Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and Stanford University Political Science Professor Larry Diamond is a renowned expert on democracy around the world. In late November of last year, he penned a New York Times essay that said, "The vulnerability of our democracy today doesn’t come in the form that many feared when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. The good news is that two of the three pillars of American democracy—liberty and the rule of law—endure, even if they have been battered. But the third pillar—free and fair elections—is under far more direct threat than my fellow democracy experts predicted." Dr. Diamond went on to predict that President Trump "might pressure the Republican legislatures in battleground states, like Pennsylvania and Florida, to award him their state’s electors, even if the formal vote-counting machinery ultimately declares a Biden victory in the state. . . . [S]uch a scenario would be far more dire and polarizing than even the Bush v. Gore nightmare of 2000, with an incumbent presiden