At a voter forum earlier this year sponsored by The Day at the Public Library of New London, the discussion about democracy became so heated that it had to be shut down a few minutes early as people pointed and shouted at one another, violating the rules laid down before the event began.

One speaker, who did not identify himself, claimed there was a “peaceful exchange” of power as Donald Trump stepped down from the presidency on Jan. 20, 2021. When confronted with the issue of the violence on Jan. 6 of that year, instigated partly by Trump encouraging protesters to march to the Capitol, the attendee responded, “The 21st is separate. Biden walked in, Trump walked down.”

“But Trump walked out thinking he was president,” countered state Rep. Anthony Nolan, D-New London, who attended the meeting.

“Hillary wrote a book saying ‘I was president,’” the man responded, referring to the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her 2017 bestseller “What Happened.”

“Do you disagree with what Trump said about still being president?” Nolan pressed.

“I'm not getting into that right now,” the Trump defender said.

Later, when others were asked to enter the fray, one unidentified female attendee said of defending democracy: "It's critical. When someone comes up publicly and says they want to be a dictator for a day, that is not democracy.“

“When he said he wanted to be a dictator (for) a day he said he was going to drill baby drill and shut down the border, then he was done,” the man shot back, pointing and raising his voice. “And then the media came out with disinformation and lied about it.”

In the actual exchange with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Dec. 5, 2023, Trump was asked whether he would abuse power as retribution against anybody, and the former president said, “Except for day one.” He then added, “meaning I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

Then, pointing to Hannity, he said “I love this guy. He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said, ‘No, no, no, other than day one.’ We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. Other than that, I’m not a dictator.”

Number one local issue

Defending democracy was voted the No. 1 national issue in the upcoming November presidential election when The Day held a series of three voter forums in April attended by more than 60 people. The newspaper followed up in May and June with three more forums, in New London, Old Lyme and Stonington, in which residents were asked to explore the Top 5 issues in some depth.

In New London, the first and best-attended forum, the questions were wide open, and the discussions wide-ranging and sometimes contentious, but in Old Lyme and Stonington attendees were asked to discuss possible solutions to the top issues at the beginning, leading to a more civil and collaborative exchange. The other four national issues voted as most important in the presidential election were foreign policy (2), immigration and border policy (3), the environment and climate change (4), and misinformation and disinformation (5).

A majority of attendees at these meetings decided that to defend democracy we must: elect candidates dedicated to telling the truth, accept election results, respect the democratic process in elections, avoid gerrymandering voting districts, institute a voting day holiday, promote the learning of civics in school, encourage more moderation; develop better leadership; encourage less violent rhetoric, and support the rule of law by obeying rules or changing them legally. In addition, voters said they wanted Americans to speak up and demand information based on evidence; keep funding from unknown sources out of politics, and encourage, rather than discourage, voting.

Mara Suttmann-Lea, an associate professor of government at Connecticut College, said all of these pro-democracy ideas have credence, but the most important would be to promote a stepped-up effort to teach civics, or how the American government works.

“Mis- and disinformation thrive in a vacuum,” Suttmann-Lea said in an email response to a series of questions. “Information environments that promote knowledge about how our systems of elections are both run, and the dynamics of representation in the United States, (will mean) the public is more resilient to misinformation.”

Suttmann-Lea added that self-governance requires people to understand and have faith in the system, otherwise “they lose incentive to abide by the rules and policies that derive from those processes.” The situation is made worse, Suttmann-Lea suggested, when leaders in both parties question the results of a fairly decided election, as occurred in both 2016 and 2020.

Among the voters who attended voter forums or opined by email, the question of defending democracy appeared to break along ideological lines, with those leaning Democratic clearly worried about Republican candidate Trump’s strong-man rhetoric and GOP supporters seeing the Democrats as a threat.

“This is probably the number one issue for the upcoming election,” said J.W. “Bill” Sheehan of Waterford in an email statement. “Reading the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 and the Time (magazine) interview of the former president should make the average person’s skin crawl.”

Project 2025, a conservative plan for governing assuming a Republican victory that Trump said does not reflect his views, has suggested wholesale changes in the federal government, including an idea to allow the president to replace bureaucrats at all levels with political appointees that Democrats fear will make regulators more responsive to political pressure.

In the Time magazine piece, Trump promised if elected to deport millions of illegal immigrants and to intercede more directly in Justice Department investigations rather than keeping the hands-off approach used by most presidents who want to avoid the appearance of political meddling in the justice system.

He added that Trump, if elected, “will be the first convicted felon to be elected to that high office. According to former (Republican) Congressperson (Liz) Cheney, the next election will most likely be the last election if he is successful.”

Conservative point of view

But others were more sanguine about the future of democracy and seemingly confident it’s not at stake in this election.

“It is important to defend democracy so the USA continues as a republic, to protect our freedoms,” wrote Julie Weber of Montville in an email. “Former President Trump will do the best job of defending our republic. President Biden is chipping away at our freedoms by attacking freedom of speech, religion, gun control and weaponizing our justice system. Every American citizen must show a valid ID in order to vote in our elections.”

Another reader, James Bridgeman of Quaker Hill, argued in an email that “any challenges facing democracy today are much less dangerous than the challenges democracy has survived easily just within my lifetime (since 1946). ... Those who claim that all of this is a crisis are simply trying to garner attention and election success.”

Bridgeman then ticked off a list of events that could have thrown democracy off course in the past seven decades, including a 1954 automatic weapon attack in the U.S. House chamber, assassinations and rioting in the 1960s, bombings in the 1970s, and the assault on the Capitol in 2021, after which “Democracy survived just fine with no extraordinary measures required after the disorder was subdued,” he said.

Bridgeman said he sees prosecutions and civil proceedings targeting political figures as the “biggest threat to democracy today. .... If polls are accurate, the abusive prosecutions seem to be benefiting the target of prosecution politically. All democracy needs is for the voters to do their jobs.”

“Every election cycle I read and re-read how Republicans are trying to suppress voter turnout,” said Mark O’Neill of Preston in an email. “But that argument, which is presented as fact by those on the left, is purely subjective, and never has any facts to back it up. And, conspiracy theories aside, a great deal of odd activity or, in some cases, inactivity went on during the late hours of election 2020, and all the media said was, ‘there’s nothing to see here.’ I found it so appalling that I haven’t watched or read the news since.”

Despite O’Neill’s “odd activity” comment about the last election, numerous investigations, recounts and court cases failed to establish any basis for contesting the last election. In addition, Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, has consistently stated that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

One Groton resident said via email she is surprised that Republicans see themselves as freedom fighters when in fact what they have been fighting for is the right to ban books, uplift religious rights above other rights and elevate their position above those of minorities, including immigrants.

“It is difficult for me to see this as being pro-democracy because, to me, it seems like this is not what our Constitution embodies,” said Christine Bennett. “I don’t believe that any party is perfect but I see the Democratic party to represent how I feel more often.”

Voting rights always a battle

Daniel Moak, an associate professor of government at Connecticut College, said the popular notion that the United States has been inexorably marching forward on voting rights over the past couple of centuries is false. There have been fits and starts over the years toward expanding voting rights, but then there have been periods of backsliding, most famously after Reconstruction with Jim Crow laws limiting minority power but also more recently with the disenfranchisement of convicted felons that affected millions, including a large percentage of minorities, he said.

Even the requirement of registering to cast a ballot is a bit of an impediment to voting, he added, and wasn’t a universal requirement in America until the last century. And there have been other ways to suppress the votes over the centuries, including poll taxes, as well as literacy and property-ownership requirements.

As the Carnegie Corp. says in a short history of voting rights, “Entrenched groups have long tried to keep the vote out of the hands of the less powerful.”

Doak agrees, adding “We are less democratic than we were in previous generations.”

“We are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy, we are not a dictatorship,” said Mike France, Republican candidate for Congress in the 2nd District during a debate against Democratic incumbent Joe Courtney earlier this month hosted by The Day.

Many Republicans have been emphasizing that America was set up as a republic, not a pure democracy, thereby safeguarding minority rights. But critics argue that institutions such as the Electoral College, which offers smaller states an outsized say in presidential politics and in the Senate, also have the consequence of suppressing the will of the people in such areas as abortion rights and gun legislation.

Money a big factor

The money in politics today is one big factor in reducing the democratic instincts of politicians, Moak said, and that is true of both Democrats and Republicans. The left celebrating Kamala Harris’ ability to raise $1 billion in campaign contributions over a short period of time might be heralded by some, but it’s also a potential issue for those who believe in democracy, he suggested.

“To me, that is a huge warning siren about this extreme amount of money in politics and who gets to set the agenda,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday, pointing to the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opening up opportunities for corporations to fund elections as a key culprit.

Moak said he sees voting as the minimal thing people should do in a democracy. Far better would be if other institutions, such as the workplace, became more able to respond to the will of the majority, he suggested.

Connecticut College students, he said, sometimes take the attitude that electing the right politicians is all that is required for a democracy to flourish.

“But if you want to affect policies, it takes a lot more active engagement,” he said.

Others who attended The Day forums expressed concern about the tenor of politics today and the strident tones invoked by some.

“Definitely concerned that the results of an election might not matter if a president is able to co-opt the military and stay in power,” said one attendee in New London who did not identify herself. “And that is just to me the extreme of not truly having a democracy.”

More subtle aspects of the onslaught on democracy can be seen in several states outside Connecticut mostly in key battlegrounds such as Georgia, where voter challenge laws are being abused to disrupt the election process, according to the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy.

In a report published in June, the organization said “election denier groups have ... organized mass door knocking campaigns to purportedly confirm voter residency, frequently pretending that they are acting in some official capacity. These organizations have also invested significant resources to develop software purportedly meant to identify ineligible voters en masse.”

The problem is that these campaigns frequently end up disenfranchising voters who should be on the rolls and are based on “unsubstantiated and false claims that the rolls are replete with dead voters, voters registered in other locations, and, most recently, noncitizens,” the report said. “Most impactfully, they are designed to sow doubt in the validity of our election processes and the eventual outcome in November.”

While Trump leans into the idea of the last election, and perhaps this one, too, being rigged and talks of retribution against his perceived enemies, his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, has pulled back from President Joe Biden’s constant warnings that this election could be pivotal to democracy, instead focusing on meat-and-potatoes economic issues and the question of abortion rights.

She also has been pointing to her support among many of Trump’s former advisers and military leaders, criticizing the former president’s warning about terminating the Constitution and going after the “enemies within,” which he said include Democrats and other people who disagree with him ideologically.

The concern among local voters about the future of democracy in America ranged depending on political leanings, but many agreed that the basic lack of civility today in public discourse reflects a hyper-individualism that is not good for the country.

“The capacity for the public to listen to one another and have good-faith discussions with one another about reasonable policy disagreements is deeply inhibited in this environment,”said Suttmann-Lea, the Conn College professor. “Listening does not require agreement, but it does require a willingness to understand.”

“There are days where I'm like, is it going to be another Civil War, is that where we're heading, because people are just so hard-headed and refusing to see that the other guy might just have a point?” said one woman at the Stonington forum. “Courtesy's out the door, and I think that's what I miss.”

l.howard@theday.com