WASHINGTON (AP) — While inflation and immigration have emerged as dominant themes in this year’s presidential race, another issue has been prominent on the minds of voters for both major candidates: the stakes for democracy.

Half of voters identified democracy as the most important motivating factor for their vote. That was higher than the share of voters who answered the same way about inflation, the U.S.-Mexico border situation, abortion policy or free speech, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide.

In particular, supporters of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, the president-elect, saw the issue from different perspectives.

About two-thirds of Harris voters said the future of democracy was the most important factor in their votes. No other topic — high prices, abortion policy, free speech or the potential of the first woman to be elected president — was as big a factor for her supporters. Harris particularly targeted this message toward the end of her campaign: She said Trump was a threat to undermine the country’s founding ideals and called him a fascist.

The sentiment was echoed by former members of the first Trump administration, who warned about his fitness for office. Trump refused the peaceful transfer of power while lying about his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. And on January 6, 2021, Trump also directed a crowd of supporters to the Capitol after telling them to “fight like hell.”

Audrey Wesley, 90, of Minneapolis, cited Trump’s legal cases and his disregard for the law as one of the reasons she endorsed Harris.

“Our system is broken,” she said.

Wesley said one of the things that troubled her the most was Project 2025, a detailed conservative plan for the next Republican administration. Trump said he had not read the report, even though many members of his first administration helped create it.

“He’s very scary in terms of what he wants to do,” Wesley said.

The idea that democracy is under attack also motivated Trump voters, but in entirely different ways. About a third of his supporters said democracy was the most important factor in their vote.

A further breakdown of the poll found that 9 out of 10 Harris voters who indicated that democracy was the most important factor in their vote were somewhat or very concerned that Trump’s election would move the country closer to authoritarianism. About 8 in 10 Trump voters thought Harris’ election would bring the country closer to authoritarianism. The “democracy voters” who supported Harris and Trump were equally concerned that the opposing candidate’s views were too extreme.

The findings followed a consistent pattern in recent polls by AP VoteCast and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. While the future of democracy has been one of the few cross-cutting concerns among a fractured electorate, people differ on why they are worried about it and who is responsible for the threat.

Debbie Dooley, 66, and co-founder of the Tea Party movement, had several major factors in her decision to vote, all leading to concern about what would happen to the country under another administration democrat.

“I think Thomas Jefferson said that when people fear their government, there is tyranny,” she said. “We had tyranny under the Biden-Harris machine.”

Dooley, a longtime Trump supporter, cited the nation’s “open border” and the concerns of many conservatives about crimes by migrants who have evaded the law. The Cumming, Ga., resident also agreed with Trump’s claim that the Biden administration has unleashed the Justice Department against political opponents.

“It’s something they do in Russia. It’s something they would do in China, not in the United States, not here in the beacon of freedom for the world,” Dooley said.

Republicans have held congressional hearings for nearly two years, but have offered little substance to the claim that Biden “weaponized” the department.

Like many other conservatives, Dooley also felt that social media companies have silenced their voices, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Thank God for Elon Musk,” she said. “Twitter or X is a totally different place now than it was before I took over, so we have First Amendment rights. It’s freedom of speech.”

The poll found that nearly all “democracy voters” who supported Trump said free speech was at least a factor in their vote. It was a less prominent issue for Trump voters who said democracy was a minor or no factor in their choice.

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, said the opposing views about which side poses a threat to democracy are understandable because both campaigns have talked about the other in those terms. And because democracy is an abstract issue, what constitutes a threat can vary.

“Harris has talked a lot about democracy, and the Democratic coalition has talked a lot about threats to democracy,” he said. “So it’s no surprise that many Democrats correctly perceived Trump as a threat and called him one of the most important issues.”

That Republicans echoed the claim against Harris would seem unusual, but one of Trump’s political strategies is to appropriate an attack against him and turn it against his opponent. Nyhan said Trump has successfully done that with the democracy argument.

Border protection, for example, might mean one thing to a Harris supporter and something quite different to a Trump voter who might support the idea of ​​the grand replacement conspiracy theory — the idea that white influence is being diminished by illegal immigration.

In his concession speech at his alma mater, Howard University in Washington, Harris alluded to the importance of accepting the election results even in the event of a loss and the peaceful transfer of power, which Trump has made conditional on seeing the election result as fair.

“This principle, like any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny,” Harris said.

Leah Wright Rigueur, professor of history at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, said the processes of democracy expressed through the presidential vote have won, for now.

“The 2024 presidential election was fundamentally, as I understand it, an example of democracy in action. Trump won the Electoral College. Trump won the popular vote,” she said.

The question is whether the country would be as peaceful if the outcome were different, and how the nation closes that rift in the future, when a “very vocal cross-section” of the American public sees democracy only working “when my side wins, but tyranny when your side win?”

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