Since 2017, Bright Line Watch, co-directed by government professors John Carey and Brendan Nyhan, has been polling political scientists and the public about their views on American democracy, watching for political drift toward the bright line that demarcates anti-democratic political movements.

“The idea is to try to identify if and when the U.S. is approaching that sort of a threshold,” Nyhan says, acknowledging that such clear-cut divides do not actually exist in the real world. “Our goal is to try to understand the state of American democracy and the threats to it in order to aid that conversation about whether we are approaching such a dividing point.”

Says Carey, “there was always a question, is there a bright line? Is there some kind of a transgressive behavior that would rally people on both sides of the partisan divide, that would be regarded as a bridge too far?”

Now, eight years later, as Donald Trump returns to the White House on Monday upon his second inauguration, Bright Line Watch is looking at how the experts and the public view the state of democracy today.

Their latest report, America Looks Ahead to a Second Trump Term, examines public faith in the integrity of elections, interpretations of Trump’s victory, and perceived threats to democracy.

One of the most striking results of the survey, which was fielded in the weeks after the November election and published in December, was a strong belief in the integrity of the vote among political experts, Democrats, and Republicans, says Nyhan.

One of the trends that Bright Line Watch has chronicled since its inception, particularly after Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob tried to undermine the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election, is a widening gap between Democrats and Republicans on views about what constitute democratic threats. 

After the 2020 election, Democrats and the experts maintained confidence in American elections and viewed election denialism as a serious threat to democracy while a majority of Republicans saw Biden’s win as illegitimate.

Carey explains, “Republicans and Democrats both overestimate how common various types of election fraud are—people voting multiple times, impersonating someone else to vote in their place, voting by people not eligible to vote, etc.—but Republicans’ overestimation of fraud is many times greater than Democrats’ overestimation. That was the main source of their belief that the 2020 election was illegitimate.”

Following Trump’s victory in 2024, by contrast, “Republican beliefs about election integrity dramatically reversed from previous years, with confidence in the national vote soaring from 59% before the election to 90% afterward,” the report stated.

“Our most recent survey, as you can see, finds that acceptance of Trump’s 2024 victory is much broader,” Nyhan says. “So that’s good news in a way, but we don’t know if we’ll see that same pattern of differential rejection of the outcome the next time Republicans lose.”

“It’s provisionally good news that confidence in elections is back up,” says Carey, “but if that’s conditional on which party wins the election, it’s a fragile kind of a peace. And that’s the biggest concern of all.”

The survey also found consistent views across the political spectrum that “dissatisfaction with the economy was the most important factor contributing to Trump’s victory.”

Moreover, both experts and voters in general “are more likely to say that Trump should compromise with his opponents than that he has a mandate,” but that his “strongest perceived mandate is on immigration policy,” particularly in regards to deporting undocumented immigrants.

Issues flagged as future concerns for democracy, with a greater concern expressed among experts, was the prospect of Trump pardoning Jan. 6 rioters and the Trump Justice Department initiating “investigations of Biden and leading Democrats—actions that Republicans say they support,” the report states.

This latest report also includes a statistical analysis of Bright Line Watch’s expert forecasts, led by University of California at Berkeley political science professor Andrew Little. The paper, The Accuracy of Expert Forecasts of Negative Democratic Events, was published by Bright Line Watch and Little along with the November study.

In summary, the report found “that experts are highly pessimistic in the sense that they assign a higher probability to negative events than the actual rate at which those events occur. However, after aggregating across experts and adjusting for their pessimism, the resulting forecasts are remarkably accurate.”

Little and colleagues have in recent years critiqued the apparent increase in expert views about erosion of democratic norms domestically and internationally as overly pessimistic. Carey says he got to know Little as he and others joined the academic debate about the best way to monitor the durability of democratic institutions. Bright Line Watch subsequently invited Little to analyze their data.

“So this has opened up a new agenda for Bright Line Watch,” Carey says. “I think we’re going to continue to work with Andrew Little. I think it’s a good reality check for us. We’ve been putting a lot of credence in our expert responses for a long time, and this is forcing us to take a really hard look at the quality of this expertise.”

While it is important to examine the potential weaknesses of the survey methods, the work of Bright Line Watch remains as important as ever, says Nyhan.

“The questions about the state of American democracy are still highly salient. The need for our work has not diminished and may in fact be greater than ever before,” Nyhan says.