Ahead of the 2024 elections, accusations that former President Donald Trump and the GOP constitute a serious “threat to democracy” have been a staple of Democratic discourse. However, some notable Republicans and analysts argue that President Biden’s party is really exerting extra effort to stifle the electorate.
They support their position by citing Democratic attempts to obstruct Trump’s candidacy, put him in jail, restrict free speech on social media, and amend election laws while opposing efforts to ensure that votes are cast honestly. They assert that the continuing initiatives pose a far greater threat to democracy than the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, which is often brought up by Democrats and Biden.
Defending the “soul of the nation” against Trump and his fellow Republicans, Biden summed up those efforts last year in a speech, saying they constituted “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” “a threat to American democracy,” and “a clear and present danger” to all citizens.
Democrats have recently thrown their support behind state-level legal efforts to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024. One such effort is Colorado, where the state Supreme Court decided earlier this week, 4-3, that the former president should be disqualified for violating the Constitution’s 14th Amendment when he “engaged in insurrection” regarding January 6.
“The most anti-democratic opinion in decades,” legal expert and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley concurred, stating that Democrats’ claims to be defending democracy “would be more compelling if they were not supporting the effort to block voters from being able to vote for Trump and canceling primaries in states like Florida.”
“It is also difficult to claim the mantle of the defender of democracy when your party is actively fighting for the censorship and blacklisting of those with opposing views,” Turley said. “The best way to defend democracy is to practice it by supporting both the right to vote and to free speech in others, including those who hold opposing viewpoints.”
After state attorneys general from Louisiana and Missouri accused high-ranking government officials of collaborating with social media companies “under the guise of combating misinformation,” the Supreme Court agreed in October to review a court-ordered ban on specific communications between the Biden administration and Big Tech.
Author Marianne Williamson, Representative Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), and now-independent presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are among the Democrats running against Biden for the party’s presidential nomination. They all accuse the DNC of silencing them by declining to host primary debates.
Kennedy also encountered the fury of his fellow Democrats during a July House hearing on the “weaponization” of the federal government meant to address censorship, before deciding to run as an independent.
Democrats on the committee tried in vain to stop the hearing and instead used it to criticize remarks made by Kennedy in the past that they claimed were anti-Semitic and anti-Asian.
Kennedy retorted, “This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.” Recent polling indicates that Democrats are more trusted in battleground states than Republicans when it comes to defending democracy, despite their behavior.
Republican strategist Garrett Ventry attributes this advantage to Democrats’ “obsession” with discussing “threats to democracy” rather than topics like the economy, prices, and employment, where they are less popular with the American public.
“There is no greater threat to democracy in our republic than the Democrat Party,” Ventry stated. “Denver Trump never pursued Hillary Clinton after taking office. He avoided pursuing Barack Obama. He refrained from pursuing his political rivals. State secretaries of state and district court judges, as well as state attorneys general, were not working to remove Joe Biden from the ballot.”
Ventry brought up Biden’s Department of Justice’s targeting of other American citizens, such as those who frequent Catholic churches, parents who show up to school board meetings to voice concerns about the education their children are receiving, and Americans with lesser incomes due to the employment of 87,000 additional IRS officers.
Republicans label Democrats “election deniers,” and Democrats try to silence them when they criticize their anti-democratic behavior, according to former senator Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., who has been a vocal supporter of ballot reform and voter turnout since she left the Senate in 2021.
She said, “Democrats fight commonsense safeguards to prevent voter fraud, encourage activist DAs to throw leading political opponents in jail, and empower unelected judges who interfere in presidential elections.” She further stated that she was “actively pushing back against the left’s work to undermine election integrity” in Georgia, a state that is anticipated to be competitive in 2024.
“To prevent the further takeover of our elections, every state must remain vigilant in defending actual democracy rather than just protecting Democrat rule,” she stated.
According to Loeffler, Democrats know they’ll “have a lock on elections and government power” if they repeal voter ID laws, allow ballot harvesting, restore voting rights for felons, and legalize same-day voter registration. They would “rather gain power by moving the goalposts than by defending their policies and track records,” he said.
“Non-citizen voting is at the top of their wish lists this Christmas—it’s the number one reason they look away while the U.S. breaks records for illegal immigration,” she stated before going on to say that the Colorado court’s decision to keep Trump off the ballot was just the most recent instance of Democrats’ “non-stop work to undermine democracy and interfere in the 2024 elections.”
The latest Democratic efforts to stop Trump by any means have started to cause some party intellectuals, such as Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University and former Biden staffer, to pause as the 2024 race approaches.
“This may be an unpopular post, but I think we need to realize that using undemocratic means to fight candidate Trump increases the odds of losing democracy itself,” he wrote on Thursday.