Is the USA a republic or a democracy?

Democracy in the USA ¹

The United States of America is a representative democracy: citizens vote for their elected officials to represent the citizens’ ideas and concerns in government.

Citizens can also contact their officials when they want to support or change a law.

1. USCIS Government and You PDF open_in_new

Because they're usually either accidentally or intentionally misrepresenting facts.

What they often mean is one of two things:

1. That the USA is not a direct/pure democracy open_in_new, though no one is legitimately arguing that it is. It's a representative/indirect democracy, where instead of voting on every government decision (direct), citizens elect representatives to vote on their behalf (indirect). Whether moving toward a more direct democracy would give Americans more liberty open_in_new can be an honest debate. But, pretending that direct democracy is the only form is either intellectually dishonest or ill-informed.

2. That the presidential election is not a popular vote open_in_new, unlike all other USA elections. There is a sound argument that the electoral college open_in_new has effectively disenfranchised much of the USA through gerrymandering open_in_new and further voter suppression open_in_new. This makes its democracy imperfect, but neither non-existant nor necessarily unimproving. Yet.
   
   Note: If the USA did have a direct, popular vote for president, it still would not be a direct democracy. A popularly elected president, like all other elected officials, makes decisions unreliant on citizens' votes (in other words, they represent the citizens who elected them: representative democracy).