Nearly half of voters say the American republic forged by 18th Century revolutionaries has come to an end, an alarming new survey reveals.
Fully 47 percent of respondents said the ‘republic the Founders created has already fallen,’ when asked by pollsters.
Another 39 percent said Americans were doing a ‘good job’ of keeping the 248-year-old government structure intact.
Meanwhile, 14 percent said they were not sure.
More US adults say the American republic is finished than say it is alive and well, a survey shows
Benjamin Franklin (left) and others among the Founding Fathers chose their words carefully when drafting America’s Declaration of Independence from colonial Britain
Rasmussen’s survey of some 1,000 voters comes in a divisive election year, pitting Democratic President Joe Biden against his Republican predecessor Donald Trump.
Both campaigns present the race as a make-or-break moment for America, warning that a bad outcome heralds catastrophe.
Trump, 77, says the multiple criminal cases against him are politically motivated, and that his loss in the November 5 election would mark the end of democracy.
‘If we don’t win this election, I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country,’ Trump said at a recent rally in Ohio.
Biden, 81, conversely, says that a Trump victory would spell the end of one-man-one-vote rule.
Biden points to Trump’s failed bid to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat and the violent MAGA assault on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
‘I’m running because democracy is at stake,’ Biden has said.
The Rasmussen survey suggests that millions of Americans take these messages seriously.
Americans by a wide margin say the republic — the constitutional order of elected representatives — has already unraveled.
Donald Trump, pictured here at his ongoing trial in New York, says the 248-year-old experiment with democracy is under threat this election year
Tourists visit the memorial of founder Thomas Jefferson in Washington DC, even as many people question whether his revolutionary ideals have survived
The 1776 Declaration of Independence says leaders get their ‘authority from the consent of the governed’
Women, graduates, and black and Hispanic people, were more likely to say the republic was over than other groups.
There is also a partisan divide.
More than half of Republican voters said the republic had fallen, compared to just over a third of Democrats.
The survey results make dismal reading for historians who cherish the disrupting ideals of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and other members of America’s ‘Founding Fathers.’
Those late 18th Century revolutionaries were the driving force behind the successful war for colonial independence from Great Britain.
They are also celebrated for the liberal ideas in the Declaration of Independence, and the republican form of government laid out in the US Constitution.
Survey respondents were also asked whether America’s current leaders have the ‘authority from the consent of the governed’ — using a key phrase from the Declaration of Independence.
Fully 57 percent of voters said the federal government no longer operates with public consent.
Another 26 percent said the ‘consent of the governed’ was intact; and 17 percent said they were not sure.
The nationwide survey of 1,087 voters was carried out earlier this month and has a +/- 3 percentage point margin of error.
The results were similar to a previous survey in July 2023.
