Thomas Edsall's weekly column in The New York Times asks Trump Won’t Let America Go. Can Democrats Pry It Away? Frances Lee finds that the unprecedented threat posed by Trump in 2020 "was thwarted, to a great extent by that president’s own party. American democracy exhibited significant resilience in the face of the threat Trump posed." Republicans' ongoing attempts to undermine elections are the greatest threat to American democracy.

Frances Lee is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs and a CSDP faculty associate at Princeton University.

[This is] a story of Republicans judges and elected officials upholding democracy at personal cost to their own popularity with Republican voters. Republican elected officials in a number of cases sacrificed their political ambitions in service to larger democratic ideals....

Election subversion is by far the most serious threat to American democracy. [Those seeking to protect democracy] should focus on the major threat: Trump’s ongoing effort to delegitimize American elections and Republicans’ efforts in some states to undermine nonpartisan election administration.