Why do people support candidates that are not supportive of democracy? Understanding whether voters support democracy or not has been a recent focus among political scientists, with one of the goals being to figure out where democracy is crumbling and how to prevent that from happening. This paper examines nearly 7,000 open-ended responses from four samples across two different open-ended question stems of academics and the general public and applies text analysis methods and a structural topic model to identify patterns in how people think about democracy. We find that voters prioritize freedoms and people being in charge of the government. This differs strongly from how academics conceptualize democracy, where the structure of democracy and the theory behind it are higher concerns. On average, the general public writes half as much as academics do answering the same question, and they signal that democracy is not top of mind. The events of January 6th are mentioned in only three responses total, showing that those current, relevant events are not included in how people conceptually think about democracy. This paper helps show that the way people think about democracy does not include behavior in office and offers insights into how undemocratic politicians find a place in office.