Declining democracy?

Happy Tuesday and welcome to US Election Countdown. I'm Steff Chávez, the FT's Washington reporter, and today we’re talking about:

• Election monitoring
• Trump fires up evangelical supporters
• Biden’s support by income bracket

Donald Trump and his Maga crowd are still singing a familiar tune: the 2020 election was rigged.

Their continued doubt around the integrity of US ballots has raised alarm bells within a group dedicated to supporting elections in fragile democracies — usually beyond America’s shores. [Free to read].

The Carter Center’s Democracy Program, started by former president Jimmy Carter, is stepping up its election monitoring efforts in the US. It will support non-partisan election observation missions in up to five US states: New Mexico, Montana, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, of which the last three are swing states.

The centre is known for its work monitoring elections in countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela and Sierra Leone.

“We have taken our international election observation expertise and have needed to turn it inward to the United States,” Carter Center’s chair Jason Carter told the FT’s Andrew Jack.

“We’ve done a variety of cross-partisan initiatives to help bring our expertise to bear on the troubling aspects of our American democracy,” he added. The group stresses that it has no stake in the outcome of the 2024 race.

The Carter Center began its support of US election observers in 2020. Two years later, it threw more resources at its domestic programme, aiming to “strengthen trust in the US electoral process”.

The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance rates the US as “a high-performing democracy”, though there have been “significant declines” in the past five years on a number of metrics.

For its part, the Carter Center said in an earlier report that the US:

“Is going through a tumultuous period of domestic unrest, one of the most polarised in American history . . . Too often, those on the opposite sides of the political divide seek to manipulate the outcome of elections in their favour through the laws and regulations that govern how our elections are conducted.”

Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

• The presidential debate on Thursday will be Joe Biden’s moment — could it shift the campaigning momentum? [Free to read]
• On the Swamp Notes podcast, climate reporter Aime Williams and Washington bureau chief James Politi explain why Biden’s climate agenda has run out of steam.
• Donald Trump may be erasing Biden’s edge in the cash battle, but Republicans are facing fresh challenges on other fronts. (Politico) 
• CEOs are frustrated with Biden, but they’re not abandoning him en masse. (NYT)
• The Maga movement is going after young voters with its “shame-free camaraderie”. (The Atlantic)
• A US banking heir gave the Trump campaign a whopping $50mn donation — one of the biggest ever.

Behind the scenes

Evangelical Christians are a core part of the US right, and Trump is trying to fire them up to vote in record numbers in November.

Trump spoke to influential evangelical leaders at the weekend, warning them that Christianity would be under threat during a second Biden term. He portrayed himself as a defender of the faith — one with “a lot of wounds” from political persecution.

Ralph Reed, founder and chair of the influential Faith & Freedom Coalition, introduced Trump as a “tireless, indefatigable champion of faith and freedom and this great country”.

He did, however, hint at critics’ initial scepticism of the ex-president’s commitment to evangelical voters...Register for the FT to keep reading the newsletter for free.