. While everyone wishes to win, it’s more important that neither side is ever completely defeated or has demoralized its opponents to the point that they no longer want to play.

In Venezuela, Levitsky recalls, polarization between the leftist Chávez and the opposition boiled over into a coup and a general strike against him, both of which failed. Chávez responded by packing the courts, closing media outlets and jailing his opponents. The country’s democratic fabric has been in tatters ever since.

A key turning point for many democracies was the moment when political rivals began to see themselves as enemies rather than competitors, losing a key norm Levitsky calls “mutual toleration.” In his opinion, American politics lost that early in the Trump era when the president referred to his rivals as “traitors” and “scum.”

The story, or some variation of it, is Levitsky’s bread and butter, with similar patterns of democratic breakdown seen in Chile, Hungary, Turkey, Spain before the Spanish Civil War, and Germany and Italy before World War II.

“I never thought I would be seeing it in the U.S.,” Levitsky said.

Not all scholars agree with that the United States is seeing this kind of breakdown. Hadas Aron, a faculty fellow at New York University, said she admired Levitsky’s work and even teaches it to students, but said there were large differences between the democratic crises in countries like Hungary or Poland and what is going on in the United States. Those countries were far more polarized to begin with, she said.

“Democracy dies when there is no support for democracy, when people don’t believe in it,” she said. “Here, Trump is meeting with resistance by institutions at every step.”

No matter how one analyzes it, the troubled times have brought a boom for these scholars. “How Democracies Die,” written by Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, also a professor at Harvard, became one of the rare books to make it both to best-seller lists and the undergraduate political science syllabus circuit. And many of his colleagues saw their careers buoyed by current events, too.

At the recent conference in Cornell on the topic of democratic resilience in America, Robert Lieberman, the former provost of Johns Hopkins University, couldn’t resist the urge to pull up a mock-up of his new book cover with the title “Four Threats.” It featured a minimalist landscape of dark, foreboding waves.

“The book wouldn’t exist if Trump weren’t president,” he said of his manuscript, an analysis of breakdowns of American democratic norms after the republic’s founding including the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression and Watergate.

The Trump presidency, in some ways, was the reason for the conference itself, giving a kind of urgency to those gathered around the table rarely seen at academic gatherings.

Jennifer McCoy, a professor at Georgia State who spent years monitoring Chávez’s elections in Venezuela, presented charts of discontent with democracy in Zimbabwe, comparing them with downward trends among Americans. Kenneth M. Roberts, who teaches comparative Latin American politics at Cornell, showed research that the Republican Party had swung further to the right than most right-wing parties in Europe.

A sense of disbelief seemed to take hold of the room when Lilliana Mason, a government and politics professor at the University of Maryland, began to show the results of a survey she had conducted among voters on the issue of political violence around the 2018 midterms. While 77% had said they were against violence of any sort, around 20% appeared willing to tolerate some kind of violence in politics.

She flipped to another survey, where 25% of respondents had said they favored the country being broken up along party lines into separate nations.

“What are they …” she paused, but no question followed. “This just looks so bad.”

Another thing these scholars think looks bad: the Supreme Court. Specifically, these scholars of democratic dysfunction could not get over the fact that Judge Merrick Garland never got a confirmation hearing in the Senate, something that hadn’t happened since 1866.

Over dinner at an upscale restaurant near campus, Thomas M. Keck, a professor at Syracuse who studies the history of the Supreme Court in previously divisive times — it changed size seven times during 19th century partisan warfare — said he thought drastic measures might be needed. He floated some options, like term limits for new justices and keeping open the possibility of expanding the court’s size.

Many of his colleagues seemed convinced by the time the entrees were served. “It may be our least-bad option in restoring the court’s role as a democratic guardrail,” Keck said.

Last year, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., invited Levitsky and Ziblatt to Washington to discuss their book with a group of senators. During the conversation, Levitsky said one of the lawmakers told him that Garland’s blocked appointment was likely to become the norm.

He described the meeting with the senators as a “discombobulated discussion,” the lawmakers struggling to understand the political polarization Levitsky understood through his studies of democratic breakdown in Latin America.

“They kept asking, ‘Why are Republicans behaving this way?’” he said, noting how unfamiliar the American lawmakers were with the polarization taking root around them. “These were smart people who knew a lot about politics, but they didn’t have an explanation.”

These kinds of questions have left Levitsky feeling somewhat vindicated since the days some saw him as too alarmist.

Earlier this year, Levitsky and Ziblatt appeared on Scarborough’s show, “Morning Joe,” to discuss the paperback version of their book.

“How have the institutions held up? How is the democracy doing?” Scarborough asked, this time in seeming agreement that there was a threat to both.

Yet Levitsky can be shy in offering solutions to the crisis he sees.

During Levitsky’s public lecture at Cornell this month, Tracy Mitrano, who is running as a Democrat for the congressional seat that includes Ithaca, asked him for any wisdom ahead of her campaign.

“What advice would you give to a congressional seat candidate from this district?” Mitrano asked, as the audience, which included some would-be constituents who recognized her, began to chuckle.

“Political science is very good at uncovering problems,” he said, saying that it was up to the politicians to figure out how to solve them. “I’m going to shut up now, because I don’t know.”

This article originally appeared in

ITHACA, N.Y. — Each prognosis was bleaker than the next.

The Democracy Doomsayers Consider 2020

The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge from voter rolls in September.

Miller, director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, believed thousands of voters were about to be wrongly removed.

Over the summer, the Ohio secretary of state had sent her organization and others like it a massive spreadsheet with the 235,000 names and addresses that would be purged from the state’s voter rolls in just a month — a list of people that, state officials said, some part of the bureaucracy flagged as deceased, living somewhere else or as a duplicate. The League of Women Voters had been asked to see if any of those purged qualified to register again.

Miller, who spends her work day helping register people to vote, scrolled through the names and then asked herself a question: What was her own voter status in the state?

She went online and discovered that her name had also been flagged as an inactive voter. The state was in the process of removing her from its voter rolls.

“I voted three times last year,” Miller said. “I don’t think we have any idea how many other individuals this has happened to.”

Ohio, where the Democratic presidential candidates are set to debate Tuesday, is both a battleground state and the site of some of the country’s strictest voting laws, from voter ID requirements to a “use-it-or-lose-it” provision that lets officials drop voters seen as inactive.

The combination has led voting rights advocates to contend that parts of the state are regularly disenfranchised, largely in purges aimed at those who have died or moved away, but which also hit real voters who don’t learn they can’t vote until Election Day. Election officials in other battlegrounds like Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas regularly purge their voter lists as well.

This year, a group of elected officials in the state, mostly all moderate Republicans, tried to answer the concerns with an experiment of their own: Rather than purge the voter rolls behind closed doors as had been done in the past, the government released the full list of those to be removed this summer, and gave the list to advocacy groups. The groups said they found the list was riddled with errors.

The result: Around 40,000 people, nearly 1 in 5 names on the list, shouldn’t have been on it, the state determined. And it only found out before anyone was actually turned away at a polling place largely because of volunteer sleuthing.

Few people had expected a problem at that scale.

But the process gave hope to people working on voting rights, who for years had pushed the state to be more transparent in how it was maintaining its voter rolls. Moderate Republicans, caught between advocacy groups pushing for fewer purges and more conservative leaders in other states urging for more, think they may have found a way to thread the needle.

“We’re talking about crowdsourcing, in simply putting the list out there,” said Frank LaRose, Ohio’s secretary of state, whose office oversaw the purge and who manages the election here.

Ohio’s needle-threading experiment this year — the only time advocates say a state government has released a list ahead of time — also offers one of the first looks at how so many names could be incorrectly removed from the rolls.

In one case, a data mistake from an outside firm meant a large number of people’s names were set to be knocked off. Ohio’s 88 counties each used a different process of removing people from the rolls, an immediate source of headaches for officials trying to compile a statewide list.

And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections. These voters were in Franklin County, a Democratic stronghold in the state.

Under Ohio law, the state is allowed to cull voters’ names from the rolls if they haven’t voted in six years and don’t respond to a postcard from the state informing them that they are about to be purged and need to take action. Voting groups challenged the law in court saying such rules suppress the vote, but the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision last year, disagreed and found finding so-called use-it-or-use-it laws constitutional.

“If you look at the numbers, it’s hard not to be jaded by this,” said Steve Tingley-Hock, who runs a watchdog group called the Ohio Voter Project and initially discovered the error.

How Tingley-Hock, a volunteer who doesn’t work for the government, chanced upon such a big mistake shows the kind of unusual backstop the state now depends on to carry out its work correctly.

A database consultant by trade, Tingley-Hock in recent years developed a hobby of spending his weekends downloading the state’s voter data onto his own laptop where he manages a database that keeps track of every voter in Ohio.

“Someone needed to keep a record of what’s happening in the voter population,” said Tingley-Hock, who thinks the purges are targeting certain demographic groups, especially young voters. “If you want to know what I’m doing on a Saturday morning, it’s downloading these files from the state.”

Working on a shoestring budget and donations from relatives, he keeps track of similar data from six other states, including North Carolina and Florida, which have both been criticized for voter restrictions.

When LaRose’s office released the spreadsheet with the list about of 235,000 names to be purged, Tingley-Hock ran them through his own database and found thousands of names matching active voters.

“It’s a simple query if you have a database management system,” he said. “A guy at his dining room table can figure this stuff out. It’s not rocket science.”

Many conservatives in the state argue that the purges and voting restrictions are necessary to prevent people from casting ballots illegally.

“There can be ballots not cast in a legitimate manner by legitimate people,” said state Sen. William P. Coley II, a Republican who has pushed for tightening the voting laws. “The number of elections that are decided by one vote or a few votes — it doesn’t take much to throw an election.”

That view could create difficulty for moderates like LaRose. As the state’s top election official, he has found himself at odds with Republican colleagues in acknowledging there is no evidence that voter fraud has ever been widespread.

Asked if officials outside of Ohio would follow his lead in releasing lists ahead of time, he said he didn’t want them to “take the wrong lesson” from fixing problems in a voter purge.

“I hope that other states don’t look at what we’ve done and say, ‘We’re not doing it,’” he said.

For the time being, the government’s efforts at transparency have garnered the praise of some of its frequent critics.

André Washington of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an African-American unionist organization that sued the state in the case the Supreme Court ruled on last year, said this was the first time the government was “willing to work with organizations like mine” and said he hoped other states would follow Ohio’s path.

But he wasn’t convinced advocacy organizations on their own were enough of a watchdog to ensure that the voter lists were accurate.

“If we glanced at it and found mistakes ourselves, there could be thousands more,” he said.

The experience has left some voters like Jennifer Kulina-Lanese, a former veterinary professional, shaken. She got a call from the League of Women Voters shortly after it received the list, informing her that the county where she had voted just last year had started the process for her to be purged.

“I still don’t know why, and that’s what’s scary,” said Kulina-Lanese, who is 45. “The idea that Franklin County was starting a process to remove me was terrifying.”

She added: “I would have shown up to vote, and I don’t know if I would have been denied.”

Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The clock was ticking for Jen Miller.

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Nicholas Casey

Articles written by the author

The Democracy Doomsayers Consider 2020

Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%.