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If you'd like to understand the special kind of political dysfunction that paralyzes American politics, just consider two numbers: 16 and 97.
You live in a country where Congress has a 16 percent job approval rating and had a 97 percent incumbency retention rate in the previous elections. Americans say they hate the way Congress works and yet keep sending the same exact lawmakers back to Washington.
People who participate in elections — particularly primary elections — are prone to think that their representatives are doing a good job but that it's the rest of those people who are the problem. This prevents voters from doing what would otherwise be the rational thing and voting out the incumbents. Add in gerrymandering and a highly geographically sorted electorate and you have a doom loop of dissatisfaction and dysfunction.
We previously had an inverted version of the phenomenon in voters' confidence in elections. In 2024, only 44 percent of American voters expressed any significant confidence that the ballots in that year's presidential election would be counted accurately. Yet, at the same time, 76 percent of voters said they were confident that their own "state or local government will run a fair and accurate election this November."
It was the same story as with Congress: "I think there's lots of election fraud, but not in my neighborhood."
While it's a bummer that so many people — mostly Republicans — believed that our national elections would be illegitimate, the implications were blunted by the fact that they believed their own votes would be cast and counted fairly. Like in a lot of things, humans easily harbor deep suspicions about strangers and people far away, but tend to operate in higher trust with those around them.
That gap, unfortunately, is closing.
A recent Marist College poll found that an all-time low of 66 percent of voters expressed confidence in their local elections, with more than a third expressing little to no confidence.
What's changed since 2024 is that Democrats and independents are catching up in expressing increasing anxiety about the vote. In fact, independents are now more likely than Republicans to mistrust their own elections. We needn't wonder why.
Riverside County, Calif., Sheriff Chad Bianco made news this week when he ordered his deputies to seize more than 500,000 ballots from last year's California gerrymandering referendum, in which the Democratic-backed proposal won by more than 3.3 million votes.
Given the margins, it's hugely unlikely that anything Bianco could find would overturn the result. And as Arizona Republicans found out in their own audit of that state's 2020 presidential results, ballot canvassing is neither easy nor suitable work for novices. But Bianco, a Republican, is running third in a donnybrook of a California gubernatorial primary. A high visibility raid like this not only gets attention, it suggests to California Republicans that Bianco is aligned with President Trump and his claims of widespread election fraud.
But it also tells the residents of Riverside County — a county that went for Trump in 2024 and reelected a hardcore MAGA candidate like Bianco with 60 percent of the vote in 2022 — that maybe even their own officials can't be trusted or, worse, that some shadowy outside forces are interfering right in their own precincts.
A very shorthand version of how we arrived here goes like this: Trump exploited longstanding Republican suspicions about Democratic voter fraud to claim massive rigging in 2016 and attempted to crack down. He failed then, but Democrats, who have long claimed massive voter disenfranchisement, responded with outrage. When the pandemic disrupted the 2020 election, Democrats pressed their case to remove restrictions on ballot access. Republicans responded with claims of even more massive fraud, which the president further exploited to try to steal a second term after losing the election. That, in turn, became the Jan. 6 sacking of the Capitol. Democrats responded with an even more aggressive effort to expand ballot access, including an attempted federal elections takeover early in the Biden administration. Unable to break the legislative filibuster to do so, Democrats turned to state-level efforts, which Republicans countered with their own.
Now we have Republicans trying to break the legislative filibuster to jam through their own federal takeover of elections and the president sending out investigators from coast to coast to look for election fraud, even where the matters have already been thoroughly investigated. Now we have the threat to send ICE officers to the polls bubbling back up. Ambitious local Republicans, like Bianco, are getting in on the play. Democrats are responding in kind.
How much actual effect any of this will have on the way ballots are cast and counted is unknown. But one thing is already clear: The wild, baseless claims of fraud and disenfranchisement have seeped into the electorate and convinced an increasing number of Americans not just that the results of national elections can't be trusted, but that their own ballots may be at risk.
What we have is a recipe not just for depressed participation, but, ultimately, a legitimacy crisis for our government and the idea of "government by the people" itself. We're a long way from being done with this particular doom loop, so be ready for anything this fall.
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