Democracy is on the brink of disaster. For voters, it’s politics as usual.

But ultimately, of course, the principal responsibility resides with the GOP. As we’ve seen, many Republicans also perceive looming threats to democracy and to their survival as a party, in the form of voting rules that they consider overly permissive and inviting allegedly rampant fraud. The supposed need to thwart such threats serves to motivate and justify anti-democratic tactics. Recent contests suggest, though, that Republican electoral fears are as unwarranted as the evidence of fraud is scant: They confirm that the party remains perfectly competitive at the ballot box. Partly, it’s true, the GOP’s ability to keep winning elections is due to structural biases that give it a bump in the Senate, House and electoral college, but it’s not entirely due to those biases. Republicans picked up 13 House seats in 2020, and Trump came within 45,000 votes of another electoral college victory. In Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin won an outright majority in November’s gubernatorial election in a state that had looked solidly blue.