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…
