OPINION
Why Voters Concerned About Democracy Voted for Trump
Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris called the 2024 presidential election a referendum on American democracy.
A vote for Donald Trump was a vote to surrender our nation’s treasured democratic institutions into the hands of a mad king.
Think George III of England, or Ludwig II of Bavaria.
When polls closed on Election Day, exit polls showed that voters had indeed voted on democracy. However, the voters most concerned with this matter did not select the Harris-Walz ticket; they chose Trump-Vance.
With Trump’s success with minorities, Democrats could at least blame inflation, open borders, and Biden’s historic unpopularity.
However, Harris was supposed to have a lock on the Americans concerned about losing our democracy. After all, Trump was the candidate of Jan. 6, 2021 the candidate who declared his desire to be dictator on "day one," and the candidate who called for former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley — who called the 45th president "fascist to the core" — to be executed.
However, these voters were not just voting for Donald Trump — they were voting against Kamala Harris.
Specifically, they looked at how the Biden-Harris administration behaved when clothed in immense power and then concluded that the Democratic nominee was a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump.
Consider the Biden administration’s banana republic tradition of political prosecution.
In June of 2023, the Biden-Harris Justice Department indicted Trump in a federal court in Florida. Then, in August 2023, as the 2024 election neared, the Biden-Harris administration indicted Trump again.
Now that the election is over and its purpose moot, U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith is hurriedly ending his prosecutions.
Of course, it was not just Trump that was a target of the Biden-Harris administration’s weaponization of government.
From the moment Biden and Harris took the oath, ordinary American citizens were as well.
Those exercising their freedom of speech to criticize COVID-19 policy were censored on social media due to government pressure, with a federal judge who oversaw this case calling the Biden-Harris administration’s actions as "the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history."
As inflation became rampant due to Biden-Harris’ own spending policies, the administration used its executive power to scapegoat businesses for rising prices.
The FTC, for example, sued to block the merger of supermarket chains Kroger and Albertsons earlier this year, alleging that the combined company would contribute to rising grocery prices and price-gouging.
This was despite grocery stores being one of the least likely businesses to price-gouge, having a profit margin of just 1.6%.
Then, when polling showed rental price inflation was an even bigger political concern for Democratic chances than grocery prices, the Justice Department sued a Texas real-estate software management company, RealPage, for "price-fixing."
It did so despite Justice officials admitting that RealPage's software generates only price recommendations to its landlord users and doesn't force them to use them.
As the election loomed, the Biden-Harris administration became even more brazen.
Like a cornered animal, it slashed and hissed at anything that seemed like a threat to its hold on power for another four years.
When Virginia sought to remove noncitizens from their voting rolls, Biden’s DOJ sued to keep them on.
When Elon Musk endorsed Trump and gave money to those who signed a petition pledging support for the First and Second Amendments, the DOJ threatened Musk with lawsuits.
When the president called the roughly half of the country that supported Trump "Garbage," the White House altered the transcript to manipulate the meaning of Biden’s remarks.
Perhaps this was on the mind of voters who told exit pollsters that they were concerned about "democracy."
Perhaps their idea of "democracy" was far more nuanced than the Harris campaign’s fearmongering about Donald Trump and that, to them, protecting democracy meant explicitly rejecting the Biden-Harris administration’s weaponization of government.
This is not to say that the upcoming Trump administration will necessarily end the weaponization of our government against political enemies.
Democrats may reap the whirlwind now, but when they take back power, they may come right back to inflicting lawfare on Republicans who made their lives so miserable.
Perhaps this will drive the nation further into a spiral of legal warfare, with every four to eight years vacillating wildly not in actions but only in targets.
Or perhaps some sort of peace can emerge from it.
This, however naïve it may sound, does have precedent.
After all, both parties declined to renew the Watergate-inspired Office of Independent Counsel after it was used against the Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton administrations.
After both sides had a chance to feel the wrath of this political division, they ultimately decided that it was time for change.
This election season, voters called for a change in the direction of the nation.
Nobody knows what kind of change these momentous results will bring.
But for the sake of our country’s rule of law, let us hope that both parties agreeing to end this lawfare madness is somewhere in the cards.
Then again, sometimes the only way to stop something is to make both sides feel the pain.
Jackson Cho is president of the Federalist Society’s Brigham Young University Chapter in Provo, Utah. A prolific political commentator who currently serves as the president of the Federal Society at BYU.
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