By now, we all know the Democrats’ “defense of democracy” push for the presidential election fell flat. But why?

One reason is that the talk of threats to democracy felt completely irrelevant to most people’s number-one concern going into the election: the economy, specifically the skyrocketing cost of living these past few years: groceries, housing, consumer goods, and more. But there’s also the fact that the way Democrats talk about democracy is out of touch with the way most Americans think about it.

As a raft of surveys make clear, most everyone in America feels like the country’s democracy is under threat — even Donald Trump supporters. A lot of that has to do with both parties suspecting the other side’s leadership of plotting to subvert it in different ways. But a large and under-discussed part of what drives this is the widespread feeling that American democracy is not delivering a decent life for its citizens and has been captured by big money.

In the last New York Times/Siena College poll before the election, of the 76 percent of respondents who said American democracy was under threat, 14 percent of them gave as the reason “the government/government corruption/nonspecific politicians/leaders.” That was the second-most popular answer after “Donald Trump,” which 21 percent picked. A higher share of both Trump voters (19 percent) and nonvoters in 2020 (11 percent) chose that first one as the threat than any other option. That fairly large shares of non-Democratic voting Americans name corruption and American leadership in general the chief threat to democracy is reflected in other surveys, too.

In a late 2023 Pew study where only 27 percent of adults said the political system was working very or somewhat well, there were a host of alarming metrics: the share of the public that trusted the federal government was among the lowest in seven decades, “corrupt” and “divisive” were the two most common words Americans used to describe politics, and large majorities said that politicians do a bad job “keeping their personal financial interests separate from their work in Congress” (81 percent), that campaign donors (80 percent) and special interests (73 percent) have too much sway over their decision-making, and that the prohibitive cost of running for office stops good people from entering politics (85 percent).

Or look at the attitudes of young voters, a key demographic whose drop in turnout and, among young men, swing toward Trump played a key role in Kamala Harris’s defeat. An April poll of voters aged eighteen to thirty by the Democratic-aligned Blueprint firm found that, in the words of its lead pollster, young voters look at US politics and “see a dying empire led by bad people”: large shares agreed that “nearly all politicians are corrupt and make money from their political power” (65 percent), that the US political system “doesn’t work for people like me” (51 percent), and that elections don’t represent people like themselves (49 percent). In a later poll of young men specifically, respondents agreed with the statement that “America has become an oligarchy, not a democracy” by a 20-point margin.

Clearly, for many Americans, the question of US democracy and its survival goes far deeper than Trump. It’s about an obviously corrupt political system, where ultrarich donors interfere in and distort elections, Wall Street and corporate leaders shape the policy agendas of both parties, and the needs and wants of ordinary citizens are measurably a non-presence in the minds of lawmakers.

In other words, when it comes to US democracy and the threats to it, many Americans have views that are not far off from the kind of things Bernie Sanders has been saying for years, including just a few months ago, when he urged Harris to start talking about the fact that “increasingly, the United States is moving toward an oligarchic form of society.”

There’s another component to this: that corrupt political system’s resulting failure to deliver the kind of decent, improving living standards for its people that was once the basic idea of the American dream.

According to Gallup, only 28 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way US democracy is working, the lowest share since it started asking the question in 1984. But there was another moment when this satisfaction plummeted: in 1992, in the wake of a recession caused in part by the savings and loan crash, which was accompanied by a set of high-profile corruption scandals in Congress. (Incidentally, that crash and the government bailout of the financial institutions that caused it also catapulted Bernie Sanders from a former mayor to Congress two years earlier, on the back of a widespread “throw the bums out” anti-incumbent sentiment.)

Though Gallup didn’t ask the question between 1998 and 2021, it did point to two surveys from CNN in 2010 — two years after the crash, when Barack Obama failed to save underwater homeowners or punish their predators — and 2016. In both those years, satisfaction with democracy was  at 40 percent, the second year being the one in which Trump won a shock election victory by carrying hundreds of counties that were still technically experiencing a recession. We might also look at separate polls that similarly show trust in governmental institutions plummeting by 2010, with trust in the presidency, in particular, dropping sharply between 2009, the year of Obama’s inauguration, and 2010.

“It is no surprise that trust in government falls during economic hard times,” Pew stated at the time. “Historically, confidence in government corresponds with broader measures of satisfaction with the state of the nation and economic stress.”

All of this isn’t to say that progressive leaders should shy away from calling out the efforts of Trump or anyone else to steal elections, trample over civil liberties, or otherwise subvert democratic institutions. But it does suggest that there’s a different way to talk about democracy and the need to save it that can marry the kind of message we heard from Harris over the past few months with one that addresses voters’ economic concerns and their disillusionment with a corrupt political system.

The question for the Democrats is, is anyone in the party capable of actually delivering such a message? The question is worth asking not just because they’re deeply tied up in this very corrupt system and rely, as Harris did, on massive financial support from the very special interests and donors that voters view as undermining democracy. But because, with Sanders — someone who spent a career raging against these forces with implacable consistency and built his political rise on loudly rejecting billionaire and corporate donations — out of the picture, is there anyone who even has the credibility to make it?