U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, left, Melania Trump and Barron Trump celebrate early results from the 2024 U.S. presidential election in Palm Beach County Convention Center, in West Palm Beach, Fla. on Nov. 6.Carlos Barria/Reuters
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
It’s been a challenge to find a silver lining from last week’s U.S. election results.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to implement a barrage of executive orders as soon as he takes office in January. During an appearance on Fox News last December, he promised he would not be a dictator, “except for day one … I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.” He has also vowed to fire Jack Smith, the special counsel in charge of prosecuting the two federal cases against Mr. Trump; pardon many of those charged in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol; obliterate protections that safeguard public servants to dramatically reduce the size of the federal workforce; and begin the “largest deportation program in American history.”
Mr. Trump, of course, does not necessarily need to use executive orders to accomplish these goals. With Republicans in control of both the House and the Senate, he likely has at least two years of free rein to implement his platform.
Mr. Trump’s stranglehold over the executive and legislative branches of government (and some would argue, given his role in building the conservative majority of the Supreme Court, over the judicial branch, too), does not extend to the entirety of the American public. Vice-President Kamala Harris may have lost both the electoral college and popular vote, but more than 72 million Americans – 48 per cent of those who voted – still wanted her as president.
Mr. Trump now must govern a country that is divided, and divided by the narrowest popular-vote margin since the contentious election of George W. Bush over Democratic nominee Al Gore in 2000.
Perhaps counterintuitively, if there’s a silver lining to the election results last week, it is just that: in a country deeply riven across lines of ideology, religion, race, class and more, democracy still worked.
While some social-media posts from those on the ideological left have raised concerns that the sharp drop in Democratic voters in 2024 is the outcome of “missing” votes – just as the conspiratorial flank of the Republican Party see this shift as “evidence” that the election was stolen in 2020 – there is in fact little proof of election interference or verifiable concerns about voter fraud.
Votes are still being counted in some states, but estimates suggest that turnout was a not-terrible 64.5 per cent of eligible voters – lower than the 65.5 per cent who participated in the 2020 election, but substantially higher than when Mr. Trump won in 2016, when it was 59.3 per cent.
And, most importantly, all signs point to a peaceful transition of power between the current administration and the next. Ms. Harris conceded the election (but not the fight for freedom, opportunity, fairness and dignity for all people), and President Joe Biden met with Mr. Trump on Wednesday, honouring a tradition in which the outgoing leader hosts the incoming one – a tradition that Mr. Trump refused to follow when he was defeated in 2020.
In short, Mr. Trump was democratically elected to be the President of the United States. This is perhaps, as Mr. Trump claimed, the outcome of a historic realignment of the coalitions that comprise the Democratic and Republican parties. As a political scientist, I have my doubts; realignments are rare, usually emerge from singularly divisive political issues such as slavery or the Depression, and must be durable beyond a single election. The 2024 presidential election, while certainly notable, doesn’t quite fit the bill.
Nevertheless, for the next four years, we will live with the outcome of this election. Many people will not like Mr. Trump and his policies, and many will probably even be hurt by them. But at the heart of our democracy is the understanding that even when our side loses, we still agree to abide by the decisions that emerge from free and fair elections, held regularly without the exclusion of specific segments of the population and carried out without the use of force.
There is still good reason to worry about whether the many other elements that comprise democratic practices can withstand a second Trump presidency. Democracy is most fundamentally about competition, representation and rights, but it also encompasses norms, which are easy to ignore or break; tensions that can readily explode into outbursts (or worse, violence); an impulse for consensus that can quickly curdle into the pursuit of hegemonic control; transparency that can become muddied; personal preferences that can slide into patronage; and lines of accountability for those in power that are in danger of unravelling before our eyes.
Democracies can fall democratically. This is not a silver lining – it’s the price of the ticket.