Last week, President Joe Biden made an urgent appeal for the American people to take seriously the need to defend democracy and oppose political violence.
It was an election year State of the Union address, so it was expected that the President would unabashedly talk up his policy successes, lay out a clear contrast with his opposition, and challenge Congress to act on salient priorities. What was unexpected, even for those political obsessives like me who had dutifully read every interview, rumor, and tea leaf that promised to provide insight into the speech, was just how thoroughly the need to defend freedom and democracy was embedded in the heart of the President’s address.
“Political violence has absolutely no place in America.” On first hearing or reading it is possible for that sentence to slip past you without effect. But three years after the attempted January 6th insurrection, and in the midst of a seemingly never-ending deluge of violent threats against the ordinary men and women who run our elections, the President’s simple statement that “political violence has absolutely no place in America” is a reminder of just how dire the danger is right now.
The President was unequivocal in his denunciation of the January 6th “insurrectionists (who) stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy.” Yet it was not just the insurrectionists’ violent attempt to “stop the peaceful transfer of power and to overturn the will of the people” that he denounced. It was also the lies that led to and emerged from January 6th that President Biden identified as dangerous for democracy. “The lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election” are, in and of themselves, “the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War.” And while it remained unstated in the speech, the most visible and dangerous way that threat makes itself felt on our democracy today is through attacks on election officials.
The dedicated people who administer our elections have been facing down these lies for the past four years. Lies about the security and integrity of our elections have contributed to thousands of death threats, and a daily drumbeat of harassment. It’s driven hundreds of election officials to leave their jobs for fear of putting their families in danger, and they have inspired conspiracy theorists to seek office and turn institutional power against appointed election officials.
A CNN interview this past week of two Republican election officials–Tonya Wichman, Director of the Defiance County, Ohio, Board of Elections and Al Schmidt, Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania–hammered home just how dangerous these threats have become. Wichman spoke movingly of the day to day indignities and fears that conspiracy theories have caused for her in her small Ohio town. She no longer felt safe attending her nephew’s baseball games and had intervened repeatedly to protect poll workers from abusive conspiracy theorists. Schmidt lived in hiding for days and with police protection for months because of the lies former President Trump spread about him during and after the 2020 election. Both remain dedicated to the work of democracy, but the abuse they have had to suffer placed President Biden’s reminder that “political violence has absolutely no place in America” in a starkly human context.
When the President concluded his speech by calling for a “future where we defend democracy not diminish it” I could not help but think of Tonya Wichman and Al Schmidt. Democracy is not abstract for them. And while no reasonable person who meets either one of them would dare think they have been diminished, you can hear in their voices the pressure they feel. Democracy is the job of election officials. But more so today than in years past, election officials are democracy. History is watching the assault they have bravely faced, but I hope we will not wait for the cold and belated judgment of history to intervene in their support.