Most Americans don’t think our democracy represents them and have rapidly dwindling faith in our institutions. This is because they are paying attention to their daily lives and how little the government is visibly doing to make their lives better in a meaningful way. For all the justified distress over weaponized disinformation, perhaps the more damaging lie is to maintain the pretense that we are a functioning democracy or that the Republican Party is a legitimate democratic actor and not the political arm of an increasingly successful fascist movement. - Michael Podhorzer - Substack
In reading that statement the other day, I thought, I have been saying the same exact thing for years now. And as readers of my Substack column, you know that all too well.
Voting is our primary way to affect our government, and yet, the Republican party is doing all it can to both make it more difficult to vote and stir up insecurity regarding our voting process.
They are being successful, at least within their own party. A survey conducted jointly by UC San Diego and USC found that trust in elections improved overall after the 2022 elections, but it varies by party affiliation. Democrats’ trust was up 83 percent, and 58 percent with independents. However, only 46 percent of Republicans said they trusted the American election system overall. Republicans were five times as likely as Democrats to say that the 2022 midterms reflected significant fraud.
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