I also have no idea whether there’s any merit in DOJ’s racial gerrymandering challenge to California’s redistricting via Prop. 50. Assessing those claims would require development of a full factual record that does not yet exist.

But I wanted to respond to a legal argument my friend Rick Hasen recently made in Slate about that challenge that I believe is wrong.  Rick asserts that DOJ has a “huge problem:” even if the legislature designed various districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, he argues that doesn’t matter because CA voters ultimately approved the map.  And he argues (and here I agree) voters approved the map for partisan political purposes.  Thus, his argument runs, race cannot have predominated in the design of specific districts and hence DOJ’s racial gerrymandering challenge to various districts must fail.

I do not think voter approval can turn an unconstitutional set of districts into constitutional ones. Voter approval cannot “cure” a map that would otherwise violate the Constitution.  Suppose, for example, the mapmakers had designed districts with a racially discriminatory intent.  But when voters approve the map, the entire campaign is based on partisan appeals.  The voters themselves might not have had a racially discriminatory intent (leave aside the complexity of assigning purposes in a direct democracy process). Nonetheless, I’m confident the map would still be struck down, because a map designed for racially discriminatory reasons remains unconstitutional even if voters approve it.

Similarly, if the mapmakers design a map that violates the “results” test of Section 2 of the VRA, the map still violates Sec. 2 — even if voters must approve the map before it takes effect.

There is no reason racial gerrymander claims are any different. Racial gerrymandering doctrine prevents a State, in the absence of “sufficient justification,” from “separating its citizens into different voting districts on the basis of race.” Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Bd. of Elections, 580 U. S. ___, ___ (2017) (slip op., at 6). Absent sufficient justification, race cannot be the predominant factor in how districts are designed. If districts are designed as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, they do not become unracially gerrymandered merely because voters approve the final map. In the Texas litigation, for example, if voters in Texas had approved the new maps, after a campaign proclaiming the redistricting was done for purely partisan purposes, that would surely not have affected the district court’s recent decision that six of those districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.

Moreover, voters do not design districts. They approve a map. But a racial gerrymandering claim does not challenge a “map” as a whole.  Those challenges must be made to specific districts.  Voter approval of a map does not change the way specific districts have been designed. The harm in racial gerrymandering cases, under the doctrine, is that race has been the predominant factor in how a district has been designed.

As I say, I have no idea whether the facts support DOJ’s racial gerrymandering claim.  But if those districts are racial gerrymanders, they don’t magically become unracially gerrymandered merely because voters have approved the final map. 

I have no view at this stage whether the majority is correct that six districts in Texas’s re-redistricting are unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. The dueling opinions are long; the issues are highly fact dependent. But I wanted to note that the decision is based on the anti-racial gerrymandering doctrine that the Court first established in Shaw v. Reno (1993).

At the time Shaw was decided, many voting-rights groups were sharply critical of the decision. But in the years since, Shaw has been used successfully over and over again by voting-rights groups and their allies to invalidate racially gerrymandered maps. In the Texas case, the lead plaintiff was the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which has been the major group litigating on behalf of Latino voting rights in Texas for decades.

If the majority is indeed right that these districts were racially gerrymandered, it would be far more difficult, and frequently impossible, to invalidate them on some other basis in the absence of Shaw’s constraint on racial gerrymandering. In Texas, the plaintiffs also brought vote dilution and intentional discrimination claims. But racial gerrymandering frequently happens without vote dilution taking place. And voting-rights plaintiffs have long been concerned about the difficulty of proving intentional discrimination.

The court decided the Texas case based on Shaw and the racial gerrymandering claims precisely because those claims are easier to prove. Having invalidated the districts on that basis, the court did not address these other claims.

From Bruce Cain’s essay, appearing today at the NYU Democracy Project:

At Caltech, I was asked to assist a group of distinguished physicists who were evaluating the technical feasibility of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka “Star Wars”).  The group ultimately concluded that SDI would not work because a sophisticated missile offense could easily overwhelm a missile defense with decoys. There was no AI yet to separate the missiles from the chaff.  We are in a similar situation today with President Trump’s numerous attempts to refashion American democracy, i.e., he generates so much offense it is hard to defend effectively.

 In Democracy More or Less, I distinguish between first and second order democracy issues. The first concerns systemic features that distinguish democracy from autocracies, such as holding free and open elections, First Amendment speech and association rights, accepting office turnover after electoral defeat, and the like. At the time, I did not believe that such matters were still controversial in America. January 6^th was a wakeup call for me.  Second order democratic design issues are disputes over the relative merits of various democracy design choices such as parliamentary or presidential, highly federalized or unitary, and proportional representation or single member simple plurality. President Trump has willy-nilly taken on both types of questions.

Some of Trump’s ideas such as annexing Canada or renaming the Gulf of Mexico are the political equivalent of the chaff that my physicist colleagues feared would confuse SDI.  Other proposals like reinstituting tariffs conflate a policy debate with a procedural question about whether tariff power resides with the Congress or the President. In such instances, policy, not procedure, usually matters more to the public and activists. We count on officials in the system to defend their powers. But when they don’t, as in the case of Republican members of Congress, a crucial assumption behind checks and balances breaks down. Tribalism and getting policy wins are pulling institutional turf protection into a political black hole.

John Samples, a vice president at the Cato Institute, argues in A Fourth Republic? that the New Deal era characterized a Third Republic dominated by experts and that this era has come to an end. He raises questions about how a Fourth Republic might be constituted and structured:

These changes meant the Third Republic would be a technocracy. …

The rule of experts had its successes and failures; space does not permit naming them in any persuasive way. But at the height of their power – the 1960s and 1970s – the technocrats began to lose public confidence. By 1980, only a minority thought the federal government would do what was right most of the time. In the ensuing four decades, public confidence in government recovered modestly at times only to fall again. Then came the failed war in Iraq and the global financial crisis of 2008. By then, the Third Republic was as old as the Second Republic when it died.

People were right to doubt the experts, but the latter had failed on their own terms. Max Weber had reconciled popular rule with science by arguing that elected politicians should determine the ends of policy while experts informed leaders about the consequences of their chosen means to those ends. Over the past two decades, and especially since 2016, the policy advice of experts has become more predictable and partisan. Experts rarely tell the leaders of the party of the left things they do not wish to hear; the same is true of the right, perhaps more so, but the relatively few right-wing experts played second fiddle during the Third Republic. In the home of expertise, the universities, only one set of ends was increasingly heard, and those who dissented were suppressed or discarded. And intellectuals became more cynical and more ambitious.

Knowledge was power, a weapon to rule over the rubes. So confident were the professors that they no longer bothered to cover their ambitions with high-minded rhetoric.

The legacies of the Third Republic will live on in the Fourth. Presidential power in service to the most recent electoral majority will define the new regime. Progressives have yet to find their Donald Trump, but they will. The Madisonian in me fears this tendency, but we have not been a Madisonian nation for some time. Rather than indulge my pessimism, I will end with hope. In a republic, the people are allowed to fail and, thereby, to learn. Experts might conclude that their loss of credibility counsels a return to tend their own gardens of policy advice shorn of political ambitions. The people and their champions may eventually learn that achieving their ends demands better knowledge of means. The arc of history, in other words, may tend toward humility and thereby to a better world. Intellectuals have it in their power to move first toward that happy future.

From Marquette’s Julia Azari, To Save Democracy, We Can’t Shy Away From the Toughest Issues:

“[N]ot confronting the racial realities of American society only pushes the problem further down the road, leaving us vulnerable to a repeat of the backlash cycle. In the wake of the 2016 and 2024 elections, Democrats are especially susceptible to election narratives that emphasize how they should have been more cautious and less bold about the interests of marginalized people – whether it’s the rights of transgender Americans, Black Americans, or immigrants. History shows that this will not work, and will impoverish rather than save democracy. Efforts to keep slavery off the national agenda or compromise the issue away, to dodge civil rights are not high points in our national story, and these efforts didn’t prevent crisis in the long run.”

From Columbia Law’s David Pozen, A Conventional Solution to Constitutional Stagnation?

“Making the U.S. Constitution amendable again, then, is likely to require a legal mechanism that does not depend on two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate, along with a cultural shift that makes constitutional reform seem more natural and desirable to more people. As it turns out, there is a potential solution to both requirements sitting in plain sight: the never-used provision of Article V that allows state legislatures to ‘call a convention for proposing amendments.’ The most straightforward way to reinvigorate ordinary Americans’ relationship to their fundamental law would be to call such a convention.”

Any scheme to make conventions more common will strike some as “extreme.” I feel trepidation about it as well. Yet almost everything about contemporary U.S. constitutional politics is extreme, from rampant gerrymandering and runaway inequality to hyper-partisanship and an administration that grows more authoritarian by the week. Insofar as changes to our structure of government are needed to break out of this doom loop, constitutional conventions deserve consideration.

From Heath Mayo, Executive Director of Principles First, Democracy’s Last Line of Defense: Us —

Principles First was founded on this idea: that principled citizens must lead the way in restoring democratic norms. We’ve seen firsthand how powerful it can be when people of different backgrounds come together around shared values — not just to talk, but to act. We’ve hosted town halls, built coalitions, and supported candidates who put country over party. And we’ve done it without asking anyone to abandon their core beliefs — only to prioritize the rule of law and the integrity of our institutions.

That’s the model we need. Not a unity of ideology, but a unity of purpose. A recognition that democracy depends on more than policy wins. It depends on the character of our civic life. And that character is shaped by what we tolerate, what we reward, and what we’re willing to fight for.

So yes, we need reform. We need better laws, stronger guardrails, and more responsive institutions. But none of that will matter if citizens aren’t engaged. If we want a democracy that works, we have to work for it — not just once every four years, but every day. We have to show up, speak out, and vote with our principles intact.

Because in the end, the Constitution doesn’t enforce itself. Norms don’t police themselves. Institutions don’t protect themselves. We do.

And if we’re serious about preserving democracy, we have to be serious about organizing — across party lines, across differences, and across the country. That’s the last line of defense. And it’s the one we can’t afford to neglect.

Niels Petersen is Professor of Public Law, International Law, and EU Law at the University of Münster. His essay is titled Supporting Democracy by Fixing the Asylum System:

The Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing populist party, was founded in response to the euro crisis. Its initial focus was the abolition of the euro, the single currency of most EU member states. While hostility to immigration was present from the outset, it was not yet a defining trait. The party failed to enter the German federal parliament in the first federal elections after its founding in 2013. However, after pushing out some of the more moderate founders, the party raised its profile as an anti-immigrant force, particularly in opposition to Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than one million refugees in 2015. Today, it is the main opposition party in the German parliament and, in opinion polls, it rivals the governing Christian Democrats for the top spot.

While the rise of the AfD is a distinctly German story, the underlying dynamic is not. Discontent with immigration has fueled the ascent of right-wing populist parties across the globe. Any discussion of democracy’s future, therefore, cannot ignore this discontent….

Fixing the asylum system, therefore, has become an urgent concern. Recently, The Economist proposed scrapping the asylum system to build something better. Today, most refugees remain in poor countries bordering conflict zones. Only the better-off attempt the dangerous journey to richer countries in Europe and North America to claim asylum. This arrangement has serious flaws: it benefits relatively few, exposes people to peril, fuels human smuggling, and is often exploited by those seeking economic opportunity rather than fleeing persecution. A more effective approach would prioritize improving conditions for refugees in states near conflict zones and abolishing the right to asylum for those arriving from safe third countries. Wealthy nations, however, should not evade responsibility. They should contribute financially to support refugees’ integration into host societies.

It is probably unrealistic to expect the conclusion of a multilateral treaty on this issue. However, the model could be implemented through a series of bilateral agreements….

I’ve been too busy to blog much this past week, either about my own work or the NYU Democracy Project. But here are three essays from last week in the NYU Democracy Project series of 100 essays in 100 days on challenges to democracy today.

From Seth Masket, The Rise of Populism, Left to Right:

“The rise of populism has been a noted phenomenon in many democracies around the world in recent decades. But its development in the United States has not been even across party lines, with populism substantially transforming the modern Republican Party but only making a dent on the Democratic side. Yet this imbalance may be changing…

One could see the beginnings of this in Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) 2016 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, as well as during the 2018 midterm elections, in which several progressive Democratic House challengers – with the backing of Sanders, Justice Democrats, and other related groups – threatened the party’s leadership. Yet, other than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) and a few others, populist challenges largely failed on the Democratic side that year.

Yet, we could be seeing a stronger push within the Democratic Party heading into the 2026 midterms. Just as Republican elites had lost favor among their rank-and-file in 2016, so Democratic elites have lost favor among their rank-and-file in 2025. Democratic Party favorability among Democrats has been dropping steadily in 2025, while Republican Party approval among Republicans is rising. It’s only one election in one city, but Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary suggests a party ripe for a populist moment, with elites uncomfortable with his stances not only unable to prevent his nomination but ultimately closing ranks behind him as the nominee.

What would a left-populist takeover of the Democratic Party look like?…”

From Charles Stewart, Polarization Today: Lessons from the Gilded Age?:

Two related topics currently dominate public discourse among educated elites in the United States:  democratic backsliding and political polarization.  Although there are exceptions, this discourse tends to take the post-Watergate consensus about the rules of the political game as the benchmark for American democratic practice, bemoaning the accelerating decline in popular political civility and elite forbearance.

As important as the topic of democratic decline over the past generation is, it’s natural to ask about how the current situation fits into the larger arc of American political history.  When we answer this question, we see patterns repeating, or at least history rhyming.  This doesn’t necessarily counsel despair, but it does suggest that our current troubles aren’t entirely the doing of contemporary actors and circumstances.  And, it suggests that the path out of the current polarization and constitutional hardball will come from the inherent instability of the political coalitions that constitute the parties.

America has experienced similar eras of intense polarization to the present one.  The obvious reference point is the Civil War, both before and after the war.  The Second Party System—generally dated from 1828 to 1854—was designed in part to take slavery off the table and organize national politics along other lines, such as patronage.  The key was the maintenance of cross-sectional national political parties that contained conflict over slavery.  Social and population forces, along with the success of the regional Republican Party, eventually blew the lid off the Jacksonian system, leading to war.

The Civil War may have settled the constitutional issue of federal supremacy over the states, but it didn’t extinguish partisan polarization.  Indeed, the Republican Party, which supplanted the Whigs as the chief rival to the Democrats, was much more cohesive on national issues than the Whigs ever were.  Thus, during the Third Party System that followed, political interests became increasingly aligned with party identities in both the electorate and the government.  When we use DW-NOMINATE scores to chart political polarization (recognizing DW-NOMINATE’s limitations in charting such things), it is only in recent years that the level of party polarization has matched that of the Reconstruction and Gilded Age years…

From Michael Kang, Electoral Due Process:

In a free and fair democracy, the rules of the election need to be set before the election, but a few partisan state legislatures have begun trying to effectively change the election results after the fact when their candidates lose—shrinking the powers of newly elected officeholders and sometimes even unseating them altogether. 

Consider events in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Under Republican governors, Republican legislatures there expanded gubernatorial powers while their party held the office. When Democrats won the governor’s races in those states, though, the same legislatures convened rushed lame-duck sessions to strip away executive authority before the newly elected Democrats could take office. In Wisconsin, the legislature waited to see the result of the governor’s election and when a Democrat won, it hurriedly transferred key executive powers to the legislature, restricted the governor’s ability to handle lawsuits, and eliminated the newly created position of solicitor general.  In North Carolina, after a Democrat won the governor’s election, lawmakers abruptly cut his control over key state institutions, including the board of elections, required legislative approval over his cabinet appointments, and slashed his administration from 1,500 employees down to 425—exactly reversing the increase they enacted with a Republican in power.  And more recently last year, after a Democrat was elected again as governor, the legislature called another lame duck session to once more cut back the governor’s powers by making last-second use of a veto-proof supermajority they had just lost in the elections.  In other words, partisan legislative majorities have retroactively stripped power from elected offices when their political opponents win, in lame duck sessions before the newly elected officeholders can even oppose them legislatively.  Other state legislatures have abused their censure, expulsion, and impeachment discretion to strip away powers from, or outright remove, elected officeholders from the opposing party under circumstances that are basically unprecedented in their states’ history.  The worry is that these incidents will become commonplace in our hyperpartisan and politically hypercompetitive country…

The WSJ published an article on Friday, based on last week’s elections, rightly titled: Americans See a Government That Can’t Solve Their Problems. Here’s the opening line: “U.S. elections are sending a consistent message: Americans are deeply frustrated with their government’s inability to solve problems.”

This is a theme I’ve been writing about for a decade or so now, based not just on what’s happening in the US, but with democratic governments across the West. There has been pervasive dissatisfaction with government, no matter which parties are in power, for the last 10-15 years across most Western democracies. Governments no longer seem able to deliver for large segments of their populations on the economic, social, and cultural issues many of their citizens consider most urgent.

At least two phenomena that characterize our democratic era have emerged from this pervasive dissatisfaction. One is that politics has become extremely turbulent, as voters regularly throw out of office those in power in the search for alternative parties or figures they believe will deliver needed change. Second, voters are drawn to political outsiders and more extreme options on both the right and the left.

The appeal of Trump and Mandami is surely a reflection of all that. In addition, the communications revolution is almost certainly central to their success. It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump winning in 2016 without cable television and Twitter (as it was known then). Similarly, social media was the dominant messaging tool of Zohran Mandami’s campaign.

Here are some thoughts from the closing of one of my articles, Democracies in the Age of Fragmentation, on these issues:

With so much attention on misinformation, we do not yet recognize that the new information age has helped make political fragmentation a defining feature of, and a major challenge to, democracies today. This fragmentation is both the effect and cause of the perceived inability of democratic governments to deliver effective governance.
Perhaps this fragmentation is a temporary fact of democratic life. Perhaps, though, our era will be one in which new technologies will enable many more people to engage in forms of politics, individually and in groups or parties. Opposition to government action, or demands for the government to act or act differently, will be easy to mobilize and constant. Politics and government will be continually turbulent, but less able to deliver effective responses on the issues roiling the day….

[T]he importance of effective government is often ignored in political and legal theory. But if democratic governments cannot overcome the profound challenge political fragmentation now poses and deliver on the issues their citizens find most urgent, dysfunction and distrust could give way to worse.

I did this extended interview for the European Center for Populism Studies. Here is their summary:

In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Richard H. Pildes, one of America’s leading constitutional scholars, warns that democracy’s survival depends not only on equality and participation but also on its capacity to deliver effective governance. “Democracy,” he says, “rests on two simple promises: equal voice and better lives. When governments fail in that second task, it profoundly undermines democracy itself.” Professor Pildes argues that excessive focus on participation, coupled with digital fragmentation and weakened political parties, have eroded governments’ ability to act decisively. The rise of “free-agent politicians,” algorithmic outrage, and social media-driven polarization, he cautions, threaten to make democracy less capable of solving problems. “Effective government,” Professor Pildes insists, “is the forgotten pillar of democracy.”

Here is the full interview, text is available here.

Yesterday, Robert Boatright and Catherine Tolbert’s essay argued that we should hold primary elections on a single, national primary day:

When America adopted primary elections, primaries were hailed as a way to give the public a say in choosing our leaders. Today, fewer than twenty percent of Americans vote in primaries. Primary voters are unrepresentative of the population, registered voters, and even the other members of their parties. Turnout of younger people is extremely low. Turnout fluctuates wildly, depending on whether there is competition in high-profile races. To improve primaries, we must increase the participation, representativeness, and consistency of primary voters. The best way to do this is to hold all congressional and state primaries (though not necessarily presidential primaries) on the same day: a National Primary Day.

Primaries for state and federal office are spread across eighteen dates from March to September.  If all primaries were held on the same day, people would know when to vote. A single-day primary would also attract more national media coverage.  People would know there is a primary even if they knew little about their local candidates. A national primary would also simplify mobilization efforts by parties or interest groups. An organization seeking to increase turnout by a particular demographic group or to highlight the salience of an issue could engage in a nationwide campaign or publicize lists of endorsed candidates. These effects would be felt the most among lower propensity voters, who tend to be younger, less wealthy, and less ideologically extreme than today’s primary voters. The primary electorate would look more like the American population.

There are many secondary effects from having a single-day primary as well. A single-day primary would limit the power of organized interests. The sequential nature of contemporary, low-turnout primaries gives undue power to groups that have sought to encourage extreme candidates and to selectively “primary” incumbents. An increase in turnout would make it more likely that primary victories would be a consequence of voter mobilization, not voter inattention. When primaries do yield unexpected results, we would understand these outcomes in the context of all of the year’s primaries, not as harbingers of what might take place in primaries later in the year.

On Monday, we ran Brad Smith’s skeptical essay about election reforms, titled Too Much to Ask: Voting Reforms Can Only Do So Much, which I blogged about on Monday. Yesterday, Josh Sellers published an essay with a more optimistic take, on how political realignments might open the door for some reforms. Today, we publish Ben Ginsberg on The Need to Re-Imagine the American Election System of the Future.

Here’s an excerpt from Josh’s essay:

In our present environment, however, the political and participatory implications of many electoral rules are less apparent. What was once conventional wisdom – that increasing voter registration rates and reducing administrative burdens on voting would benefit the Democratic Party – is now in question. As the electorate further divides along socioeconomic and educational lines, non- and infrequent voters (both of whom tend to be poorer and less educated) are, according to some studies, slightly more likely to favor the Republican Party. Moreover, the expanding Latino vote is increasingly divided between the two major political parties. Whatever challenges these developments pose for political strategists, they present an opportunity for election reformers and fair-minded elected officials.

The reason is simple. In this deeply contested political era in which many elections are decided by very small margins, both parties have an incentive to simplify the electoral process and bring more voters into the fold. And given the now unpredictable consequences of various election administration policies, such simplification can occur behind a veil of ignorance, without knowingly sacrificing an electoral advantage. The upshot would be more efficient and inclusive election administration for all…

Along similar lines, the moment is ripe to finally reach some agreement on voter identification laws. The utility and impact of such laws have long been points of profound political disagreement. At present, though, significant evidence suggests that the partisan impact of such laws is negligible. And to the extent that the acquisition of a qualifying identification is burdensome, such burdens disproportionately fall on lower-income, less-educated voters who, as noted above, increasingly favor the Republican Party. These dynamics present a rare opening for a détente.

From Ben Ginsberg’s essay today:

It’s time to be truthful about the current state of American elections, a venerable institution foundational to our form of government, currently the subject of an unprecedented onslaught against its accuracy.

The reality is that the system is reliable at present, but it is creaky. It needs innovation to keep up with technology. More than anything else, it needs reimagining and a vision for the future rather than the incremental refinements it now receives….

The vision for the election system of the 2040s can take many different forms. In addition to exploring the benefits of in-state consistency, central topics for re-imagination would include:

• The design of future voting systems and how and where voters should cast their ballots, with an examination of whether internet voting can be made sufficiently secure for states to entertain its use.
• How to ensure a steady funding stream to incorporate technological improvements that can be used in the casting, counting and certification of votes.
•  Research and development projects that will design modern vote casting and tabulation equipment and methods of best maintaining the voter rolls. Current equipment has not kept up with technology, in part because of the localized administration system and in part because of insufficient and episodic funding.
•  The United States is a mobile society and voter rolls are not systematically and uniformly kept accurate. Coordination between the 50 states in checking their rolls to prevent dual voting registrations and voting is needed.
• The redesign of polling place locations and layouts to help with efficiency and uniformity.
• As cyber threats grow and artificial intelligence becomes integrated into all facets of life, the election system needs better cyber protections.

Today’s elections are reliable but the onslaught against them should provide a catalyst for imagining what they should look like in the future.

At the NYU Democracy Project today, Jonathan Adler’s essay, titled Help Legislators Legislate Again, argues that current campaign finance laws contribute to Congress’ increasing inability to generate legislation:

Federal campaign finance laws require legislators to fill their war chests primarily through small donations. With individual contribution limits capped at $3,300 per candidate per election, representatives must reach exponentially more donors to raise equivalent funds. It is common for members of Congress to spend two to four hours per day soliciting donations—time that could otherwise be devoted to meeting with constituents or colleagues, developing policy expertise, or working on legislation.

Former Senator Alan Simpson captured this problem perfectly: “When we were spending so much time raising money, we simply could not devote quality time to thoughtful decisions and debate. It lowered the substance of our work.”

Effective legislating depends on relationships. Developing the trust and understanding necessary for successful compromise requires face-to-face interaction and sustained engagement. Yet when members aren’t casting votes or delivering speeches, they’re increasingly found at phone banks or pursuing media hits, rather than in colleagues’ offices working through disagreements.

The structure of small-dollar fundraising creates incentives that undermine effective governing. Smaller donors are often more tribal and ideological, and respond more readily to rage-bait and political posturing than to the quiet work of legislating. They’re more likely to contribute after seeing a viral social media clip or inflammatory TV interview than after learning about behind-the-scenes coalition-building.

This dynamic rewards exactly the wrong behavior. What gets a member on television or makes a clip go viral is divisive rhetoric and gotcha moments—not sitting down with someone across the aisle to find common ground. Members who depend on passionate small-dollar donors from highly partisan bases risk alienating their funding sources by engaging in bipartisan compromise.

The nationalization of fundraising through online platforms has accelerated this trend. Representatives can now raise significant money by taking controversial positions that energize donors across the country, rather than focusing on local constituency needs or pragmatic problem-solving. The incentive structure pushes toward performance politics rather than governance. It has also side-lined the parties as moderating institutions.

The irony is stark: campaign finance rules designed to democratize political fundraising and reduce the influence of special interests have inadvertently made legislating more difficult. However well-intentioned, limits on individual contributions and party support have undermined the activities necessary for effective governance — relationship-building, compromise, and nuanced policy development.

Yale’s Steve Skowronek is one of the leading scholars on the American presidency. His recent book is The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience (2025); other books include Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive(with John Dearborn and Desmond King) and The Policy State: An American Predicament (with Karen Orren). For the NYU Democracy Project, his essay on authoritarianism then and now begins as follows:

“Government and politics in the United States have come to epitomize a world-wide drift toward authoritarianism. How is it, then, that America resisted a similar slide in the 1930s? The simple answer, not without weight, is that America in the 1930s was led by a charismatic president who was committed to democracy’s advance. But look closer, and several complications quickly come into view.

At the outset of his second term, that charismatic president, Franklin Roosevelt, opened a multi-front assault against constraints on his power. His challenge to the constitutional order featured a brazen plan to subordinate the judiciary to presidential will, a purge campaign aimed at building a personal party based on loyalty to his program, and a proposal to consolidate presidential control over the entire executive branch. In broad outline, those transformative ambitions are not all that different from the designs of our current president. And yet, in that earlier episode, defenders of the Constitution in both parties mounted stiff resistance. They denounced the president as a would-be dictator. All three of Roosevelt’s initiatives were defeated.

Leaving it at that, however, is also too simple. The sobering fact is that those faithful constitutionalists of the 1930s were not resisting presidential power on behalf of an advanced position on American democracy. At the heart of the coalition that defeated Roosevelt’s designs were Southern racists determined to protect oppressive forms of rule in their home region from the threat of unbridled presidentialism. In the 1930s, the U.S. sidestepped the risks of a strongman at the top, but that was because authoritarianism characterized so much of American governance at the local level.”

Today we have an essay from Nate Persily titled: Democracy in the Age of AI. Yesterday, Lisa Manheim also published an essay titled: Leaning into AI. Both essays turn out to more optimistic, or at least less pessimistic, than a lot of writing on AI and democracy.

Here’s an excerpt from Nate’s piece:

AI amplifies the abilities of all good and bad actors in the democratic system to achieve the same goals they have always had. That includes purveyors of disinformation or hostile foreign actors who can take advantage of the tools of artificial intelligence to engage in influence operations or even “kinetic” operations, for example, to execute a cyberattack on critical infrastructure.  At the same time, those tools can help election officials more easily convey information to voters or allocate resources more efficiently, and they can lower the cost of campaigning for those who might replace a large staff with AI agents or construct advertisements and other campaign communications (in whatever language they want) at a fraction of the cost consultants now charge…. 

We might later look back on the revolution in AI and realize that “AI’s democracy problems” were inseparable from the other challenges that this new technology poses. If AI leads to massive labor force disruptions or it enables governments to better surveil and censor their populations, those are democracy problems as well. In the end, the best way to realize the upsides and mitigate the downsides of AI for democracy, would be for democracies to ally together to ensure that they continue to lead in AI model development, deployment, and diffusion, and steer this technology toward a pro-democratic future.

And here’s an excerpt from Lisa Manheim’s essay:

So how to move forward? The law should and will still play a role. Preexisting legal restrictions will still apply, for example, to restrict actors even as they seek to exploit new technologies to engage in voter intimidation, voter suppression, impersonation of a candidate, fraud, and so on. There may, moreover, be a role on the margins for newly enacted regulation, particularly with respect to disclosure.

Ultimately, however, the solution to the problem of AI in elections is not likely to be a legal solution. Instead, the path forward might need to be one of acceptance, coupled with a commitment to harnessing AI’s potential to advance pro-democratic ends. On this front, AI-related technology can be an excellent teacher, potentially educating voters about complicated concepts in an accessible way…Leaning into AI for pro-democratic purposes may not be easy or attractive. But like a backburn in a wildfire, it may be what is needed.