Alt causes to democracy impact.

So with Trump on his way out, the crisis is over, right? If only. We dodged a bullet this time around, but if any of several things had gone differ­ently — most obvi­ously, if the presidential race had been closer — we might not have been so lucky. The Trump era has both high­lighted and exacerbated the reality that our democracy may be a lot less secure than we’d like to think. And many of the reas­ons for that won’t disap­pear when Trump himself takes up full-time resid­ence at Mar-a-Lago.

So with a new year approach­ing, here are the five key threats that our demo­cracy will have to reckon with in 2021 and beyond:

Trump voters wrongly believe the elec­tion was rigged

This one could be the subject of a column on its own. The pres­id­ent’s barrage of false claims about voter fraud have convinced many of his support­ers — over three-quar­ters, by some meas­ures — that he was the true elec­tion winner, and that Pres­id­ent-Elect Joe Biden’s admin­is­tra­tion will be ill­gitimate.

With their voters in thrall to this lie, elec­ted Repub­lic­ans are acting like they believe it too: seven­teen red states (plus a few states that don’t even exist) and over half of the GOP members of the House signed on to Texas’s outland­ish lawsuit aimed at getting the Supreme Court to over­turn the results. The GOP state Senate leader in Pennsylvania said that if she had publicly opposed a letter that has a similar goal, signed by 64 of her Repub­lican colleagues, “I’d get my house bombed.”

It’s hard to over­state the damage this will do if extended across the next four years. For starters, if the GOP holds the Senate, the basic cooper­a­tion needed for a functioning government figures to deteriorate even further than it already has, spurring yet more distrust and cynicism about government. But it’s much worse than that. A party that believes it was cheated out of the presidency is all but certain to carry out its own anti-demo­cratic rule-break­ing in response. The doomed efforts to keep Trump in office are likely to be just the start.

Vote suppressors are readying a push for a new round of state voting restrictions

The robust turnout that democracy advocates are celebrating has spooked some politi­cians who’d prefer a smaller electorate. Seiz­ing on the same base­less fraud claims that Trump has promoted, support­ers of voting restric­tions are already talk­ing about the need to crack down.

Legis­lat­ors in Geor­gia and Pennsylvania have signaled they plan to advance meas­ures making it harder to vote, and in Texas nearly a dozen bills have already been filed. Mail-in voting, which many states expan­ded this year in response to the pandemic, is most clearly in lawmakers’ crosshairs, with bills expec­ted to make it harder to get an absentee ballot, ban drop-boxes, and disen­fran­chise voters whose ballots arrive late, among other steps. But other forms of voting could also be affected: One U.S. senator has even called for a nation­wide voter ID law.

Gerrynmandering could skew elec­tions in many states for another decade

The upcoming redistricting cycle, set to kick off early next year, could also strike a major blow against fair elec­tions.

To be sure, some of the states that saw the most extreme partisan gerry­manders last cycle may get fairer maps this time, either because they passed reforms to the process or because they now have divided govern­ment, giving both parties a seat at the table. But in other states — includ­ing Texas, Flor­ida, Geor­gia, Missouri, Iowa, and North Caro­lina (which does have divided govern­ment, but gives the governor no role in the process) — partisan lawmakers will have a more or less free hand to draw maps for the bene­fit of them­selves and their party rather than voters.

Indeed, they could be even more emboldened, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling last year find­ing that the federal courts can’t inter­vene in partisan gerry­man­der­ing disputes.