Spencer Overton Says Now Is the Time to Get Aligned

Lee Drutman fears Democrats will mistake a backlash for a mandate—rather than using a moment of victory to break the two-party doom loop. Don't confuse a historically-high outcome with a history-changing event. That's my lesson from the latest episode of This Old Democracy with returning guest and CBF co-founder Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America's politics program. Drutman says Democrats have plenty to celebrate from an election in which the winning side will have a national vote edge of at least 13% over the losing party, a margin not seen since 1974. But letting the celebration blind them to some hard realities would be a critical and predictable mistake, says Drutman. He warns: Don't confuse rejection of the party in power with durable support for its replacement.  What does Drutman say happened on Tuesday, November 3? First, he joins other analysts in saying the outcome was explained much more by a repudiation of a president with historically-low job approval ratings (we have to go back to the final days of Richard Nixon to find anything worse). So Democrats cannot claim, based on the electorate's choices, that their policies are much more popular. Second, we know from the work of Drutman and others that American elections have a pendulum quality, especially midterm elections. The "cost of ruling" almost always  penalizes the party in power.    Third, Drutman reminds us of the growing number of "double haters."  He cites WSJ and CNN estimates of this group as between 21% and 25% of the electorate. Take these elements together – Trump's low standing, the cost of ruling, and the rise in double haters, and a persuasive  explanation for the Democrats' performance comes into plain view:  "[M]ostly they're voting against whichever party is in power. And in '24, Democrats were in power …so the double haters were voting against the incumbent to the extent that they were voting... Now, Republicans are in control of the White House, doing a particularly bad job … so it's a lot of double haters voting against Republicans… {T]his is not love of the Democratic Party as much as it is 'just gotta do something to push back against Trump.'" Drutman has been around long enough to recite the pattern: the hopes for a durable Democratic era after Obama's 2008 victory, followed by the Tea Party backlash; claims of a Republican working-class realignment after 2024—followed by another reversal.  The recurring pattern: victory, inflated expectations, disappointment, backlash. Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with both parties grows. Drutman is just about ready to guarantee that Democrats will pay their own "cost of ruling" if they manage to win the White House and hold power up until the 2030 midterm elections. Yes, they should try to govern better. But Drutman observes, "A lot of the long term economic challenges in this country are not going to correct in two years." The inherent whiplash dynamic  of our system is not going to change, and thinking otherwise is short-sighted. Instead, Drutman beats the drum for changing the rules that have locked in these predictable (and predictably bad) outcomes. Public problems are not solved, and anger and disillusionment are ever-present.  Only rules changes – simple and proven ones, really – provide a way to change the destructive incentives of the status quo.  "[P]ractically that means changing the voting system to get out of this zero-sum binary two-party system, making it more viable for third parties, fourth parties, fifth parties, even maybe sixth parties to come and go, to bring new ideas, to make the coalitions a little bit more fluid, to make it so that every election isn't just throw all the bums out and bring in a different set of bums, but, you know, maybe readjust the coalition." The structural rules reforms Drutman prioritizes are familiar to readers of this Substack: Electoral fusion for single-winner elections. Two (or more) parties nominate the same candidate, but for different reasons, which allows distinct constituencies to "send a message" with their vote. It makes factions visible, and teaches citizens and electeds alike that principled bargaining and coalition politics are a good and common feature in a democracy.  Proportional representation for legislative bodies. Seats in a legislature are distributed based on each party's support among the voting public. Most advanced democracies use one version or another of PR. And for good reason: PR systems produce better governance, fairer representation, less hatred, more coalitions.  Both reforms give those double-hating dissatisfied voters ways to participate in a governing coalition. It's not winner-takes-all, it's winner-gets-its-fair-share and so does everyone else.  It's not that changing the rules would be good for Democrats; that's an open question. Rather, according to Drutman, changing the rules is good (perhaps essential) for the survival of American democracy. We need more and better parties. Drutman gets specific about the paramount need of the moment: "Without a center-right party that believes in the fundamentals of liberal democracy, it's hard to have a democracy. It can't be that in order to have a democracy, Democrats have to win every election, because that's not a democracy if only one party can win."  This follows from Drutman's "Two Party Doom Loop" thesis: When every election becomes an existential struggle for control, governing becomes less stable, long-term problem-solving harder, and the possibility of authoritarianism grows. We are left to wonder after hearing Drutman's take, will Democrats treat victory as proof that the system works—or use their opportunity to change the system that keeps producing backlash?  Our own two cents: friends tell friends, don't get high on your own supply. Maybe the moment when winners feel least threatened may be their best opportunity to prevent the next destructive swing. For more, read "The Democratic Party is about to make the most predictable mistake in politics," Undercurrent Events, March 23, 2026

Micah Sifry got schooled on the politics of young Americans in the latest episode of This Old Democracy podcast. His guest, just a few days before election day, was Rachel Janfaza, the founder of The Up and Up, a qualitative research, media and strategy firm focused on Gen Z – the demographic cohort of people born between 1997 and 2012. She shared her latest insights on how Gen Zers are relating to the challenges facing our democracy right now. Janfaza offers a paradoxical view of Gen Z. They are frustrated with the two party system, rife with economic anxiety but not ready to burn down the house. They seek out optimistic candidates (Micah learned the term "hopemaxxing") and welcome civility in politics. The state of the two-party system is our bread and butter, so it was interesting  to hear Janfaza say that in her work – she frequently conducts focus groups of young voters (and non-voters) – she is hearing about frustration with the current duopoly. "I think plenty of young people would love there to be a multiparty system. One of the biggest complaints I hear from young people is that they feel they're choosing between the lesser of two evils. They don't like either party. They want to take a little bit from one party, a little bit from the other, and … they don't want their beliefs to have to fall straight on a party line." But Gen Z doesn't see a third party as realistic. I don't know if the terms "wasted vote" and "spoiler problem" may not roll off tongues in youth focus groups. But, by Janfaza's account, they get it – but they are not writing it off. "[T]hey don't see it as realistic. And so I think they've been kind of taught or told that it's not possible. That being said, we know that young people oftentimes are the ones who say, 'It's not possible until we make it possible.'" Whether it's a third party or something else, Janfaza reports there is a yearning for something different in the cohort she studies (here comes Micah's new word). "I'm really hearing a hunger from young people for some optimism, for some hope. And that's why I wrote about hopemaxxing, where candidates who present a civil forward-looking message, like a James Talarico in Texas or a Jon Ossoff in Georgia, who have more of a unifying position and are coming at this from a place to be representative for all people, are actually getting a leg up with young people." Underlying a lot of what Janfaza reports is concern about economic standing, she says. Gen Z may not be the only group focused on the cost of living, but it hits them in a profound and complex way. "[T]oday, young people are united around a single set of issues, and that all relates back to their overwhelming sense of economic anxiety. As AI changes the job market, as war rages and the cost of everything seems to be increasing, young people are just really having a hard time affording their day-to-day lives, let alone thinking about their futures. And so we're hearing young people talk about not just the cost of renting and groceries and gas prices today, but the fear that they don't know what the job market's going to look like in five months, let alone five years."  "They don't feel they're ever going to be able to own a home, let alone be able to pay their current rent." It sounds like it would take some organizing to get young Americans to join or support a third party. But not much. They're ready for change, and hoping for it. To dig deeper into Janfaza's sharp analyses, read The Up and Up 2026 Gen Z Voter Roadmap and follow her on TikTok, Instagram, X, and Threads.

Alex Hertel-Fernandez on labor, state power, and what happens after a policy victory Late in their This Old Democracy podcast conversation, Micah Sifry puts an unusual question to Alex Hertel-Fernandez. Suppose the government actually wanted to help people —as workers, parents, patients, consumers, what have you. How would the many and varied demands of a complex society make their way into politics and governance if the political parties meant to serve as the "transmission belt"  have lost so many of their ties to non-wealthy people? Hertel-Fernandez is a Columbia University professor, co-director of its Labor Lab and a founder of the Empowering Democracy Initiative. He previously served in the Biden administration's Department of Labor and White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and he is very interested in this question! In a recent essay with colleagues Sam Berger and Sophie Jacobson, he argues that a future pro-democracy administration will need to ask who gains power from its policies, not only who receives their benefits. In his book State Capture, Hertel-Fernandez details how conservative donors, businesses and organizations built networks across the states. They developed policies, cultivated allies in statehouses and understood that a legislative win could make the next win easier to achieve, especially if it structurally weakened the opposition. Perhaps their #1 target in this regard was state policy toward unions and unionized workers.  "Right from the start, groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council were really focused on cutting back labor rights and making it harder for unions to organize workers. And that wasn't a coincidence. I think they accurately saw that cutting back labor rights would weaken a key opponent and make it easier for the allies that they had in government to win elections and change policy." Weakening organized labor not only reduced workers' bargaining power; it also reduced their power to influence political party platforms. Hertel-Fernandez encountered the reverse problem while working in the Biden administration. Policymakers devoted serious attention to whether a program would get benefits to people who needed them. Whether it would help those people organize themselves, and be ready to defend the program if necessary, was rarely discussed.  That question illustrates the focus of the Empowering Democracy Initiative. EDI brings researchers, organizers and people with experience in government together to, in its own words, "understand how to build people power through policy." Hertel-Fernandez borrows organizer Ai-jen Poo's image of three Earths. Earth One is the familiar world of elections and policy fights. Earth Two is the authoritarian capture underway now. Earth Three is the more inclusive democracy one might  hope to build. These aren't successive eras, he says; we're living in all three at once. That makes restoring the old order not only impossible but also inadequate. "It's really about accepting this Earth Two threat that we face and trying to think about policy levers to build the kind of civil society power we need to get to Earth three. Like what kind of worker organizing, tenant organizing, consumer organizing, patient organizing do we need to push back against this threat in Earth Two and get to the Earth three that we want?" What would one of those policy levers look like? Hertel-Fernandez use the expanded child tax credit, which sent monthly payments to families for six months during Covid, as an example. He asks whether the law could or should also have helped those families organize themselves: "So, how might you have designed that policy differently if you had put someone from EDI at the table? I think one thing is creating mechanisms for child tax credit recipients to organize collectively together in, say, a parents union." In the Earth Three/EDI version of the expanded child tax credit, organizers could have helped families enroll. A parents' union could have provided real-time feedback to the Treasury Department as it administered the credit. And when the temporary expansion was about to expire, parents would have a way to make their case together to Congress. Sifry likes the idea, but – being a party animal – he can't help but ask: Isn't this the job of a political party? Hertel-Fernandez agrees that the structural weakness of 21st century American political parties is part of the problem. Once vibrant and locally-focused, American parties today are basically national fundraising machines without thick ties to their voters. Stronger civic organizations might help repair some of those frayed ties, but Sifry wonders whether that is enough given just how  alienated people are from both major parties. Not to mention the barriers to entry for new parties.  Hertel-Fernandez doesn't take the bait. Neither fusion voting nor proportional representation is as yet part of the Empowering Democracy Initiative's agenda. He does, however, see a reason to make room for organizations—and perhaps parties—that bring together people whose interests don't follow the familiar partisan divide: And to really get out of this polarized mess, we need to think about ways of creating more cross-cutting cleavages, whether that's through new parties that do not fall on the standard left-right spectrum, or new civil society organizations. You know, we are really excited by the effort, for instance, to create a patients union that is being launched right now. If you like listening to alternative visions of how to make government more responsive and inclusive, Hertel-Hernandez makes for a good tour guide of Earth Three. Particularly the Expanded Child Tax Credit thought exercise.  And then stick around for Micah's challenge about whether, if people build power together, our electoral system gives them a way to use it.  

On the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry talks with Spencer Overton about what democracy reformers should be doing before the next political opening arrives. Baseball cognoscenti like to talk about "five tools" players: meaning, the rare athlete who can hit for average, hit for power, field, throw, and run at the highest level. In other words, Willie Mays. You might think of Overton as a five tool political reformer: scholar, writer, organizer, convener, and public servant. He is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at George Washington University, and has spent much of his career thinking about voting rights, race and political representation. He served in the Justice Department during the Obama administration, led the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and now directs GW Law's Multiracial Democracy Project. The conversation ranges from the history of multiracial democracy, the weakening of the Voting Rights Act, money in politics, technology companies, party decline and the challenge of governing in an age of deep distrust.  The organizer in Overton is emphatic on one central point: now is the time for the pro-democracy community to be getting aligned in the event a window of opportunity opens for much-needed reform. But the scholar starts with history. American democracy was not founded as a multiracial democracy and did not become one all at once. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a huge step forward, but the legal structure built around it has been terribly weakened. This has in turn inspired a burst of new thinking and interest in proportional representation, and Overton is in that number. Under the system most Americans know, legislative seats are awarded one district at a time, winner-take-all. A group can make up a substantial share of a state's voters and still wind up with very little representation. Overton offers Louisiana as an example. If Black voters are roughly a third of the state and tend to vote together, then in a proportional system they might reasonably expect to elect roughly a third of the state's congressional delegation. The same logic cuts across party lines: "Republicans in Massachusetts," he explains, "are about 30% of the population, but they have none of the state's non-congressional seats right now." For Overton, one of the virtues of proportional representation is that it changes who gets to define a political community, solving concerns about politicians dictating race-based or partisan political lines. "Proportional representation is basically race neutral… It allows, basically, the voters to determine the groupings rather than some state entity or some politicians creating the political winners and losers." Overton explains that proportional representation comes in different forms and that different jurisdictions may need different answers. His current work has focused heavily on civil-rights groups and communities of color, in part because any large change to the electoral system has to be understood in terms of who gains power, who loses it and whether historically excluded communities have real agency in the process. At one point, he puts the problem this way: "What are the right answers here? What are the right solutions? Because there's going to be a moment where people who are busy, focused on other things are going to say, okay, we can do something. What is it that we should be doing? "I think we need to have worked with different groups, civil rights groups, and … different labor [groups], other folks here, you know, the business community, and really socialize what folks can kind of get their heads around, what can work, so that we can move forward." Micah asks Overton about fusion voting (you knew he would!). For newcomers to The Ticket, fusion allows smaller parties to cross-nominate a major-party candidate, giving distinct political constituencies a way to demonstrate their support and potentially gain leverage without running a spoiler candidate. In a very real sense, fusion and PR are two sides of the same coin. They each inject proportionality into the election results. And in doing so they each incentivize inter-party bargaining and compromise Overton is open to it. "Fusion is definitely promising. I think it's also a step in the right direction toward proportional representation, just generally." But Overton also has concerns about walking away from the Democratic Party. For African-American voters in particular, Overton says, the Democratic Party has been one of the few institutions through which real political power has been exercised. So reformers, he suggests, should be careful about framing the problem too simply as "the two-party system." This conversation is worth hearing. Reform debates can become very technical very quickly. Overton keeps his focus on power: who has it, how it is distributed and whether political minorities – whether racial, ideological or geographic – can do more than simply cast votes in systems where the outcome is largely predetermined. And, putting his organizer hat back on, he is worried about timing. "We have to talk to people now about this, and people have to be aware of the options because we may not have another window for another 20 or 30 years if we even do have a window in 2029." No one knows exactly when such a window will open. If and when one does, reformers on Team Democracy should not squander it by then spending precious time debating among themselves. 

The United Kansas leader talks fusion voting, the limits of the two-party system, and the long work of creating something new On the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry talks with Scott Morgan, executive director of the United Kansas Party and the party's candidate for Kansas Secretary of State. Morgan is a fifth-generation Kansan who has been around politics for most of his life. His father was the Kansas political editor for the Kansas City Star. Morgan worked for Senators Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum, served as chief counsel for Dole's presidential campaign, worked for a Republican governor, and served as a Senate representative on the Federal Election Commission. Asked what he makes of American politics today, Morgan's answer is short: "It's a hot mess right now."  He has also watched the changes in Kansas politics up close. Morgan remembers a Republican Party in which moderates and conservatives fought hard with each other, but still operated within the same broad coalition. What he sees now is something different. "It's not this existential viciousness that you get now. There are a lot of reasons why I think that has happened, but having watched it happen in person, I realize we can't just sit there and let that become the norm." Morgan first ran for Kansas Secretary of State as a Republican in 2014, challenging Kris Kobach in the primary. Part of the purpose of that campaign, he tells Micah, was to locate the remaining pockets of moderate Republican voters around the state. That effort ultimately led Morgan and others to create the Free State Party. This year, Free State merged with United Kansas, which has a focus on restoring fusion voting in the state. Morgan is now focused on building a functioning political party. Morgan says the message that gets the best response as he travels around Kansas is simple: "I'm not Republican. I'm not Democrat. I'm something different." That grabs people's attention, Morgan says. The harder part is persuading people that a new political party can actually matter. Fusion is an important piece of the strategy, because without it, voters balk at the risk of spoiling or wasting their votes. But Morgan admits that it is not something he generally leads with when talking to voters. Most people have no idea what fusion voting is, and explaining it takes longer than the few seconds a candidate may have with someone at an event or on a doorstep. That has helped push United Kansas toward the more basic work of organizing: creating local chapters, recruiting candidates and developing a presence around the state. And Morgan makes a larger point about election reform that will be familiar to readers of The Ticket: "Either way, it's important that this party build political support for these issues, whether it's fusion voting for some of the local races … but also redistricting and proportional representation, all that. You need to have political power to ultimately get that done." United Kansas has also been pursuing fusion through the courts. The party and several voters challenged the Kansas laws that prevent a candidate from appearing on the ballot as the nominee of more than one party. After this episode was recorded, the Kansas Court of Appeals ruled against them. United Kansas has said it will appeal to the Kansas Supreme Court. Morgan is one of the plaintiffs. But he doesn't see litigation as a substitute for organizing. Kansas illustrates a familiar problem. Many state legislative races are effectively settled in low-turnout party primaries. Candidates have strong reasons to pay attention only to primary voters and no reason to build a broader, multi-party coalition for the general election. But if our laws allowed parties to get out of the wasted vote and spoiler box (via fusion, proportional representation, or both), new kinds of alliances and bargaining would take place. "You just got to change the math," Morgan says. "I mean, everything about politics has always been math and you've just got to change that." The work isn't glamorous: driving around Kansas, talking to people, organizing locally and trying to convince voters that something different can last. Sifry ends the podcast conversation, as always, by asking what keeps Morgan going. Faith, family, and a little fire, Morgan says, and an eye to the future.  "I'm ready to pass the torch, but I'm really hoping to build something to pass on." That might just be one of the best definitions of party building we've heard.

On the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry talks with Tom Asher, the director of research and global engagement at Columbia World Projects. Asher is leading a university-wide working group that seeks to turn academic insights into pathways for action on challenging civic and social problems.  For the past two years, Tom and his colleagues at Columbia World Projects have been working in partnership with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University, focusing on a simple but hard question: How do we fix our democratic system? That made Tom a perfect guest for Micah to talk with. The show started with some level-setting. Micah asked Asher, "Is democracy in America in trouble? is this something new or is it something we've been through before?" Tom's response: "Yes, yes and yes."  Asher explained that America has faced democratic threats before – citing Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy. But these voices were checked by institutions; Coughlin was ultimately subdued by his own church's hierarchy as well as the radio broadcasters trade association; McCarthyism was ultimately restrained by the U.S. Senate and the free press. Today, the kinds of institutions capable of providing checks on authoritarian movements have lost courage, standing and power. Asher connects the reduced power of civil society institutions to the decline in membership organizations that inculcated democratic values and skills. "If you think about unions, for example, at mid-century, one American worker in three belonged to a union. Today it's one in ten… But it's not only that. It's that if you read their literature from, say, the mid-19th century past the mid-20th century, they not only worked to build their membership and to fight for higher wages, but they actually expressed the goal of cultivating the democratic capacities of their members and the ideal of defending democracy itself. And that's not the case today. The great federated associations, the Elks, the Women's Clubs, the American Legion, which gathered people and taught them real democratic skills, oriented them toward active civic life, have lost most of their membership after the 1970s, and they've never recovered." The hollowing out of civil society – and of political parties – has been a running theme on This Old Democracy. We've covered the research and perspectives of Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Daniel Schlozman,  Didi Kuo and others – all making the case that richer parties make for a more resilient democracy. Asher argues that the hollowing out has been more substantial on the left than on the right. "As the union hall, the mainline congregation, the lodge, the local party offices were hollowing out, the need for belonging didn't disappear with them. When the old rooms closed, people were looking for new ones, and the right built those rooms and waited and invited people in. And what they built were mega churches organized around small group discussions, Turning Point chapters, Moms for Liberty gatherings, and these were often weekly, in-person, meeting people where they already were." Asher explains why this matters, and the distinction between the left and the right. These kinds of groups say,  "[J]oin us, sit with us, have fun at our rollicking events, regardless of what you believe. Belonging, as Hahrie Han, the great political scientist, puts it, comes before belief. The politics arrive later, carried by the relationships. And the left offers something very different. Believe in our cause and send $25. Citizens are treated more as its targets, not participants." Micah challenges Asher, pointing to social projects on the left like Black Lives Matter, the Women's March and the No Kings marches. Asher says these are different.  "Compare the two parties and how they received their insurgents. The Tea Party was absorbed by the Republican Party, it got remade in its own image, and it remade the Tea Party as well. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, borrows the movements' language, it spends their energies at election time. But it tends to resist the demands the rest of the year. And someone in our convening put it really provocatively… [T]he Republican Party, this person said, loves its base. The Democratic Party appears to hate or at least fear its own." Asher believes we need parties that are thick in two directions.  He explains: "They need to be socially thick. That means present year-round, useful to people between elections, and embedded to a greater degree than they are in people's routine lives. But they also need to be politically thick with real internal debate, factions, and decision maps that members can win or lose, and live with that losing. That's really important in a democracy, and we seem to be losing that skill."  "And then second, we need to wrestle to a greater degree than we have with whether to invite groups that stand adjacent to the parties closer to the inside. So organizations like Faith in Minnesota that did so much of the mobilizing around the anti-ICE movement, or Voto Latino, both of which have a base of their own. They drive voter turnout, but they're often treated more like vendors than they are treated as if they're meaningful members of the party." Asher says his group's preliminary report also supports electoral system reforms that present a wider array of choices to "reflect the preferences of voters in a way that they simply do not right now … a wider suite of policy choices that 'I want to be represented should you win.'"  Going forward, Asher says the Columbia World Projects working group will be exploring the potential for more dynamism at the city and state level and the role that digital platforms have played in changing our political system, as well as the role of influencers.  Listen to the full episode to drink in the nuance of Asher's critique of our politics and share it with others who follow new thinking about how to repair this imperfect, precious, worn down marvel – otherwise known as this old democracy of ours.  

A noted civil rights lawyer and law professor makes the constitutional case for reviving fusion voting (and fusion parties) — and explains why he thinks the timing is right. On the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry talks with Samuel Bagenstos, the Frank G. Millard Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and a professor of public policy at the Ford School. The principal topic: a lawsuit he's helped bring to get us out of the two-party "doom loop."   Bagenstos has spent his career moving between scholarship, litigation, and government service. He served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Obama Justice Department, then as general counsel first at the Office of Management and Budget and later at the Department of Health and Human Services under Biden. Now he's back in court. He's representing the Michigan Common Sense Party and the Michigan Libertarian Party in a suit filed in May challenging the state's 131-year-old ban on fusion voting. Context is everything, in life and litigation both, and Bagenstos sets the stage well. In post-Civil War Michigan the GOP was generally dominant, but a coalition of Democrats, Populists, Greenbackers and laborites used fusion to break the GOP's grip on state government in the 1880s and 90s. This coalition didn't just win elections for the sake of holding office — they had an agenda and used their time in power to push through labor reforms, consumer protections, and women's suffrage (along with, he adds dryly, Prohibition–yes, we made that pun up on our own).  Nobody rules forever, and the Republicans clawed their way back to power. By 1895, the GOP was in complete control of state government. They understood that their opponents were a varied lot – by occupation, religion, region, race, ethnicity – and they also understood that fusion was the very rule that allowed different political factions to unite across those differences. The GOP decided to prevent such coalitions from forming rather than have to defeat them once formed. Fusion voting was made illegal, and fusion parties vanished. Change the rules, change the outcome. For more than 130 years, the fusion ban stood unchallenged. But Bagenstos argues the ban on that kind of coalition-building is newly and perhaps even deeply vulnerable because of how Michigan voters have amended their own state constitution in recent years. A new context has emerged. In 2018, voters approved creating an independent redistricting commission and added voting protections. In 2022, the same coalition went further, adding a sweeping guarantee of "the fundamental right to vote" that bars anything that denies, abridges, or unreasonably burdens that right. Layer on top of that a "Purity of Elections" clause in the state constitution that the Michigan Supreme Court has long read as barring the legislature from favoring major parties over minor ones. Bagenstos thinks fusion's opponents are running out of room. Ask Bagenstos why this matters beyond party-building, and he discusses the voter's dilemma. [W]ithout fusion voting in a first-past-the-post system, what we have for the voter is effectively three really bad choices, right? The voter who doesn't see themselves represented in either political party either swallows their lack of representation and votes for the political party that's closest to them that doesn't really represent them, or the voter votes for a third party, which is at best ineffective in our first-past-the-post system, and at worst likely to lead to actually the worst outcome from the voter's perspective because it will be a spoiler for the major party candidate who is closest to the voter; or the voter just says, look, I'm not represented here, I don't have good choices, I'm not gonna vote. That framing is part of why Bagenstos's client list is such a cross-cutting assortment: the Common Sense Party (mostly ex-Republicans repelled by Trumpism), the Libertarian Party, a Democratic candidate who'd also like a second ballot line, and individual voters from across the spectrum. As he puts it, "I think that we see... this is not about a particular ideology. This is about opening up our democracy." The fusion ban's defenders will likely lean on the old argument that banning electoral coalitions between major and minor parties protects political stability — the same reasoning the U.S. Supreme Court used in 1997's Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party to bless Minnesota's fusion ban. Bagenstos doesn't think that argument has aged well: I don't know how these justices — who are very smart people — or really anyone else looking around could look at the world we're living in and say the two-party system has really worked well to stabilize our democracy. The evidence that it's not is just all around us. He points to an expert report from political scientist Lee Drutman that has been submitted as part of the plaintiff's case. Drutman argues that the Rehnquist Court got it exactly backwards: more viable parties, not fewer, is what would actually get us out of the zero-sum "doom loop" that has so degraded politics and governance over the last thirty-plus years. The case now heads to the Michigan Court of Claims this fall, with appeals likely to follow that will ultimately produce a state Supreme Court ruling.  Bagenstos doesn't expect relief in time for the 2026 election, but he's hopeful it could arrive before 2028. If Michigan's courts agree, the ruling could become a template for other states that, like Michigan, have recently strengthened their right-to-vote guarantees in ways the old fusion bans never had to answer to. Asked how he keeps going, given how much of his own civil rights work is being undone in Washington right now, Bagenstos didn't reach for a pep talk. He pointed to the long view — the lawyers who kept fighting through Jim Crow, family members who lived through the McCarthy era and kept going anyway: "We've been here before, and we wouldn't have made the gains that we'd had if everybody had given up." And then the more ordinary discipline: reading a novel every night, walking outside, not letting the work swallow the whole of a life. Share this episode with someone who still thinks the two-party system is just how democracy works. It isn't. It's a design choice — one Bagenstos is now in court arguing Michigan got wrong.

The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Jennifer McCoy, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and political science professor at Georgia State University. McCoy is one of the world's leading researchers on democratic erosion and recovery, and on political polarization — a topic she has spent years studying comparatively across dozens of countries. The conversation with host Micah Sifry covers a lot of ground: what's really wrong with American democracy right now, what happened in Hungary, and whether structural reforms like proportional representation and fusion voting could help dig us out. McCoy wastes no time getting to the diagnosis. "I think we're in trouble," she tells Sifry early on.  "We have extreme political polarization that I call pernicious polarization because it has a harm to democracy... And we have democratic backsliding going on. And basically we have a frayed society, a frayed social fabric that makes it difficult." "Pernicious" is the key word. McCoy draws a distinction between ordinary political polarization — which simply presents voters with choices, and can be healthy — and the pernicious variety, which "gets so extreme and uses negative tactics and negative rhetoric that demonizes and belittles the opposition" to the point where compromise becomes impossible and the other side starts to feel like an existential threat. That dynamic, she argues, is exactly what we're living through, and declining presidential poll numbers alone aren't enough to break it. Her proposed remedy is counterintuitive, at least to ears trained on the bridge-building discourse: rather than trying to reduce polarization directly, she argues we need to repolarize — but along a different axis. Instead of the red-vs.-blue, Democrat-vs.-Republican divide that currently structures our politics, she wants to see a new organizing line drawn between top and bottom, or between the interests of ordinary people and a corrupt elite. As she puts it:  "We have one axis of polarization now, and it's basically defined as red, blue, Democrat, Republican... So what we're saying is you take that axis and you shift it around, like moving around a clock, move that line around and create a new axis, but one where you're not dividing into two equal parts, where you can actually galvanize a large group, a large majority, around an idea." It sounds theoretical, but McCoy has a concrete recent example: Hungary. This past spring, Viktor Orbán — who spent 16 years transforming Hungary from a democracy into what McCoy calls an "illiberal autocracy," and who has served as a model for authoritarian leaders elsewhere — lost power in a stunning electoral defeat. The victor, Peter Magyar, was actually a defector from Orbán's own party, and he succeeded largely by doing exactly what McCoy's framework prescribes: presenting a new axis of conflict, pitting the nation against Orbán's "clan" of cronies and corrupt elites. Magyar campaigned everywhere, including rural areas that had long been Orbán strongholds. And because he came from the inside, he was able to preempt the government's attempts to pin corruption charges on him by simply acknowledging his own past and denouncing the system. The Hungary comparison leads naturally to a conversation about structural reform. Sifry raises fusion voting and proportional representation as tools for escaping the two-party doom loop. McCoy is an advocate for both. On proportional representation, she makes the case with precision: it reduces pernicious polarization because it opens up political space beyond the binary. When people only have two options, she notes, they tend to vote against the scarier one — negative partisanship — rather than for something they actually believe in. Proportional systems allow parties to earn seats in proportion to the votes they actually receive, and multi-member districts could, in a state like Georgia, produce a congressional delegation that includes a MAGA Republican, a traditional Republican, a centrist Democrat, a progressive Democrat, and perhaps a Libertarian or Working Families representative. That's not fragmentation; that's a politics that more accurately reflects what voters actually want. And on fusion voting, McCoy is equally warm. She notes what Ticket readers already know: fusion doesn't require a constitutional amendment. Neither does proportional representation for the House — just a change to a single law passed in 1967. "[N]either of these require a constitutional amendment," she says. "They can be done just with changing legislation." The episode closes on the question Sifry puts to every guest: how do you cope? McCoy turns to Buddhist philosophy — "impermanence makes possible transformation" — and to the people around her: colleagues who believe in human agency, students, and younger generations who want something different and are ready to take risks to get it. It's a grounded kind of hope, the kind that comes from studying a lot of dark history and deciding to stay in the fight anyway. Give it a listen. McCoy is a rigorous, genuinely comparative thinker who has spent her career watching democracies bend and sometimes break — and occasionally recover. Her framework for understanding what ails us, and what might help, is one of the more useful ones available right now.

The latest This Old Democracy features Tabatha Abu El-Haj on associational party building, the power of a ballot line, and what democratic accountability can look like in practice. Something is missing from American politics — and it's not a policy position or a charismatic leader. It's a structural connection between the people who hold office and the communities they claim to represent. Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a professor of law at Drexel University and a nationally recognized scholar of the First Amendment and the law of democracy, has a name for what's missing. She calls it associational party building, and it's the subject of both a paper recently released by New America under the title A Model for Associational Party Building and a rich conversation with host Micah Sifry on the latest episode of This Old Democracy. The argument is deceptively simple: parties work best not as top-down electoral machines, but as living, rooted civic associations — embedded in the communities they represent, rich in face-to-face relationships, and accountable in ways that money alone can never manufacture. Abu El-Haj came to this view through an indirect route. She had spent years studying money in politics, but arrived at a sobering conclusion: you can't take money out of politics. So where does that leave ordinary people? "What they have is numbers on election day, but to exercise that power requires effective organization." She describes the problem with both major parties in terms that will feel familiar to most readers. The two major parties, she says — especially at the national level — "feel very disconnected from what the rest of us experience life as." They operate, in her telling, at a remove from ordinary people, inside echo chambers driven not just by moneyed elites but by professional ones too. An associational party is a remedy for that disconnection — one that starts bottom-up, invests in genuine community relationships, and gives ordinary members real encounters with the candidates and elected officials who depend on them. Here is where the theory connects most directly to election reform. What gives an associational party its distinctive power — beyond what any civic coalition can achieve on its own — is the ability to make its contribution to a candidate's victory visible and auditable. Without a separate line on the ballot, there's no way to prove, conclusively, how many votes came from your people. And without that proof, elected officials can always find a reason to take the meeting but ignore the ask. As we've written here frequently, fusion voting allows minor parties to show that proof  without asking voters to waste a vote or spoil an election.  Abu El-Haj's research draws on extensive interviews with organizers who built a new fusion party and experienced the shift from interest group to political party firsthand. The civic group leaders recounted how their relationships with legislators were transformed:  "Before we were a part of the party, we would get access, but it would be like begging…. And then, you know, we would tell them, yeah, we delivered, but they were like, 'Yeah, we probably could have gotten those votes anyways. We could have hired other people to, it was just a matter of money.'" Once a party can point to a specific number of votes cast on its line in a specific district, that argument collapses. The contribution is no longer deniable. And from that shift — from invisible to auditable — real accountability becomes possible. The ballot line, she notes, also acts as organizational glue: in any coalition, tensions arise, but members who have tasted that kind of power don't easily walk away. Abu El-Haj is careful to note that her primary case study — the Working Families Party's experience in New York — was founded by unions and community organizing groups with deep roots in relational politics, and that not every new party effort starts from that foundation. But the core insight, she argues, applies broadly: to centrist parties trying to build a home for voters alienated from both major parties, to reform movements working to restore fusion voting, and as a cautionary lesson about what happens when parties don't do this work. She points to MAGA's rise as a case in point: it was able to emerge, she argues, in part because the old Republican elite "was not very well embedded" — and the same is true of the Democrats. "In the Bush-Clinton era," as she puts it, both parties were "disengaged." Churches, PTAs, civic associations, local unions — these are potential anchors for any party willing to do the slow, relational work. The model doesn't require a particular ideology. It requires a particular kind of commitment. "I hope that the leaders of those parties, when they get their ballot line in, will think about comparable ways to embed themselves." Go listen. It's one of the more useful conversations we've hosted about what democratic power actually looks like — and how to build it.

The  Callais decision is a watershed moment. Latner argues the only path forward runs through "party-system" reforms: PR w/ a side of Fusion. The Supreme Court didn't just rewrite the rules of redistricting in Louisiana v. Callais. It effectively ended, after more than forty years, the regime of legal protection for minority voters that the Voting Rights Act had built. The decision stripped away the tools that voting rights lawyers have relied on since the 1980s to identify and remedy racial vote dilution, leaving what Justice Kagan called, in dissent, "a dead letter." The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Michael Latner, professor of political science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and director of research on democratic reform at Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Latner co-authored Gerrymandering in America: The House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Popular Sovereignty, and a major article in the Yale Law Journal (co-authored with Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer and Carlos Algara) titled "Callais Confusion, Power Sharing, and the Inevitability of Proportional Representation" — published shortly before the Court issued its ruling. Host Micah Sifry puts that article, and its central argument, to the test over the course of a wide-ranging, substantive conversation. Latner walks through the mechanics of the Callais decision with admirable clarity. It isn't just that the court made it harder to prove discrimination; it's that the majority essentially declared that the only permissible approach is "racial blindness" — that courts can no longer rely on racial data to identify whether district maps dilute minority voting power. The catch: in a country where 90 percent of Black voters in Louisiana vote for the Democratic Party, the idea that race and party affiliation can be cleanly separated is, in Latner's telling, "empirically not possible." States can now gerrymander with impunity as long as they claim they're doing it for partisan, not racial, reasons. The fallout has been fast. Louisiana suspended an ongoing primary to redraw its maps and remove one of its two majority-minority districts. Tennessee eliminated its Black congressional district. Alabama, Mississippi — and maybe others are moving. As Latner puts it, states are "acting on the decision even before the ink is dry." What does all of this tell us about American democracy more broadly? Latner doesn't soften the diagnosis: "We are the only major democracy in the world that seats only two parties in its legislature... many U.S. voters were understandably upset at the Democratic Party in 2024. It was a poorly performing party. There was a leadership crisis. These are things that in normal democracies you would see the governing party replaced with an alternative. The problem in the U.S. is that the only alternative was an authoritarian one."  Most proportional systems, he notes, have contained or constrained their authoritarian movements — through coalition governments that collapse when one party overreaches, or through vote-share constraints that limit how much power any single faction can accumulate. The United States is one of the rare cases where a major party has been fully taken over by authoritarian forces and handed unilateral control of government. That is not a coincidence. It is a structural consequence of our electoral system. This brings Latner to the central argument of his Yale Law Journal article: that proportional representation (PR) is not merely desirable but, given where the courts have taken us, inevitable. "The short answer hearkens back to Winston Churchill — that the Americans will do the right thing after they've tried everything else." The logic runs as follows. If the Supreme Court demands racial blindness, and if the only system that can achieve fair representation without relying on racial data is one where the threshold for winning a seat is low enough that any coherent organized coalition gets seats proportional to its votes — then proportional representation isn't just a reform preference. It is the only legally defensible path to minority representation in a post-VRA world. "If the Supreme Court is serious and we are now in an era, a post-VRA era where … the use of racial data in order to protect voters of color is not going to be used in operation of protecting voting rights; and if in fact racial blindness, which is what the court refers to as an appropriate approach to protecting voting rights, if that's actually the only option, there's only one type of electoral system where you can truly be racially blind. That is, you don't take account of race when you're designing the rules and the system, and that's proportional representation."  The contrast with the old VRA framework is sharp. Under the Voting Rights Act, the state had to carve out specific districts, count citizen voting-age population, use racial data at every step. Minority representation was protected, but it was also dependent on continuous federal oversight and a sympathetic court. Under PR, you simply set a low enough threshold of exclusion — and then let voters organize themselves. Micah pushes back, usefully, on the political economy of this shift. The longstanding voting rights community isn't necessarily ready to let go of the VRA framework. The instinct, understandably, is to try to win back Congress, pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and restore what was lost. Latner is sympathetic — but skeptical. He is candid that the political reform movement has historically done itself damage by acting independently of the civil rights community, and that the voting rights groups he works with regularly are rightfully cautious about new frameworks that haven't proven themselves. But he thinks the moment has forced a practical reckoning. "The legal community is not just skeptical," he says. "They're also pragmatic." Nobody understands what has happened to the VRA better than the people who have spent careers enforcing it. And they are, increasingly, looking for alternatives. Where does fusion voting fit in this emerging picture? Latner makes an argument that should resonate with readers of this Substack: fusion isn't just a stopgap for single-seat offices that can't be carved into proportional districts. It's a structurally important complement to PR in a country like ours — and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the U.S. Senate. Even in a world where the House moves toward proportional representation and more state legislatures follow, U.S. Senate races will remain single-winner affairs. That is not going to change.  Still, it is possible to inject proportionality into U.S. Senate races via fusion parties and fusion voting. And in doing so one almost surely strengthens pro-democracy forces competing against anti-democracy or authoritarian actors.   "My view is that fusion voting is actually a really important part of an effective reform movement in the U.S.... The U.S. Senate is the clearest case of where, once you've got multiple coalitions competing in a state, whether it's a right wing and a center right party or a green party or multi-dimensional politics... you're still going to have a single candidate and you want those smaller parties to have an influence." He points to New York City as a living example where third-party lines play a real role in electing candidates from single-member districts. Fusion, in that sense, is already doing part of what PR does: translating organized political identity into real electoral leverage. At the end of every episode of This Old Democracy, Micah asks guests the same question: how do you cope? For Latner, the answer has a certain pleasing literalism. "Getting punched in the face and punching other people in the face helps me both release tension and keep me humble."   He's a regular at the gym, he explains, and does kickboxing. But beyond the stress relief, he returns to something more durable: a sense of calling. Every generation, he argues, has been required to fight for democracy — it has never arrived or sustained itself on its own. This moment is simply the version of that fight that belongs to us.   "We stand on the shoulders of giants," he says. "We stand on the shoulders of those who've come before us and we've just got to keep pushing."   It's a dark time. But the argument Latner is making — that the destruction of the VRA framework, however painful, may finally force the reform movement to reach for something structurally durable — is at least a reason to think clearly about what comes next.