How is American democracy doing? As July 4th approaches, people are worried, according to a poll.

This year, the United States will have its 247th birthday, but many Americans aren’t in the mood to party. Polls show that people aren’t too excited about the top candidates for president in 2024, and there is still a lot of worry about U.S. institutions. A new poll done by USA TODAY and Suffolk University before Independence Day found that 7 out of 10 Americans think that the American democracy is “in danger.”

Many Americans are worried about the state of democracy as the country hurtles toward another presidential election that is likely to be more divisive. This is because of the fallout from the Jan. 6 uprising, fears about the rise of artificial intelligence, and other obstacles to voting. What happens next will depend a lot on who wins the presidential election in 2024 and other lower-level events.

Expert analysis shows that to get ready for the 2023 election, more states are taking steps to increase the number of people who can vote and protect the people who work at the polls than are trying to make it harder to vote. Legislators and other supporters of democracy say that these changes show a strong and growing push for democracy.

In the last two election cycles, democracy’s foundations have been seriously threatened. This is mostly because former President Donald Trump and his allies have kept lying about whether or not he really lost the 2020 election (Republican and Democratic election leaders across the country say he did). These denials led to a violent uprising at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

They also caused a number of states to try to make voting more difficult in the name of election security. In the months that followed, hundreds of people who didn’t believe in the election decided to run for public office. Even though many of them lost, they are still talked about all over the country. Proponents of democracy point to the losses in the midterm elections of 2022 as a sign of how seriously voters take the state of democracy in the country right now.