These voters will pick the next president. They’re frightened about American democracy.

NAZARETH, Pennsylvania — Earlier this month, 15 voters in this closely contested area of Pennsylvania convened to discuss the state of American democracy.

To say they were discouraged as the 2024 election gets underway would be an understatement.

Three years after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, half of the voters in the focus group immediately started nodding when asked about the possibility of violence around the election.

Sitting around folding tables in an arts center just off of the small town’s Rockwell-esque Main Street, the voters painted a bleak picture over the next hour: A largely negative view on everything from trusting that their votes and their neighbors’ votes will be fairly counted, the speed it takes to get results and that those results will be accepted by the losers.

“I almost feel numb to it,” Jackie, a younger voter in the focus group, said of the violence on Jan. 6. “We’re going to have another election, could that happen again? I probably won’t even react the same, because I’m like ‘this is what happens.’ … Something’s probably going to happen.”

The focus group was brought together by Keep Our Republic, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that seeks to educate the public about strengthening the democratic system. It was convened in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, a swing county in one of the most important swing states in the nation.

The participants' pessimism encapsulates one of the most pressing challenges in American politics right now — the loss of public trust in democracy itself and the electoral infrastructure that supports it. It is a problem that stretches far beyond just Nazareth; a Gallup poll released the day after the focus group found that a record low 28 percent of American