As we move toward another election, we are going to hear a great deal about what is at stake. We are also going to hear a great deal about the people who see those stakes differently than we do.
That is nothing new. Elections are supposed to involve disagreement. We are choosing between different candidates, different policies, different priorities and different ideas about what the country needs. But lately, I have been thinking about a different question:
What does democracy ask of us besides voting?
Voting matters, of course. The 2026 midterm elections will determine all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and about a third of the Senate.
But a democracy cannot depend only on what happens when we fill out a ballot.
After Election Day, we still have to live together.
We still have to work together, raise families, share communities, solve problems and make decisions alongside people who may have voted exactly opposite the way we did.
And right now, that part seems especially hard.
When trust is low
Trust in American institutions remains near historic lows. Gallup recently found that only 27 percent of Americans, on average, express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in major U.S. institutions.
It is easy to look at numbers like those and conclude that people have simply stopped caring.
I’m not sure that is true.
Sometimes disengagement is not indifference.
Sometimes it is exhaustion.
Sometimes it is the feeling that nothing we do matters.
Sometimes it is not knowing whom to believe.
Sometimes it is deciding that the safest thing to do is simply stop paying attention.
All of those reasons for disengagement make sense to me. However, I can’t help wondering what happens to democracy when too many of us stop engaging.
A healthy democracy requires more than people who care deeply about winning.
It requires people willing to stay engaged even when they are discouraged.
- People willing to listen when they are certain they already know what the other person thinks.
- People willing to ask questions rather than immediately correct.
- People willing to reconsider something without experiencing that as weakness.
- And people willing to remain in relationship with fellow citizens whose conclusions are very different from their own.
That does not mean pretending our differences don’t matter.
Some differences matter enormously.
Nor does it mean that every claim is equally true, every position equally defensible, or every disagreement capable of being resolved through conversation.
It means something simpler.
Democracy requires us to remember that the people on the other side of an election are still part of the democracy.
Small things—or democratic infrastructure?
At Crossing Party Lines, we often talk about curiosity, listening and respectful disagreement. Those can sound like small things when the issues facing the country feel enormous. But perhaps they are not small at all. Perhaps they are part of the infrastructure democracy depends on.
- So is paying attention.
- So is asking a question.
- So is listening long enough to discover that someone is more complicated than the label we gave them.
- So is showing up when it would be easier to withdraw.
None of us can repair the country’s political culture by ourselves.
Each of us can decide what kind of citizen we want to be within it.
And maybe that is where democracy begins.
