Austin rents fell by as much as 20 percent from their 2021 peak, and almost overnight the city was canonized as proof that supply alone can tame housing costs. But Austin’s housing story was never just about supply. Such a dramatic outlier should invite observers to ask why rents collapsed particularly at a time when deep concerns among YIMBYs over Austin’s penchant for restrictive zoning laws was seen as a major impediment during and after the COVID era.

Before COVID, Austin was already one of the fastest-growing metros in the United States. Domestic migration averaged over 33,000 people a year over the 2010s, and jumped to over 48,000 in 2020. During the previous decade, the metro added over 350,000 net new migrants, a jump of 16 percent of its population in 2019. For over a decade Austin was attracting people at an unusually high rate.

Then came the pandemic-era boom, when the city’s growth story seemed to move from strong to unstoppable. Remote work, tech expansion, migration into the Sun Belt, and the city’s cultural pull created the sense that Austin could be on a one-way path toward ever-higher demand and ever-higher housing costs. That fear was not irrational. By 2022, the Austin Chamber reported that the metro grew by over 60,000 people in a single year, especially in the neighboring high-demand suburban Williamson and Hays counties. The politics of supply were shaped by exactly that atmosphere. Mayor Steve Adler had been making that warning for years, saying in 2017 that without housing reform Austin could “end up like San Francisco,” with no real middle in the market.

So developers and policymakers responded to a real signal. Austin built at extraordinary scale. From 2021 through 2025, the metro authorized about 190,000 housing units—roughly 93,000 single-family homes and 98,000 units in structures with two or more units—so the supply surge was broader than apartments alone. The apartment wave, though, was especially large: developers delivered about 32,000 apartment units in 2024 and another 17,000 in 2025.

But supply is only half the story.

The other half is that year-over-year population-growth demand in Austin tanked just as developers were rushing to deliver housing planned around the assumption that the pandemic-era boom would continue. By 2023–2024, domestic migration into the metro had dropped to its lowest year-over-year annual growth rate in over 70 years. But low demand is not zero demand which is why absorption, the rate at which vacant apartments become occupied, doesn’t explain the dynamic at play as supply-siders may think. They might say apartment demand could not have weakened much because absorption remained high. But achieved demand is demand achieved at the new lower price. If landlords have to substantially cut asking rents, offer six to eight weeks free, or pile on concessions to fill new units, then strong leasing does not prove that demand remained strong enough to support prior price levels. Austin ended 2025 with rents down 4.3 percent year over year with more than 20,000 units of net absorption. Those facts are not at odds with one another. Dallas Fed reported last month that concessions remain widespread in Texas and are especially prevalent in Austin, where they are expected to continue through mid-2026 despite “healthy demand fundamentals.” In plain English, yes, a lot of units got leased; but they got leased in a market that had to reprice.

What the Austin case demonstrates is that large additions to housing supply can push rents down but that supply alone cannot produce dramatic affordability gains. The latest data show Austin’s apartment pipeline under construction was down 34 percent annually. Developers may build until housing is affordable, but they are not drafting plans to oversupply a market out of the goodness of their hearts.

Austin’s story points to a broader but still practical lesson in the housing debate. Supply matters, and cities have good reasons to pursue growth. But growth comes at a price. Where change happens, what it looks like, how fast it comes, and what it does to a community’s feel all matter too. Any town or city’s present arrangement is what attracts people more than what it can become. Where policy technocrats are wedded to the future, the broader public is to the present. Austin is useful precisely because it shows both sides of that reality at once: abundant building can relieve price pressure, but the resulting city is shaped not only by how much gets built, but by timing, demand, and the local tradeoffs growth brings with it.

That is why Austin should not be treated as a universal housing parable. There is no single urban value to maximize, whether it is affordability, growth, preservation, or efficiency. Cities have to balance opportunity and continuity, acceleration and preservation, expansion and cohesion. Austinites, like residents anywhere else, are not wrong to care both about affordability and about the kind of city they are building. The real challenge is managing change without pretending tradeoffs can be wished away.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that national data is all but worthless in aiming to have a mature understanding of the housing market — because there are actually many dozen housing markets and rates are consequently highly localized. A few metros on the western and eastern coasts of the union account for much of the so-called “national” housing shortage when viewed on a continental lens. Yet many other metros face a mix of strapped supply, particularly in cities like Atlanta, where large institutional investors own tens of thousands of homes at a time when homeownership has become more difficult.

The “Austin Miracle” is a more contingent case where a market built for one level of growth then had to compete harder for tenants when that growth normalized. The broader housing issue is hyper-local and constantly changing and the metros said to face the worst shortages today may not look the same in years or even months. Austin’s rent drop is good news for renters like myself, but it is not an accurate expectation of what supply alone can regularly achieve. It is a reminder that housing markets move on both sides of the ledger, and in the case of the Texas capital, a freak case of supply and demand heading in opposite directions that nobody saw coming five years ago.

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In light of today’s decision by the federal Supreme Court, I’m re-publishing this post I wrote from October 2025.

The Court today narrowed the capacity of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act holding that Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district was created with race as the controlling factor, and because the Voting Rights Act did not clearly require that remedy, the district is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Last fall, I wrote about how such a ruling could prompt states to redraw districts around principles including compactness and local community, features the Court cited in its opinion.

This term, the U.S. Supreme Court took up a case in oral arguments — Louisiana v. Callais — that could reshape the electoral districts drawn by states that elect state and federal lawmakers. Observers posit that the Court is poised to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, designed to ensure a certain number of majority-minority districts exist to retain the ability for racial minority voters to elect their preferred candidates. The plaintiffs argue that forcing states to meet racial targets is unconstitutional. A previous case sheds light on how I think the Court could — or could not — rule and the extent to which the federal electoral ramifications would be exceptional.

In Louisiana, the case centers on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a key part of the law that bans voting rules or district maps that make it harder for racial or language minorities to have an equal voice in elections. One way states have sought to do this is by creating majority-minority districts — the surest way minority voters can elect their preferred candidates.

Louisiana created a second majority-black congressional district after its hand was forced during previous litigation that argued the state’s packing of black voters into a single district diluted black voters’ overall representation in a state where they constitute about a third of the population. Now, the state is arguing that the district it was forced to draw is a form of racial discrimination, even if the ends, defendants would argue, are designed to protect minority representation. For decades, Section 2 has been used to challenge unfair maps without proving intentional racism — only that the results are discriminatory. Now, the Court is being asked whether that very rule is constitutional, or whether requiring states to consider race when drawing fair districts violates the Constitution’s promise of equal protection.

I’m not a legal expert, but I do want to observe a path the Court could plausibly take based on another case also involving the Voting Rights Act — one that reignited litigation around the landmark law — Shelby County v. Holder.

In that case, the Court struck down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, nullifying Section 5’s federal preclearance requirement for states with histories of racial discrimination. The coverage formula, based on outdated 1972 data, had never been revised despite congressional renewals. Chief Justice Roberts argued that “our country has changed,” and laws must reflect current conditions. Importantly, in a related preceding case out of Texas, Austin Utility District v. Holder, Roberts signaled to Congress that the data governing Section 5 was outdated. At the time the ruling came down, Democrats held a nine-seat majority in the Senate and a substantial majority in the House. Congress didn’t act, and so Section 5 remains not so much “gutted,” as critics often write, but neglected by a more polarized Congress.

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As interesting in this case is the extent to which members of the Court may be amenable to a new standard that places local geography at the heart of fair representation. In Callais, the Supreme Court seems to entertain that idea, based on analysis from the oral arguments. During oral arguments, several justices signaled interest in narrowing Section 2 rather than dismantling it. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh questioned maps that link distant black communities, suggesting states should prioritize compact, locally coherent districts before considering race. Kavanaugh’s comments about a “time limit” on race-based remedies pointed to recalibration, not repeal, while Justices Alito and Gorsuch stressed that race cannot outweigh traditional map-drawing principles. Together, their questioning hints at a “local-first” standard — one that elevates geographic integrity and community boundaries, curbs Section 2’s scope, yet still allows minority influence to emerge naturally where population patterns support it.

In Louisiana specifically, a “local-first” ruling would have immediate and tangible effects. The state’s current map, which added a second majority-black congressional district under federal pressure, links distant communities from Baton Rouge to Shreveport with little geographic or cultural continuity. If the Court adopts a standard requiring compactness and local coherence before racial considerations, Louisiana could be permitted to revert to a map more reflective of its parish boundaries and regional identities. Such a change would likely reduce the number of majority-black districts but would emphasize political representation grounded in shared local interests.

One 2019 survey finds that 37 states require compact state legislative districts, while 21 states require compact congressional districts. Such a pivot, if the Court were to take one, would be well within a standard that a large majority of states apply in congressional or state legislative redistricting, or both. However, “even where compactness standards exist,” the study finds, “courts have difficulty enforcing them. There is no clear threshold at which a given compactness measure’s numeric value indicates a violation.” Iowa, Colorado, and Michigan, for example, have quantitative measures. Other states rely on phrasing like “reasonably compact.” It’s also worth mentioning that a “local-first” compactness isn’t intended to strike a proportional partisan balance by one measure or another. It is designed to represent communities with like interests based on geography. Everything else is secondary. After looking at some congressional and state legislative maps, it becomes easy to guess which states have compactness requirements and which don’t.

An even more interesting question is the opportunity such a ruling presents in indirectly tempering political gerrymandering as a second-order effect, which the Court declined to weigh in on back in 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause.

State courts could cite the Callais opinion as persuasive authority under their own constitutions to strike down extreme partisan gerrymanders, while legislatures and redistricting commissions might codify those neutral principles into law. Such language could elevate the integrity of local geography as a predominant factor and could be incorporated into how states shape new maps.

Such a decision could make sprawling districts easier to attack, particularly for Democrats who would be eager to cite how certain state lawmakers’ approaches to redistricting may contrast with that of the conservative Supreme Court. Even if the ruling were to apply only to race-related cases, the logic could make its way further into popular discourse, onto referenda, and perhaps into state constitutions. Or not. Such a ruling would almost certainly secure broad discretion for states, perhaps to keep districts with high proportions of minorities local and compact while others remained sprawling.

Whatever the outcome, Callais will test whether the Court still trusts states to govern their own representation. A “local-first” standard wouldn’t end the politics of race or power, but it could quietly shift where those fights are fought. Even so, there remains work for Congress to take up in restoring voting rights protections before, in 2031, the Voting Rights Act is set for renewal.

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Six years on, the conventional wisdom about COVID remains oddly imprecise: that the United States should have had a more centralized response because the virus transcended borders. Even after reading a number of critiques, it’s unclear what that response would have looked like. The path that was ultimately taken, primarily by nature of the constitutional order but compounded by an inept national information ecosystem, was the dual-federalism path. The federal government didn’t fail in its response because it was mostly not its responsibility to respond. That duty rested with the states, and that is precisely what made the U.S. response, if not swift, then sustainable.

Many of the most prominent critiques of the American response were, at bottom, arguments for more national direction, even when they stopped short of spelling out the legal machinery. In September 2020, Ed Yong at The Atlantic portrayed national failure as the product of national incompetence and drift, as well as online misinformation that undermined expertise. In April 2020, the Center for American Progress called for “a national and state plan” and later endorsed a 45- to 60-day national stay-at-home policy as an “essential first step,” pairing it with mass testing, tracing, and isolation. Vox, in August 2020, lamented the lack of a “unified state or national response,” adding that “the patchwork we have created will allow coronavirus to spread” in a post gawking at crowds of people out on the water in Iowa’s Great Lakes region. What ran through these pieces was not always an explicit defense of federal coercion, but a recurring frustration that never seemed to articulate a concrete alternative that would have produced better outcomes on mortality and infection rates.

A stronger approach, like China’s, which used mass testing, sealed off villages and residential compounds, deployed wartime emergency footing, and enforced travel restrictions and lockdowns for extended periods of time, would not have been received well in the United States. Or take Australia, which deployed mass compulsory testing, sealed off neighborhoods, set hard movement limits, and aggressively enforced public defiance. Each of these would have faced explosive pushback in the United States in a year already defined by political unrest.

There’s the softer version — the cooperative-federalism approach — that instead would have perhaps seen states act more at the mercy of federal guidelines and coordination efforts. And in the early part of the pandemic, the efforts to “slow the spread” to give hospitals time to assemble the capacity to take on new patients, along with the early guidance around distancing, could be regarded as de facto cooperative federalism.

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The trouble is that public health is fundamentally a dual-federalism issue, in which the federal and state governments have separate and distinct roles, the latter of which possessed much of the legally binding authority to carry out policies that may have done the most to limit transmission or illness. But despite this, the limited advisory role the federal government did have was undermined by several examples of conflicting, misleading, and politicized information from official agencies like the CDC, but also from a national public-health elite aligned with more prescriptive approaches to containment.

During the Trump period, the CDC stated and then walked back the idea that asymptomatic exposed people might not need testing. During the Biden period, the pattern was less overt interference than highly visible reversals, including the CDC’s claim that vaccinated people “don’t carry the virus,” a statement that was far too categorical and later looked plainly wrong as breakthrough infections mounted. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director at the time, misrepresented her agency’s study on outdoor transmission rates. The phrase “pandemic of the unvaccinated” was also politically potent but too sweeping. Vaccination clearly reduced severe illness and death, but vaccinated people could still contract and transmit the virus.

Independent of either administration, national public-health figures also undermined trust. National Institutes of Health Director Anthony Fauci was a primary character here. Early on, he discouraged mask use for the general public, then later supported widespread masking, with later explanations about supply shortages making many people feel they had been managed rather than candidly informed. He also fed a “moving goalposts” perception when he acknowledged raising his public herd-immunity estimate in part based on what the public seemed ready to hear. Even when the underlying science was genuinely evolving, that style of communication made national guidance sound like strategic persuasion.

Independent of Fauci, the effectiveness of masking was overstated. While it was defensible to argue that masking helped some, especially better-fitted and higher-grade masks, expert messaging often projected more certainty and uniform effectiveness than the evidence warranted. That helped turn a limited precaution into a cultural wedge issue, encouraging an epidemic of hygiene theater. As far as national expertise went, the American Public Health Association didn’t do any favors toward earning public trust when the organization effectively excused mass social-justice protests during a phase marked by fervent insistence on social distancing, calling “racism a public health crisis.” At the same time, an open letter from 1,000 public-health professionals and community leaders circulated excusing the protests when masking and social distancing were being fervently preached to the broader public.

The national media also played a central role in eroding trust in national experts by pointing its scrutiny in one consistent direction and presenting unsettled questions with overconfident answers. The legitimate, and perhaps even likely, theory that the coronavirus was derived from a compromised lab in Wuhan was dismissed as a crackpot right-wing conspiracy theory. The idea that Trump told people to drink bleach was a lie; he never said that and his implication that light could be a disinfectant was a poorly-communicated prospect that did have serious scientific grounding.

. Real and safe human drugs like ivermectin, though not found to be an effective coronavirus treatment, were rebranded for months as horse dewormer. That led figures like Rachel Maddow to spread bold misinformation in the form of a fake story about gunshot victims in Oklahoma hospitals having care redirected away from them to treat patients who had overdosed on ivermectin. On vaccines, skeptics who early on said vaccination would not prevent transmission were treated as cranks despite this proving true once the vaccines were widely available and other strains emerged. Concerns about school closures were too often brushed aside as selfish or unserious, even as evidence mounted that prolonged remote learning was harming children’s mental health and derailing academic progress.

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All of this is to say that states and localities did not fill a void left by a failed federal government. The response to COVID most relevant to Americans was firmly within the legal domain of the states.

Dual federalism may not have manicured an austere and technocratic response, but what it did do was make the response sustainable because it bound the most restrictive powers to locally accountable officials. In many respects, governors wield more unilateral power than presidents, which makes sense, as the U.S. constitutional order was designed with numerous impediments proportionate to the scale of the jurisdiction. Governors directed or heavily influenced schools, retail, and recreational gatherings. Trump’s claim of having “total authority” collapsed almost immediately going into April 2020, as his reopening plan was worth less than the paper it was printed on.

But it isn’t as though state decisions were met without resistance. Anti-lockdown backlashes in Michigan and Wisconsin were flashpoints as weeks of “sheltering in place” dragged on. In New York, Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods were targeted for closure. Across the Sun Belt, states moved in various ways, including by limiting capacity in certain public spaces, to tailor restrictions to what was palatable to the immediate public they were embedded among. That lockdowns were met with such resistance underscores the imprudence of an alternative response in which much of the discretion over these policies was left to a gridlocked and grandstanding Congress, a self-aggrandizing egotistic president, or an unaccountable federal bureaucracy covered by national media institutions with zero interest in challenging centralized information.

In a system where the core police power already rests with the states, that made policy variation less a failure of design than a reflection of both constitutional structure and epidemiological reality. In that sense, COVID’s border-crossing nature strengthened the case for federal coordination of information and resources, but not necessarily for a uniform national regime of closures and mandates.

COVID federalism, rightly, did not resolve division among Americans precisely because there are values and approaches to operating amid an epidemic that do divide Americans, perhaps irreconcilably. Yet there is a deeply entrenched notion that believes unity may simply be enforced through national uniformity. If only national authority figures could paper over the divisions with a prescriptive response, voila, this could have unified the country. Of course, that is never said aloud, but the logical path seems to unravel toward such a conclusion.

Division — the benign, nonviolent sort that recognizes clear divergences in culture, values, and needs — is not to be papered over in a democracy in the name of unity, nor should what constitutes democracy be conflated with channeling disputes through unrepresentative and distant national institutions. When people believe their own values, fears, and tradeoffs are at least partially reflected in the authority governing them, compliance becomes less a matter of coercion and more a matter of civic acceptance. In that sense, federalism did not merely disperse power, but provided a structure through which a divided people could remain civically associated without first becoming morally uniform. Relatedly, surveys after the height of the COVID era found governors, as well as state government, receiving higher approval and trust ratings than presidents and the federal government, respectively. None of this is to say a non-centralized response was ideal or did not pose its own risks, but in a hyper-nationalized, and thus divided, union, non-centralization doesn’t have to demonstrate superiority in every respect, only that it remained the stronger alternative.

Relatedly, COVID also taught us that ubiquity is a poor limiting principle for uniform rule. That a problem may emerge everywhere does not itself justify uniformity, either in principle or in practice. As with COVID, the virus did not affect all places at the same time, with the same severity, or always among the same groups of people. One will recall that outbreaks of new strains into 2020 and 2021 ebbed and flowed by region. Enhancing the coordination of material resources at the federal level has its advantages, but as far as policy powers go, it would have faced not only principled resistance but practical challenges as well, with technocrats who enjoyed little public trust left either to impose uniform limits on economic and educational activity or to micromanage such activity at the local level — both of which seem untenable. A free society needs a limiting principle for federal public policy when confronting major challenges, including lethal ones, that transcend state borders, because when it comes to morally fraught questions, the surest way a divided people remain united in their fundamental commitments is by giving them more avenues to express their views on governance rather than channeling those views through a single institution meant to represent a consensus among the whole that does not exist.

The federal government played a crucial role in doing what it does best: lending aid amid an initial massive disruption to the labor market and marshaling the resources to accelerate vaccine development. At the same time, COVID exposed not just the principled and constitutional limits of federal power, but the practical ones as well, revealing how easy it is to overvalue solutions while undervaluing the importance of communicating them through trusted expert and media institutions. The American response to COVID varied because outcomes in any democracy of its size and complexity will vary. Much as tolerating speech we disfavor is a test of the resilience of free expression, so too is deferring life-altering questions to institutions proximate to the people a test of democracy committed to remaining plural.

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Five years after progressives and technocrats on the left started calling for the abolition of the legislative filibuster in the federal Senate, President Donald Trump and a small number of congressional lawmakers are calling for the same. Though the idea is meeting stiff resistance among Senate Republicans, it’s a moment to confront some of the assumptions about axing the filibuster and governing via bare majoritarianism in such a tightly polarized union.

Chatter among the GOP about axing the filibuster first came up as last year’s shutdown stretched on. Now it’s come up again as Trump pushes Congress to pass the SAVE Act, a bill that, among other things, would require voters to provide a passport to vote in federal elections. Even so, filibuster abolition seems much more at home on the left—the side that has historically embraced centralized power. Though there remains a rift between technocrats and progressives, one thing that seems to unite them is a disdain for mediating institutions that impede centralized power.

The premise to end the filibuster rests on the idea that the majority should rule, and that if Americans don’t like the results—disruptive though they may be—voters can simply vote them out, and dare the winners to repeal their supposedly popular policies. Further, the idea is that ending the filibuster would prevent senators at the ideological center of the chamber from impeding glorious progress in the national interest. But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong? What if, as is so often the case in politics, the cause-effect link winds up not being straightforward? What if instead bare majoritarianism winds up shifting conflict inward from the center?

There hasn’t been a lot of good, well-worded polling on the filibuster generally or lately. An April 2021 Monmouth poll found the public divided 34%-34%, with 33% having no opinion. The same poll found 38% support to keep the filibuster, another 38% to keep it with reforms, and 19% to eliminate it entirely. A Morning Consult poll from October 2021 found 41%-27% support in favor of the filibuster. Phrased differently, the same poll found the public narrowly favoring, 43%-40%, a rule where a majority of 60 votes is required to pass legislation.

Historically, the filibuster wasn’t designed as a grand constitutional safeguard. It emerged accidentally from Senate procedure and culture. In the early Senate, debate was often constrained by the chamber’s own norms and by the expectation that senators would eventually yield to a vote. Over time, especially after the Senate removed a formal “previous question” motion in the early 1800s, the combination of unlimited debate and a small, clubby institution created the possibility of prolonged obstruction—but it wasn’t routinely exploited. For much of U.S. history, the Senate simply didn’t operate as a body where every major bill faced a 60-vote test. The tactic was used episodically, often at moments of high intensity, and it carried reputational costs. That changed most infamously when Southern senators used filibusters and other delaying tactics to defend Jim Crow and block civil-rights legislation.

Critics of the filibuster on the left will contend that it is used today in a way the Founders would have never intended, but, as those who wax on about the Founders are so often reminded by those on the left, times and circumstances change. Given the consolidation of power at the federal level of government and within the executive, for which most of the Founders did not intend, old rules can find new relevance when consolidation increases systemic risk.

The contemporary story—especially post-2000—is where things escalated. As polarization rose, the filibuster became normal operating procedure: a quiet expectation that major legislation requires 60 votes, because the minority can force the majority to burn time to get to a vote. But the real accelerant was the nuclear-option logic that turned Senate rules into a tit-for-tat arms race. Things escalated further when Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader from Nevada, detonated the supermajority threshold for most executive and lower-court nominations, setting off a domino effect that Republicans had little choice but to reciprocate. At the time Reid pulled the trigger, Senate Majority Leader warned him that he’d regret it. Republicans, in response, axed the filibuster for federal judges and U.S. Supreme Court justices, effectively clearing the way for three Republican appointees to join a majority-conservative U.S. Supreme Court—plus a record-number of appointees to the federal bench—only to be outdone by Joe Biden.

The federal Democratic trifecta of 2021-23 was really reflective of pent-up demand among liberals and a wave of venture capital-backed progressive news outlets to tackle economic and climate issues that developed during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Leveraging the COVID crisis to cram through bold action, originally to the tune of $7 trillion in new spending, is what seems to have put filibuster abolition on the table. The old “never let an emergency go to waste”.

And while there are risky ideas, including among centrist technocrats, to do things like outsource more authority over electrical transmission to FERC or strong-arm states and localities into urbanism, we seem to be in a different era—one that might still result in the filibuster’s demise but also see tempered policymaking, at least relative to the 2021-23 period. Why? Today, the national debt is starting to worry even those on the center-left. It’s become more acceptable within the mainstream to abandon climate apocalypticism for climate pragmatism by acknowledging the demand for fossil fuels. There’s wider recognition of the difficulty and tradeoffs of taxing wealth and unrealized capital gains, neglecting the U.S.-Mexico border, and transitioning to a European-style single-payer healthcare system at a time when Europe’s feebleness and dependency on the U.S. for its defense is in large part due to spending on its social welfare programs.

More to the point, even amid the pursuit of a more disruptive agenda, what seems more likely to occur in a federal Senate without a filibuster is the relocation, not the elimination, of conflict, from the center and inward within the caucuses themselves.

At least when it comes to higher-profile legislation, the filibuster frequently forces the coalitions within the parties to reach outward, at least occasionally, to find the marginal votes needed to close debate, otherwise known as cloture. Removing the 60-vote requirement to end cloture could shift the bargaining when disruptive policy comes up and induce wider rifts between party factions that, in themselves, wind up mediating policy.

When a party can say, “we don’t have 60,” it lowers the temperature inside the caucus. Uneasy members can hide behind the math. Maximalists can be told—without anyone taking personal blame—that the chamber’s rules won’t allow it. Disagreements still exist, but they’re easier to manage because the path is obviously narrow. Remove the filibuster and that disciplining constraint disappears. Suddenly the question is no longer “can we find ten votes somewhere?” but “can we keep every last one of us in line?” That would put pressure on many more senators to privately balk, bargain for concessions, or publicly defect when a bill clashes with their state’s interests. I suspect that when Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona took heat for holding up glorious progress in 2021-2023, they were also providing cover for other Democrats alarmed by filibuster abolition but who did not need to or want to say so out loud.

The dynamic of the 51-vote regime is that a threshold of 51 votes makes passing ambitious legislation numerically easier but strategically equally or more difficult. If one side is acting with urgency and expects the next election to flip control, it has an incentive to push bigger, more entrenching changes. The catch is that bigger change creates more room for dissent within a party caucus when members are no longer protected by the other side failing to play ball. That can raise internal temperature, harden factional lines, and turn ordinary ideological differences into loyalty tests that, in turn, place at risk incumbent senators in competitive races and create an opening for primary challenges or party losses to the minority party. The wager liberals are making is that Democrats will pass such popular policies that Republicans who return to power will be politically foolish to repeal them, as was the case with the Affordable Care Act. But the bigger and more structural the agenda gets, the more it strains a caucus stitched together by factions that have become more, not less, visible since 2010. The paradox is that eliminating a tool associated with gridlock can make gridlock more likely—by moving the fight from a visible, cross-party threshold to a series of internal standoffs where a handful of senators have even more reason to defect, delay, and demand more, even if it happens in private.

But the minority would still have constraints to impose without a filibuster. Though it may not block legislation, there’s an entire toolkit of proceduralism available to create friction for the majority party.

The Senate runs on consent and time. Much of what happens in any given week—scheduling, routine motions, expedited consideration, moving “noncontroversial” business—depends on unanimous-consent agreements. A determined minority can withhold that consent and force the chamber to do everything the hard way. That won’t always stop a bill, but it can make the process so slow and exhausting that leaders have to triage: which fights are worth days of floor time, and which are better postponed, watered down, or dropped.

The minority can also grind the gears through procedural objections, amendment floods, quorum tactics, repeated votes, and full readings—turning the floor into a sequence of delays designed to run out the clock. The majority may still prevail, but only by spending weeks on what could have taken hours.

And in the 24-hour news cycle, the minority can trade consent for votes on embarrassing amendments designed to split the majority or raise the cost of passage. Often the goal isn’t to kill the bill outright, but to make it painful enough that a few majority senators blink. None of this produces the clean majoritarian accountability abolitionists promise. The outcome is more like guerrilla warfare: governing that is more draining, more deadline-driven, and more reliant on maneuvers—creating stronger temptations to route around Congress altogether.

That last point matters because some self-styled realists argue that ending the filibuster would rebalance power away from an aggrandized presidency and bureaucracy and back toward Congress. This is an extraordinarily naive assumption.

Congress’s capacity constraints don’t vanish under bare majoritarianism. And if policy can swing every two or four years, lawmakers have more incentive to write broader statutes that delegate more detail to agencies, not less. Conflict then shifts from legislating to implementation—behind closed doors, through rulemaking and litigation—inviting more judicial review and more executive workarounds. The presidency remains the focal point of problem-solving whether the Senate needs 60 votes or 51. The executive will only get reined in by laws that explicitly restrain executive power, or by courts that do.

In a more extreme scenario, progressives and centrist Democrats could join forces not merely on sweeping health care, tax, or climate policy, but on institutional radicalism: adding new states to pack the Senate, expanding the Supreme Court, nationalizing voting rules, and placing federal power over redistricting. In combination, these moves could entrench Democratic power in ways Republicans have not been willing to entertain in Congress, given their thinner appetite for institutional upheaval beyond unilateral executive overreach that transcends presidents.

Ending the filibuster is sold as a way to make Washington finally “work.” But in a polarized, factional era, it’s more likely to change where dysfunction shows up than to eliminate it—replacing one chokepoint with dozens of smaller ones. If those, too, are eliminated over time, such an event becomes as strong a causal candidate for the union’s gradual dissolution as anything else that’s been surmised in the commentariat.

The filibuster may not be sacred. But neither is the fantasy that American politics operates in a straight line—or that bare majoritarianism is synonymous with wholesome democracy and clean governance.

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I don’t know about you, but when I was in grade school, the Gilded Age was a pretty neglected period in United States history class—teachers seemed to largely hop over the period between the end of Reconstruction and the Progressive Era. In the current period, though, the parallels to the Gilded Age are pretty stark. Does it supply clues as to what’s to come this year and in the years to come?

After the Civil War, the U.S. reunited and rapidly industrialized. Wartime production, new banking and corporate forms, and a flood of railroad building emerged. National policy often favored growth through tariffs, land grants, and loose regulation. Wealth concentrated, city cores urbanized, labor unrest grew, and politics became more tangled in corporate power than it had been. Not to mention the partisan media and the heightened salience of immigration and civil rights issues.

It was also a window of time within which the Union saw some of its most contested presidential elections in history, as well as the last time (and only other time) a president won a re-election bid to a nonconsecutive term. That, in turn, was followed by the opposition controlling the federal government for a generation.

Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump share the rarest American political rhythm. Both were treated as mistakes the system would correct, and both came back anyway. And in both cases, the comeback was not powered by a makeover but by an old fixation that grew louder while they were gone. For Cleveland, the fixation was tariffs. Protection was a disguised transfer from ordinary consumers to organized producers, the argument went. When people started to feel that after four years of Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland gradually became more validated and started sounding like the only major figure who had been insisting the country was paying a hidden tax to the well-connected. Though a fan of tariffs, what catapulted Trump back into the White House, in part, was border security—but also the stark contrast to his predecessor (and successor). Until Governor Greg Abbott of Texas began bussing migrants north from a U.S.-Mexico border that saw a surge in encounters, the migration issue never left the minds of the American public. Biden ran on normalcy, and between disastrous fiscal policy, chaos at the border, and a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump benefitted from a sense of buyer’s remorse that Kamala Harris couldn’t overcome.

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The years between the 1880s and the 1910s are useful here because the parties were not ideological monoliths. They struggled much the way the current parties have, between factions. They argued internally over whether to lean into populist anger or to reassure business and institutions.

Democrats start the period with Cleveland’s posture, which is better described as reformist restraint than as modern liberalism. It was anti-machine, suspicious of patronage, skeptical of expansive national programs, and oriented toward credibility in finance and administration. After the crash in 1893 and the mid-1890s trauma that followed, Democrats did not glide smoothly toward the center.

William Jennings Bryan came along as something of an insurgent and turned Democrats into a vehicle for moralized economic populism, aimed at concentrated power and the financial establishment, and it gave the party a mass style of politics that was louder than Cleveland’s own. But Bryan failed to overcome McKinley in two consecutive presidential elections. Bryan would also lose a third bid as the Democratic nominee in 1908 against William Howard Taft. Democrats pivoted to Alton Parker, a more conservative establishment Democrat, but he wasn’t able to unseat Roosevelt, who, while popular at the time, had begun seeing splinters within his party that McKinley had been able to keep together before his assassination. Eventually, Democrats landed on a different synthesis under Woodrow Wilson, a sweet spot of sorts between progressivism and managerialism, notwithstanding Wilson’s tarnished legacy as a segregationist.

As for Republicans, they had been the reform party from the post-Civil War era through Reconstruction and into the stratified Gilded Age. By the 1900s and 1910s, the Republican argument became increasingly nationalistic. Roosevelt believed it to be the duty of the federal government to curb abuses within the system and called for a unity that wound up involving a considerable amount of consolidation and anti-institutionalism. His successor, William Howard Taft, embodied a progressive conservatism that combined the antitrust and reform-mindedness of the Roosevelt period with a regard for institutions. In 1912, after 16 years running the federal government, Roosevelt, the third-party Progressive nominee, challenged Taft, the incumbent Republican president, splitting the vote and handing a landslide victory to Woodrow Wilson.

The Republican triumph that begins in 1894 is usually attributed to one thing. The country fell into deep economic distress after 1893, and Democrats were the party in power. Republicans were able to tactfully do what Democrats are trying to do today, which is bridge the divide between the progressive populist wing and the market-oriented technocratic wing—and you can see this in the breadth of popular news opinion, which leans left, in Democratic primaries across the country, and among the prospective presidential candidates.

For a time into the turn of the 20th century, Republicans looked like the party with a theory of modernity. In an era when the federal government was becoming a more consequential actor, the party that seemed more at ease with centralized power kept finding ways to win even when it was internally divided. More broadly, Roosevelt’s strongman “New Nationalism” style politics treated fragmentation as a problem to be solved and treated national authority as the instrument for solving it. The reform impulse became less about leaving space for local variation and more about building a coherent national state that could manage the economy and discipline power. It’s also the case that state and regional polarization, and the limited though material success of third-party candidates, often foiled either party from earning popular majorities into the 1900s.

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That brings the story back to 2026. The safest prediction in American politics is that the president’s party usually bleeds seats in midterms. The conventional wisdom is that Republicans lose the House and possibly the Senate this year.

The harder question is scale. A true 1894-style catastrophe is less likely now because polarization and national sorting act as guardrails. And it appears, for now, although things can change, that Democrats aren’t leading by a larger margin than they were compared to the 2018 midterms—but it’s also the case that polls in Virginia and New Jersey last year underestimated the turnout gap between Democratic- and Republican-leaning voters. There are also fewer competitive districts—but it’s also the case that, eventually, after years of tight margins, things break decisively for one party within a broader realignment.

The 1894 number is worth keeping in mind as an image even if the modern translation is smaller. Republicans gained on the order of a hundred-plus House seats in that midterm and while it’s hard to see such a swing this time around, it’s a reminder that a governing party can go from restored to repudiated quickly when the public concludes that the return solved one problem and either created or exacerbated others.

Cleveland’s tariff focus helped bring him back, but it did not immunize his second term from conditions, factional splits, and the optics of federal power. If 2026 becomes a referendum on whether the country feels more stable and less strained, Republicans have a path to limit losses—particularly if rifts between Republican congressional candidates and Trump on foreign intervention and tariffs become more pronounced and less risky. Conversely, if the midterm becomes an indirect repudiation of the president, there becomes a certain inevitability of losses — something of a correction to the correction that we’ve seen time and again.

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Minnesota investigators say the FBI first indicated the case would be handled jointly, then reversed course and cut them off from evidence and interviews. The state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension withdrew. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty went public asking witnesses to send video directly to her office, because she fears the normal flow of information won’t reach local authorities.

The federal government not only used lethal force, but then tightened control over who gets to examine what happened. That’s what makes this feel like a Ruby Ridge moment—one that should awaken liberals’ skepticism of central authority.

In 1992, federal agents tried to arrest Randy Weaver at his remote cabin in Idaho over a firearms charge. What should have been a straightforward arrest escalated into a firefight that left a U.S. marshal and Weaver’s teenage son dead, and it quickly became an 11-day siege. The next day, an FBI sniper shot and killed Weaver’s wife, Vicki, as she stood near the cabin doorway—an unarmed civilian death that became the scandal’s emotional center—and the standoff ended only after negotiations brought the remaining family members out. Despite its legacy as a quintessential example of federal law-enforcement excess on the right, Ruby Ridge was an egregious abuse of central power, in part because official reviews later condemned both the operation and the federal government’s behavior afterward. The lesson was that when federal agencies overreach, they can also make it hard for outsiders to get a clean accounting of what went wrong. In the mid-1990s, a recurring complaint was that the FBI couldn’t be trusted to investigate itself in a high-profile shooting—so much so that outside officials were brought in for reenactments and scrutiny.

Minneapolis is not Ruby Ridge in the literal sense. Ruby Ridge was a siege in the woods; Minneapolis was a street encounter. Ruby Ridge involved explicit “rules of engagement” later condemned in official reports; Minneapolis is still being argued in real time. But the predominant parallel here is the federal move to keep the investigation inside federal hands.

For decades, skepticism of federal law enforcement has been culturally coded as a right-leaning obsession: Ruby Ridge, Waco, and a general fear of the federal state. Liberals, meanwhile, have often treated federal agencies as a necessary counterweight—either to local abuses in some eras, or to Trump-era threats in others. It’s easy to defend federal power when you think it’s aimed at someone else’s bad guys.

But now the force at the center of the story is ICE, operating aggressively in a big city amid the politics of immigration enforcement—terrain many liberals experience not as “law and order,” but as executive power grinding down ordinary people in public places. In the official response to the Minneapolis shooting, top federal figures framed the episode in sweeping ideological terms and defended it forcefully, while local leaders demanded basic transparency. Vice President J.D. Vance accused Good of being part of a “left-wing network” using “domestic terrorism techniques” and called her death a “tragedy” and a “tragedy of her own making.” The Department of Homeland Security tweeted a veiled threat: “Reminder: if you lay a finger on a federal officer or agent, you will face the full extent of the law.”

This is what it looks like when the old Ruby Ridge lesson lands on a liberal-coded cause: federal coercive power feels distant, unaccountable, and quick to declare itself righteous. Liberals have spent years treating distrust of “the feds” as someone else’s hobby; a case like this should force a rethink.

It also highlights something easy to miss when politics becomes tribal theater: federal police power is different in kind, not because state and local police are harmless, but because federal power is harder to correct.

When a local cop kills unlawfully, the system at least contains multiple points of pressure that are not the same institution: local elections, state investigators, state prosecutors, state legislatures. None of that guarantees justice, but the public can see where to push. When federal police kill a citizen, the loop can close faster: federal investigators, federal prosecutors, federal internal standards—and then a federal insistence that the matter is essentially federal business. Minneapolis shows that dynamic. State authorities are warning they may be unable to fully assess the facts if federal investigators keep the gates closed. When the highest domestic authority uses lethal force and then positions itself as the main judge of whether it acted properly, that’s a legitimacy problem.And that’s where liberals have an opportunity—maybe even an obligation—in a second Trump term and beyond.

Federal Democrats in the coming years would be wise to redirect some of their braintrust and political capital toward reforms to federal law enforcement and unilateral executive authority. More directly, the left needs to resurrect its skepticism of centralized authority, especially but not exclusively when it comes with a gun and a badge. Equally important, any diehard conservative who wants to live up to the Founders’ legacy of robustly checking central power should join them.

Minneapolis is a chance to insist, immediately, on the thing Ruby Ridge painfully taught later: no institution should be trusted to both wield lethal power and monopolize the story about whether it was justified.

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There’s a rhetorical trick embedded in the phrase “cooperative federalism,” and once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere.

The trick is that it takes a vertical relationship—Washington sets the terms, states execute—and markets it as a horizontal one: a “partnership.” But a core tenet of federalism is divided sovereignty, maximizing legal autonomy, and providing substantial recourse against federal action. A system can involve states, and even rely on them, without actually respecting those things.

In the cooperative model, the federal government typically decides the ends and the basic architecture, then offers states a menu: run the program our way (maybe with some flexibility), or face a penalty, a loss of funding, or a federal takeover. That’s not an alliance of co-equal governments. It’s really just a subcontract.

Take the Clean Air Act, the poster child for cooperative federalism. The EPA sets the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, and states are responsible for submitting State Implementation Plans showing how they’ll meet those federal requirements. That sounds like federalism until you read the fine print: the “state plan” exists to satisfy a federally defined target under federal review. And if the state doesn’t submit an adequate plan—or the EPA disapproves it—the federal government can step in with a Federal Implementation Plan. That structure matters because it reveals what the “cooperation” really is. The state’s discretion is bounded by a federal standard, policed by a federal agency, with a federal backstop waiting behind the curtain. When the fallback is “we’ll do it ourselves,” the state’s “choice” is less the choice federalism implies (to govern differently) and more the choice a contractor has (to accept the client’s specs or lose the job).

The Congressional Research Service has a refreshingly plain description of the overall pattern. It is cooperative federalism that provides for shared state and federal regulatory authority, typically by empowering states to be the primary implementers of policies established at the national level, often using conditional grants and “conditional preemption” if states don’t adequately implement the federal program. This is like that meme about a married couple where the husband and the wife disagree over what the husband should wear to a special occasion, so they compromise and the husband wears everything the wife wants him to wear. “Empowering” is doing a lot of work, and in this context it doesn’t mean empowering states to chart the course their representatives would like; it’s a perversion that casts federal directives as discretion to make cooperative federalism seem more palatable to skeptics of federal power.

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Cooperative federalism, like much of the centralizing infrastructure in this country, emerged during the 1930s New Deal era as scholars sought to shift away from the preceding regime of dual federalism, the idea that the state and federal government had clearly demarcated areas of responsibility neither should violate. The web of conditional grants, bureaucratic rules, and administrative requirements became the way for a federal government without the capacity to govern directly to wield its influence indirectly through the micromanagement of states and localities. Today, the presumed virtue of policy centralization is so entrenched both in political discourse and within an academic environment disinterested in studying subnational politics that cooperative federalism is referenced as a fair compromise of shared power that modernizes but still honors the union’s founding arrangement. The reality is that cooperative federalism is acutely hierarchical, and anyone who acknowledges the clear trajectory of political, corporate, and cultural power upwards can see that cooperative federalism isn’t an olive branch but a usurpation.

Now, the honest defense of cooperative federalism is that it’s a pragmatic response to scale. The federal government doesn’t have the administrative capacity (or local knowledge) to run everything directly. So it sets national goals and lets states tailor the means. Sometimes that tailoring is real. Sometimes it produces better outcomes. And in a country as large and diverse as ours, total uniformity can be both politically unstable and substantively dumb. Another defense is one pitched by folks including Donald Kettl, who argues that federalism fails because it produces unequal outcomes that are morally and politically unacceptable. In order to minimize or eliminate unequal outcomes between the various states, the federal government needs to intervene and condition policy toward equity.

These defenses concede the key point: cooperative federalism is primarily an administrative strategy, not a theory of divided sovereignty. It solves a management problem—how to get fifty governments to help implement national policy—while presenting itself as a constitutional virtue. Accountability also can become an issue. When a program is federally structured but state-administered, blame becomes liquid. Federal officials say, “the states are the ones running it.” State officials say, “we’re implementing federal requirements.” Voters sense the evasion, then conclude—often correctly—that nobody is really in charge. The system produces what looks like local governance while functioning like layered command-and-control.

This is why the anti-commandeering doctrine, the foundation of the Tenth Amendment of the federal constitution, is such a revealing contrast. The Supreme Court has been clear that Congress can’t simply force states to enact the federal government’s will. In the 2018 case, the Court, in a 6-3 decision, Murphy v. NCAA, restates the principle in blunt terms: Congress may not “commandeer” the legislative process of the states by compelling them, in this particular case, to not repeal prohibitions on private conduct. The very existence of this doctrine is an admission that there’s something constitutionally suspect about treating states as administrative arms of the federal government. And yet cooperative federalism is often designed to reach similar practical results without tripping that wire.

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The Medicaid expansion in the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act fight in NFIB v. Sebelius is instructive precisely because it made this dynamic impossible to ignore. The Court didn’t say Congress can’t encourage states with money. It said the Affordable Care Act’s threat—loss of existing Medicaid funding if a state refused the expansion—crossed the line into unconstitutional coercion. Even if you think the Court’s line-drawing was messy, the episode exposed the underlying reality: a “cooperative” program can become a lever to force state compliance when the funds are too large to refuse. And if it isn’t via fiscal federalism that the federal government operates on a false sense of cooperation, it will attempt itthrough legal federalism, as it had in the landmark Lopez case, where the Supreme Court struck down the galaxy-brain notion that federal firearms regulations in public school zones (governed by state and local governments) could be defended under the Commerce Clause.

For now, the courts appear settled on permitting the more substitutionist “cooperative” regime of “if you don’t establish your own X program, you will run ours in your state.” Where federal efforts to disempower states could be curtailed in the future is in the Spending Clause. In the future, courts could limit Congress’ conditional funding power by limiting the loss of funds to noncompliant states to newly appropriated money, not existing funds. Courts could also render certain conditions unconstitutional, including ones that condition grants on states undermining their own taxing, policing, or even election process.

Federalism is not “states help carry out federal policy.” Federalism is deference to the states on, at a minimum, matters not enumerated to the federal government in the Constitution. What federalism can be in the future is another matter—and one that I hope to lay out the possibilities for in this publication over time.

The United States can look within and beyond its borders for how it can rearrange its institutions for a sustainable federalism—fiscal, legal, and cultural. One that understands the federal government to be a servant and facilitator of the states’ will; that recognizes a role for the federal government to play in a progressive fiscal redistribution; that develops a bias toward deference to states and localities on legislation and implementation; and that bolsters state identity over the burden of conforming to a loaded and conflicted national label. As long as the debates persist over what the United States is and is not, and what being an American means and does not mean, the intimate places where we spend most of our time exist to ground us and grant us the opportunity to self-govern in a more perfect, yet imperfect, cooperative way.

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Much of the political-media industry is heavily invested in national narratives, national identity, national policy, and national implications—needlessly, in my opinion. Those stakes are creating an enormous amount of stress in the culture. An insistence on unity, the universalization of policy, and the misattribution of economic influence to the presidency are all deeply entrenched in our discourse and political reporting. There are few of us poking the bear and speaking up to question the wisdom of nationalization—the premise that progress and defending democracy means outsourcing more disputes to the national level. I appear to be the only writer I’ve seen committing to this with any regularity, but I welcome others to join me—or to introduce themselves. If you agree someone should be capturing this badly overlooked angle, consider a paid subscription. If you are part of an institution who may want to sponsor my work, reach out! With your help, I can commit more bandwidth to this work.

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This year I wrote about Trump’s disaster federalism and revisited the idea of tearing down the presidents. I wrote about the kayfabe fakery that exaggerates the president’s role over economics, how decades of law enforcement federalization paved the way for the arrest of a local judge, and how states are exploiting Medicaid. I wrote about finding fault in government during disasters, and the rise of far-center technocrats fixing to centralize more power in the name of pragmatism. I explored whether federalism failed 20 years after Hurricane Katrina, how Charlie Kirk’s assassination says more about the risks of nationalization than the volume of the discourse. I also wrote about how progressive vibes and moderate policies won in big cities this year and how artificial intelligence should prompt us to create more legal patchworks — just to name a few. Below though are some highlights from this year.

Decentralization doesn’t necessarily imply small government or large government. And while there are certainly different flavors of federalism, decentralization is, above all, about deference and about the critical role the central government ought to play in facilitating, not subsuming, that system of deference. Traditionally, advocating for states’ rights and local control has carried, and still carries to some extent, the baggage of racists who used “states’ rights” as a pretext to disenfranchise Americans. But if centralists can learn from the perils of centralization while still advocating reforms within centralized systems, decentralists can do the same. And for those of us on the left who still prize a healthy skepticism of central authority, there’s plenty of room—now and going forward—in the decentralization camp.

In the next year, I’m looking forward to tackling more ideas and issues, as well as doing a bit of electoral work as the 2026 campaign gets underway.

Until then, have a great holiday—and thank you again for reading!

-Robert

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According to Gallup in its October poll, sixty-two percent of Americans now say the federal government has too much power—a record high in Gallup’s trend back to 2002. The topline is notable, but the coalition is the story: Democrats swung in a year from 25% saying “too much power” to 66%, making them more likely than Republicans to voice overreach concerns for the first time since the mid-2000s. Treat that as more than partisan weather. It suggests centralized power can feel threatening even to many voters who typically prefer national capacity. Meanwhile, 6% said the federal government has too little power.

That broad unease sits on top of a broader collapse in faith. In 2023, Pew found only 16% trust the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time,” and 59% say their main feeling toward it is frustration. Pew also shows how federalism anxiety cuts both ways: 41% are extremely or very concerned the federal government is doing too much on issues better left to states, while 41% are extremely or very concerned that states aren’t willing enough to work with the federal government.

The favorability numbers point in the same direction. In late 2023, Pew found 22% favorable toward the federal government versus 50% for state government and 61% for local government (all down from a few years earlier). That doesn’t prove Americans are decentralists. It supports a simpler critique: our political culture treats legitimacy as if it can only be manufactured at the top, even as many people experience government as least credible at the top.

This is where the media frame matters. National politics is covered as if it’s the only politics that counts. Governors become presidential tryouts. Mayors become culture-war avatars. State legislatures become props in national dramas. Policy differences get narrated as threats to “the country,” not choices within a federated democracy. That frameI trains audiences to expect the presidency and Congress to settle every conflict, and it rewards politicians who route more problems upward. But when state and local government are acknowledged, when they are included in polling, when polls disrupt the presupposition that the federal government is not too powerful, Americans express a discomfort and distrust of center power.

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Now add the detail that makes the Gallup trendline harder to dismiss as mere out-party alarm. Yes, the 2025 spike is tied to the start of Trump’s second term, and Gallup points to expansive executive action as a likely driver. But even during the Biden presidency, one in four Democrats already said the federal government had too much power. That’s not some fringe reflex. It’s a reminder that skepticism of centralized authority isn’t confined to the right—and that the premise “national power is the obvious solution” was never as universally shared as elite discourse assumes.

One caveat, briefly: “too much power” doesn’t specify which branch, which policy domains, or what alternative people prefer. Public opinion can want stronger federal capacity in some areas and tighter limits in others; more national guarantees and more state variation. The point isn’t to pretend public opinion is coherent — and so long as it is not, it’s a stronger case for resolving public policy challenges at first locally and supporting local institutions in executing those policies.

So in the new year, I want to treat Gallup’s 62% less as a prompt for further exploration. I want to foreground what we rarely measure: where people think they can realistically be heard, what they think state and local institutions are for, and how often national politics is taking credit or blame for outcomes that are being produced locally. And I want to interrogate the media premise directly: how Washington-first storytelling raises the stakes, rewards maximalism, and puts pluralism on a destructively divisive path by insisting on a uniformity that will not be. Put another way, I want to aim to better understand what people believe democracy is for and what they believe are the institutions that maximize representation.

All of this is particularly important to probe given how the usually implicit and sometimes explicit premise on which much of the political discourse operates is that we should be striving for unifying conformity, smoothing over legal patchworks, and deferring to central power which has unparalleled expertise and wisdom. But as we’ve seen with the current administration and the preceding one, the union trained to concentrate power will keep rediscovering—under changing parties—how dangerous that concentration feels once the hand on the lever isn’t the one side may trust.

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President Trump says he’s about to rescue American AI from a “patchwork” of state laws. In a repudiation of the union’s basic premise, he wants a “one rule” executive order so companies don’t have to get “50 approvals every time they want to do something.” Meanwhile, firms like big tech investor Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI are aggressively lobbying against state laws. The president cannot preempt state laws via executive order. Trump’s post on Truth Social about this would-be executive order comes after Congress balked at freezing state AI laws; the White House is reaching for an order that would steer the Justice Department against them. This is pitched as temporary triage until Congress writes a national framework. In reality, it’s an attempt to decide who governs a general-purpose technology that will seep into every area of life. And it points in the wrong direction. AI is exactly the kind of domain where we should lean into legal patchworks.

Start with uncertainty. We don’t have a settled catalogue of “AI harms.” We have familiar problems like fraud, discrimination, error, and opacity showing up differently in criminal justice, health care, hiring, housing, and finance. A single federal framework that pretends to know the right balance for all of that might be more efficient in the abstract but introduces risks that outweigh the benefits. If a few large states adopt different limits on how insurers or employers can use AI, we’ll learn who overreached and which rules actually changed outcomes. A bad state statute can be repealed but a sprawling federal code that took years to pass, and years to admit is broken, is much harder to unwind.

AI also isn’t one product. It’s a layer that will sit inside systems we already run mostly through states and localities. Police will buy AI-assisted tools, school districts will adopt “personalized” platforms, state agencies will use models to flag fraud or sort applications. Those choices involve value judgments about due process, acceptable error, and tolerance for automation in sensitive domains. A dense, tech-heavy state and a rural, low-trust state may not want the same knobs turned the same way.

Patchworks are also a hedge against capture. When Washington is the only game in town, the rational move for large firms is to pour lobbying money into one set of agencies and a handful of committee chairs. If they win there, they win everywhere. When states retain real authority, they become additional veto points: attorneys general who can bring their own suits, state courts with their own precedents, sector regulators and procurement officers who can say no. That doesn’t guarantee smart regulation, but it makes quietly locking in bad regulation more expensive. The “50 approvals” line that bothers Trump is the whole point. What industry wants is not just clarity, but a single chokepoint it can learn to manage and, if it’s lucky, to own.

Centralizers sometimes concede this logic in the short run, then assume that once we “know more” about AI, the mature system belongs in Washington. That gets the structure wrong. The places where AI will matter most over time—health care, education, criminal justice, land use, benefits administration, licensing—are structurally state-heavy and will stay that way. If a state judiciary is going to let judges consult a risk-assessment tool, it makes more sense for that same state to set guardrails than for a federal agency to do it for everyone.

The right long-term picture is a thin but firm national floor that includes civil rights protections and basic due process in high-stakes automated decisions; national security and critical infrastructure guardrails; and competition rules that states can’t undercut. The federal government should stop states from going below that floor, not from trying to do better. Above it, states should own the bulk of deployment rules and remedies.

There’s also the question of power. We’re already drifting toward an AI stack where a handful of firms control the leading models, the cloud infrastructure, and the main distribution channels. A unified approval regime layered on top of that is an invitation to consolidate. Secure one friendly settlement in Washington and you effectively have a hall pass across the country. State-based patchworks don’t magically end monopoly, but they change the geometry. States have their own antitrust and consumer-protection statutes. They can bring cases when firms tie access to models to their own cloud or lock in agencies with exclusivity clauses. They can use tools like procurement policies, licensing, privacy, and unfair-practice laws to push back on abusive deployments even if federal antitrust enforcers drag their feet.

Patchworks also raise the cost of capture. Lobbying one national regulator is cheaper than lobbying three dozen statehouses, attorneys general, and utility commissions. No one should romanticize state politics. Plenty of states will under-regulate or turn AI into culture-war theater. But a map of overlapping authorities is harder to quietly rig than a single vertical chain running from a few executive-branch lawyers to a few committee chairs.

Finally, patchworks keep more of the AI fight where people actually live. The harms that will enrage voters will hit specific counties and neighborhoods. It is easier to show up at a statehouse, pressure a governor, or deny an attorney general re-election than it is to move a federal commission whose members mostly answer to the White House and congressional leadership. Trump’s order is aimed at sweeping those centers of power aside, which is one broader example of Trump’s penchant for authoritarian leadership.

The choice isn’t between chaos and order. It’s between a tidy national framework that’s comfortable for a handful of firms, and a rougher landscape of state-led rules that are messier, more varied, and more contestable. If some companies really can’t handle different rules in ten or fifteen states, that’s a prompt to go back to the drawing board.

We are destined to make serious mistakes with AI. We are better off making smaller mistakes, containing them, and allowing other states to learn from them than we are centralizing all of the risk at one point of failure.

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Since Democrats’ defeat in federal elections last year, a consensus has all but emerged that a major part of their corrective strategy is to muzzle their cultural progressivism and aim to build a broader coalition that can earn the party durable multi-majorities again. A core rift in the party is whether to move a leftward populism or toward the center on economics, but also the tenor of economic messaging.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, veteran Democratic strategist James Carville called for Democrats to pursue an “aggressive” and “sweeping” agenda of “pure economic rage.” After months of rising groceries and more public opinion data, Democrats and their broader brain trust think they’ve found a focus around which to bridge the intraparty rift, and that focus is “affordability” — a neutral and salient word recognizable by the layperson and that breaks from both Bidenism and “socialism”. It’s legitimately the best idea Democrats have going into the next three years. But “affordability” may prove to be treacherous if the term becomes a euphemism for left-wing economic populism from the Biden era and doesn’t resolve or at least recognize the differences that do exist on vibes (which do matter) and political strategy in the aftermath of the shutdown.

To Carville’s credit, he was quite a vocal critic of the left’s fixation on identitarianism and cultural condescension before it was widely acceptable in entrenched Democratic circles to push back against it. But the now banal observation that Democrats went overboard on culture really obscures the party’s extremism on economics and fiscal policy during the Biden presidency, which was marked by the kind of sweeping policy Carville seems to imply Democrats need to embrace.

But before getting into Democrats and affordability, it’s worth breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge how much of the politics surrounding the economy among journalists, the president, lawmakers and experts is a performance in the suspension of disbelief.

The politics of economics is mostly signaling control over the economy, including prices, that presidents do not have. Presidents with Congress can certainly raise prices but even prior to Trump’s tariffs, there was little Trump and Republicans could do to lower the price of consumer goods, the way there was little Biden and Democrats could do to lower inflation other than not pouring money into the economy. Most policies that could be traced back to a president or Congress take years, and even then it’s difficult to attribute macroeconomic outcomes to the president’s policy. A poll from last year found Americans divided on perceptions of presidential influence over consumer prices, with 25% saying the president has a lot of or total control, 35% saying “some control,” and 33% saying either not much or no control. The president ran and won on reducing prices that he doesn’t have the power to reduce — and yet, this false claim of authority is one that presidents never get fact-checked on by reporters in part because a false attribution of power drives storytelling. Out of one side of their mouth reporters clutch pearls over autocracy and out the other attribute job creation, consumer prices, GDP growth and unemployment solely to the president. If the political strategy around affordability feels amorphous — whether to lead with pragmatism or rage, moderation or zeal — it’s because it’s premised on a figment that makes debates over affordability feel like fighting with a cloud. But we’ll accept the premise and instead treat economics as a proxy for how best to win at politics at the risk of perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The first pitfall Democrats may face is allowing “affordability” to become a euphemism to bait suburbanites with moderate rhetoric into a more progressive agenda. Affordability concerns center around food and housing — the latter of which is much more localized. The rift in the party is whether to interpret concerns over momentary food and housing costs as demand for restructuring the economy, or alternatively, to advance minimally disruptive policies perceived ease upward pressure on prices. In either case, it’d be wise for either faction to say what they mean and do as they say.

This contrasts the run-as-a-moderate-and-govern-as-a-progressive strategy which was the cornerstone flaw of the Biden presidency, indistinguishable on economics from what one might imagine a Sanders presidency could have pursued given razor-thin congressional margins. Joe Biden campaigned on moderation and a return to normalcy but was pulled leftward on economics in a fit of, if not economic populist rage, then economic populist fervor having been flattered that he could cement his legacy as a modern-day Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in early 2021 roughly three months after a $900 billion bill poured a massive amount of demand into an economy well on its way to recovery. Combined with very generous unemployment benefits and a new entitlement program, the child tax credit, it overshot and hiked inflation to the highest level and for a longer period of time than any other developed nation that experienced inflation spikes despite the expertise of Nobel laureates advising the president that the inflation that wouldn’t be an issue (but was) would be transitory (which it was not).

Nor was it only progressive populists but center-left technocrats who were vouching for fiscal maximalism out of a belief that Democrats’ Great Recession response wasn’t strong enough but also out of spite for the GOP’s fiscal hypocrisy under Paul Ryan’s speakership. These factions, along with an outcomes-driven congressional press corps badgering senators to abolish the filibuster, also pushed to pass several trillions more in new spending, including the failed Build Back Better colossus, as inflation was rising to 7% before it’d max out at 9% nearly a year later. There were comparatively defensible pieces of legislation like the bipartisan infrastructure law and the CHIPS and Science Act, but also the Inflation Reduction Act involving industrial policy, climate subsidies, and place-based spending with weak fiscal guardrails, all framed as “middle-out” economics. The administration extended the federal eviction moratorium even after legal warnings, kept student loan payments paused for years, attempted a sweeping one-time cancellation that the Supreme Court rejected, and then pursued backdoor relief through new repayment rules. These executive maneuvers certainly did not begin with Biden, but they escalated under him, given the crippling pressure he was under from his left, and re-established a precedent of executive overreach currently being exercised by Trump. Finally, on trade, Biden normalized Trump-era populism rather than reversing it: he kept most tariffs in place, added new ones, and leaned into “worker-centric” trade and Buy American rules that privilege protected sectors and union jobs over the kinds of consumer prices that have risen since. So the U.S. already had one economic populist moment with Joe Biden and Democrats from 2021-23.

The ways Democrats can sidestep this problem are by, first, recognizing that there are multiple ways for Democrats — at the local, state and federal level — to win on affordability, but that will involve party leaders recognizing that a broad range of candidates on vibes, rhetoric and policy will need to be tolerated, if not encouraged. Among the very online, there’s a debate over whether moderates or progressives have a better electoral track record, and much of that boils down to methodology and classification choices.

In simpler terms, one can imagine a four-quadrant typology: moderate vibes–moderate agenda, progressive vibes–progressive agenda, progressive vibes–moderate agenda, moderate vibes–progressive agenda. There are examples of three of these being rewarded by voters.

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Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger of Virginia would be a prime example of moderation on both vibes and agenda, winning by the widest margin for a Democrat since segregation. For progressive on both counts, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani of New York or Mayor-elect Katie Wilson of Seattle would be examples of candidates who earned half the vote on leftward platforms.

Then, there are your progressives in the streets and your moderates in the sheets — these are most of the mayors who were elected or re-elected in major cities this year, including mayors-elect Helena Moreno of New Orleans, Corey O’Connor of Pittsburgh, Mary Sheffield of Detroit, and Cara Spencer of St. Louis — all prevailing over candidates to their left in primary or general election races. While affordability was emphasized to varying degrees in these campaigns, public safety, budgeting, economic development and anti-corruption were all major issues. These candidates succeeded in making order and responsible governance sound progressive throughout their messaging.

Finally, there are the moderate-on-vibes and progressive-on-agenda crew, the quintessential recent example being Joe Biden. Progressivism is proudly disruptive, and delivering disruption on an expectation of stability risks disastrous electoral results. This contrasts Barack Obama, who did the inverse by governing modestly to the right of his campaign rhetoric and lives on as the most popular political figure among Democrats and one of the most popular among the American public. Crucially, none of these urban mayoral candidates ran on economic populist rage.

But if affordability is the issue that transcends Trump and can unite Democrats for years, then resistance to Trump is the issue that can unite them now — but even anti-Trumpism reveals a rift within the party that calls back to the same one revealed during Biden’s tenure: Democrats aiming to govern more disruptively than their unifying fight against Trump suggests. Figures like Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland have criticized Democratic leadership for not fighting hard enough, building on the meme that weak Democrats are busy writing strongly worded letters while Trump dismantles the federal government. In fact, Democrats had notched legal successes against Trump’s agenda early in the year, unsexy as they may read, including blocking appointments and legislation via the filibuster.

But it isn’t clear what the progressives in Congress precisely have in mind by wanting Democrats to “fight” harder that doesn’t involve the Republican Party capitulating to progressive public policy. After all, this was the “fight harder” strategy during the shutdown: ground more flights and furlough more workers until the Republicans pass an extension of the Affordable Care Act tax credits. This proved to be untenable for at least eight Democratic senators (possibly more, but who faced greater electoral risk from sticking their necks out), including those like Tim Kaine of Virginia with a materially impacted constituency. Given that, the demand for Democrats to wait for Republicans to pass a key Democratic priority wasn’t practical. And as a matter of principle, nobody would expect the inverse — for progressive senators to include a Republican priority in a continuing resolution as a condition for re-opening the federal government. Mind you, all of this is occurring parallel to progressives and now a select number of populist Republicans who advocate for eliminating the filibuster, the primary means by which political minorities have checked the excesses of the governing majority.

The question of whether Democrats should moderate or radicalize is as much institutional as it is economic or cultural. Right now, federal politics exists in a world bereft of principle in large part because of the example set in the current White House. In turn, progressives and the president are operating from the same playbook: to use whatever means available to block power and to then dispose of those same means when power is acquired.

The next two years, let alone four or eight, are likely to be disruptive, and our capacity and understanding to tackle the largest problems have changed since the 2010s. On the S-tier progressive policy trifecta — inequality, climate change, and health care — new developments at home and abroad, along with influential new insights, are beginning to challenge the maximalist policies the left treated as no-brainers a decade ago. Europe’s brittle, risk-averse social democracy has underscored the importance of private investment and the difficulty with taxing wealth and figures like Bill Gates are reframing the fight against climate change away from apocolypticism. With China developing a military space program and the U.S. federal government nearing $40 trillion in debt, enough to make even center-left analysts anxious, the D.C. brain trust is likely to recalibrate around what is actually feasible.

But if Democrats decide that they want to move the party, and the union, left on economics — higher taxes on the wealthy, new and expanded entitlement programs, tougher anti-trust, the centralization of medical insurance, and a continuation of industrial policy — they should unapologetically run on that. They should listen to Carville, win if they can, and prepare to moderate. But whatever they do, they should steer clear of selling economic populism with a brand of mild-mannered disciplined pragmatism that they have no intention of living up to.

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To illustrate how strong the results were for Virginia Dems, newsrooms across the country universally compared the 2025 Virginia gubernatorial (and New Jersey elections) to the 2024 presidential results. This practice—treating presidential outcomes as a baseline—is now standard among election analysts, justified on two grounds: (a) presidential elections draw higher turnout, providing what’s assumed to be a more accurate reflection of a state’s partisan balance; and (b) polarization has so closely aligned presidential and state-level voting patterns that presidential data operate as good enough proxies for understanding non-presidential contests.

Meanwhile, I feel slightly insane for having to argue the basic point that elections should be compared to like elections—governors to governors, presidents to presidents, and so on. Why? Because (a) the data differ significantly, and (b) the media—yes, “the media,” and the generalization is justified here—by using presidential results as the default frame, aggrandize the presidency in an era of overreach, condition voters to a false binary and a two-dimensional, president-centric conception of democratic federalism, and obscure the local issues that actually define governance. (It’s no coincidence that New York City voters last week rejected a proposal to move mayoral races to coincide with presidential years.)

Presidential elections are not governor elections and governor elections are not presidential elections.

The 2025 Virginia gubernatorial results — at least the unofficial ones we have here — tell a different story from the presidential comparisons dominating headlines. Virginia moved roughly two points more toward Democrats in 2025 from 2021 than it did toward Republicans in 2021 from 2017. In 2021, the median county swung 10.1 points toward Glenn Youngkin, giving Republicans a narrow commonwealthwide win. Four years later, that same median county swung back 12.4 points toward Democrats, producing a 15-point commonwealthwide victory for Abigail Spanberger—the largest Democratic margin in modern Virginia history.

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Over the past eight years—three presidential elections and three gubernatorial contests—Virginia has ever-so-slightly nudged rightward for president but meaningfully leftward for governor. The median county shifted 4.7 points toward the Republican for president since 2016, while the commonwealth overall barely moved at just 0.2 points. For governor, the same median county moved 1.7 points toward the Democrat, but the commonwealthwide margin improved by 6.6 points—evidence that Virginia’s Democratic gains are concentrated in its most populous counties. That the presidential vote has become less elastic, while gubernatorial races remain more sensitive it seems to shifts in persuasion and turnout. In other words, the swing toward Spanberger was far larger than comparisons to 2024 presidential results would suggest.

Spanberger’s map also looked different. Nearly every county swung in her direction — just as nearly every county had swung toward Youngkin in his — but she notably underperformed Ralph Northam in some areas, her Democratic predecessor who won by 8 points commonwealthwide. Northam outperformed her in western Virginia and parts of Hampton Roads, but Spanberger outperformed him significantly across Northern Virginia, the northern Tidewater, and central and south-central Virginia winning 70 percent across ten Northern Virginia localities—up from Northam’s 66 percent—and notably 50.4 percent everywhere else, making Spanberger the first Democrat since at least McAuliffe in 2013 to win a collective majority of the vote everywhere outside of NoVA.

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Conversely, in the House of Delegates, Democrats picked up 13 seats bringing their majority to 64 seats on 58 percent of the commonwealthwide vote, the largest House majority for the party since the mid-1980s. Democrats controlled the House during redistricting, giving Republicans a taste of their own gerrymandering medicine.

Spanberger’s shattering of the Democratic ceiling — across any office — could be chalked up to how little regard Virginians have for the current president and the false premise that the president is responsible for the federal government shutdown disproportionately affecting those who reside in northern Virginia. The shutdown itself combined with Spanberger’s strong campaign on local issues, a lackluster opponent without messaging discipline, non-consecutive term limits on incumbent governors, plus being a level-headed and likable moderate all coalesced to work in Spanberger’s favor.

In some ways it seems Democrats have reached their electoral ceiling in the commonwealth. In two years, the narrowly divided Virginia Senate where Democrats hold a 21-19 seat majority will be up for re-election. In 2019, Democrats regained the majority by flipping 2 seats in what was Republican gerrymandered map. Now, with a map Democrats drew in 2021, it remains to be seen if the party can rekindle the magic of this year.

Spanberger’s victory wasn’t proof of a realignment so much as a recalibration: Virginians rewarding steadiness, moderation, and functionality in a moment defined by fatigue with national dysfunction. Whether Democrats can sustain that balance—governing pragmatically while keeping their coalition energized—will determine if this year marks a peak or simply a pause in Virginia’s long, uneven evolution.

Be sure to subscribe below to get That Patchwork’s 2026 Electoral Index — the only electoral index that measures partisan composition at the state and federal levels.

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Across the country’s 2025 mayoral races, a clear pattern emerges: pragmatists—candidates promising competence, safety, and functional governance—are quietly consolidating power. While progressives still hold sway in select coastal enclaves, most major cities are signaling fatigue with ideological politics and a turn toward managerial steadiness after years of disruption and drift.

To be clear, dozens of other cities and municipalities also hold elections this year. But this is just a recap of the largest cities.

In Oakland (election already held on April 15), Barbara Lee’s win marked less a triumph of the left than a reset. Though nationally known as a progressive, she ran on restoring order after the recall of Mayor Sheng Thao, promising steadiness amid crime and fiscal strain. Voters favored competence over ideology. In Pittsburgh’s May 20 primary, County Controller Corey O’Connor ousted Mayor Ed Gainey, reflecting similar fatigue with symbolism. O’Connor emphasized growth and service delivery; Gainey leaned on moral appeals. In a city blue since 1934, voters chose management over movement.

In San Antonio (election already held with runoff June 7) became a proxy for generational change. Gina Ortiz Jones defeated Rolando Pablos, pairing national experience with a cost-of-living focus and transparency message. Pablos ran on public safety and pro-business stability. In a city where the mayor holds one council vote, Ortiz Jones’ win suggests an appetite for fresh leadership that still values pragmatism. In St. Louis (election held in April), Alderman Cara Spencer unseated Tishaura Jones after leading the approval-voting primary. Jones touted ARPA-funded improvements; Spencer ran on anti-corruption and safety, a back-to-basics message that resonated with voters tired of rhetoric.

Seattle heads to November with Katie Wilson leading Bruce Harrell out of the primary. Wilson presses for social housing and limits on surveillance; Harrell points to progress on homelessness, housing, and climate, offering steadier hands amid high costs. Labor, tech, and neighborhood blocs will decide the margin. In Detroit, Council President Mary Sheffield enters the general as the institutional favorite over Pastor Solomon Kinloch, whose populism remains mostly symbolic. Voters appear more drawn to continuity on housing, taxes, and services than to another outsider experiment.

Miami’s crowded 13-way race offers one of the few urban openings for the right. With Mayor Francis Suarez term-limited, Republican-aligned figures Joe Carollo and Emilio Gonzalez have fundraising and visibility advantages. Even the Democratic hopefuls emphasize affordability and governance reform rather than bold ideological departure—underscoring the managerial tilt even in competitive terrain.

In Boston, New England progressive figure Mayor Michelle Wu is cruising unopposed after the September primary; her record—housing production, fare-free buses, lower gun violence—outlasted a business-friendly critique of zoning, streets, and stadium financing, validating a policy-heavy incumbency. Out in the Rockies, Helena, Montana, offers a microcosm of the pragmatic ideal: Commissioner Emily Dean and businessman Andy Shirtliff both campaign on infrastructure, housing, and local economic development. Ideology is largely absent; delivery defines the race.

In Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey runs on experience and delivery; State Senator Omar Fateh channels the organized left, backed by progressive councilmembers. Ranked-choice dynamics, union alignments, and post-2020 policing fissures make second-choice math as important as first-ballot enthusiasm.

Finally, New Orleans was so eager for change they settled their race without a runoff. Council leader Helena Moreno won outright (primary concluded Oct. 11), avoiding a runoff. Against a field including Royce Duplessis and Oliver Thomas, Moreno’s majority signaled a mandate for competent autonomy in a notoriously dysfunctional city government.

One could argue convincingly that many of these candidates couldn’t be considered moderates. But moderation is often a consequence of circumstance rather than choice. Progressivism that encounters reality will capitulate to forces that are directly bound to the interests of the people. Taken together, the 2025 mayoral cycle reads as a corrective to the last decade of ideological volatility. The most competitive cities—Oakland, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit—rewarded candidates who combined reform language with administrative seriousness. Even in left-leaning strongholds, the edge goes to those who can—or at least hopefully can—govern. Progressivism hasn’t vanished; it’s simply being domesticated.

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It’s worth acknowledging how national politics seeps into and distorts state and local dynamics. When every perception of a candidate traces back to their party’s standing in the last presidential race, the presidency becomes an imperial metric for all politics—even as we wring our hands about the authoritarianism that radiates from Washington. National media, especially cable news, thrive on elections; their easiest way to make a New Jersey governor’s race relevant to someone in Louisiana is to frame it through the president, the most polarizing and recognizable political figure in the country.

With this post, I want to recap each of the gubernatorial races, the issues driving them, and what they reveal about state-level partisanship beyond presidential voting patterns—something most electoral analysis still fails to capture.

The United States of Governors

First, it’s worth noting that most American electorates for governor diverge meaningfully from their presidential preferences, even when the winning gubernatorial candidate belongs to the same party they supported for president. In addition to writing about decentralization, I also compile electoral data to show how a state-centric, decentralized view of elections can more accurately capture the political composition of the union.

The map below shows governor index scores relative to presidential index scores. Each index score is derived from the average two-party net Democratic vote margin from the last two elections in that category, divided in half. From the map, you’ll see that Virginians vote roughly two index points (or four percentage points in an election) more Republican for governor than for president. Conversely, New Jerseyans vote about two index points more Democratic for governor than for president.

A majority of states have elected governors by margins exceeding two points relative to their presidential results. The most divergent state is Vermont, where a popular Republican governor, Phil Scott, has won multiple landslide re-elections opposite of the state’s strong Democratic lean federally. On the other end, Kentucky stands out for re-electing a Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, even as it has voted overwhelmingly Republican in recent presidential elections.

Overall, Republicans hold a two-point advantage in the median governor’s seat, underscoring the often-overlooked distance between national and state-level voter behavior.

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Virginia

Four years ago, Virginians elected businessman Glenn Youngkin, a conventional Republican, in an upset over former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe, who was seeking a non-consecutive second term. At the time, DC and New York political media largely credited Youngkin’s victory to Joe Biden’s waning popularity. The Biden administration was then facing rising inflation—partly a byproduct of the American Rescue Plan passed that spring—and the fallout from a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Coming just months after the Capitol riot, Biden, who had campaigned on unity and moderation, warned that extremism could come “from a smile and a fleece vest”—a nod to Youngkin’s signature look.

In truth, McAuliffe—a Clinton-era establishment Democrat who had only narrowly won in 2013—was never a particularly strong candidate. It’s also worth noting that Barack Obama, who carried Virginia by six points in 2008 and still enjoyed majority approval during the fall of the Virginia election that year, saw his party’s nominee, Creigh Deeds, lose the 2009 race to Republican Bob McDonnell by 17 points. In 2017, Democrat Ralph Northam outperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote share by four points. Together, these examples underscore how limited presidential politics’ influence tends to be on Virginia’s state elections. It’s also important to note that the 2021 Virginia governor election was arguably the first high-profile election to successfully challenge the myth that Republicans could only win in low turnout election as the 2021 race was a highest turnout governor election for the commonwealth since 1993.

More relevant were state-level issues tied to COVID-19 restrictions and public education. Prolonged school closures and mask mandates frustrated parents, especially in suburban areas, creating an opening for Youngkin. He centered his campaign on “parental control” and opposition to pandemic-era mandates, while McAuliffe defended the existing policies. The mix of lingering pandemic fatigue, education-related cultural flashpoints, and perceived government overreach turned schooling into a symbolic battleground—and helped deliver Youngkin a narrow victory.

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This year’s race features former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, who retired from Virginia’s moderately Democratic 7th congressional district to run for governor, against current lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears—the state’s first Black woman elected statewide, a Jamaican immigrant, and a former U.S. Marine. Next week, Virginia will elect its first woman governor. The campaign has revolved around the cost of living, immigration enforcement, public education, and abortion regulation. Earle-Sears has tried to cast Spanberger as a culturally out-of-step progressive, particularly on issues involving transgender students, but she currently trails Spanberger in the polls. In 2022, Spanberger was a critic of progressive rhetoric, particularly the “socialist” label some had embraced that she says resulted in losses of her party. In 2021, she said Biden was elected “to be normal and stop the chaos,” not “to be FDR”.

Spanberger shares the Democratic ticket with Senator Ghazala Hashmi of Chesterfield, who could become Virginia’s first Muslim elected statewide, while Republicans have nominated John Reid, who would be the first openly gay man elected lieutenant governor. For attorney general, incumbent Republican Jason Miyares is seeking reelection against Delegate Jay Jones of Chesapeake. Those races are tighter than the governor’s contest, particularly the attorney general race, where Miyares is even or slightly ahead of Jones, whose campaign was damaged by leaked texts advocating violence against Republicans. Split-partisan outcomes are common in Virginia—six of the last fourteen governors have served alongside executive officers from the opposite party, most recently Tim Kaine in 2005.

Youngkin remains a relatively popular governor, at least by modern standards of what constitutes popular. A Roanoke College poll this week found 50 percent of respondents approved of his performance, versus 36 percent who disapproved and 10 percent who had mixed views. The same survey showed Spanberger’s favorability at 47-42 and Earle-Sears’s at 38-45.

All 100 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates are also up for election. The chamber has see-sawed between the parties for at least the last decade and Republicans would need to gain three seats to retake the majority. Democrats have a 1-seat margin in the Senate and those elections are held next in 2027.

New Jersey

Four years after a surprisingly close re-election, term-limited governor Phil Murphy is leaving office at the end of his second term, opening the door to New Jersey’s most competitive gubernatorial contest in over a decade. The race between Democratic Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill and Republican former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, who Murphy defeated by three points four years ago, reflects a familiar dynamic in the Garden State: voters frustrated by high costs and heavy taxes but reluctant to return a Republican to office.

The story in New Jersey is a curious one. It’s a state that’s comfortably Democratic by almost every measure—from the presidency to the General Assembly—yet far more elastic in its choice of governors than Virginia. In a state presidential Democrats have carried by 15-20 points since 2008, Donald Trump narrowed that gap to 6 points in New Jersey last year. But it’s less Trump having ignited a new propensity among New Jersey voters to consider a Republican so much as New Jerseyans existing propensity to vote for Republicans had, for the first time in a while, transferred over to the presidency.

In Virginia, the last three governors have all won by single-digit margins. In New Jersey, former Republican governor Chris Christie was re-elected by over 20 points in 2013, Democrat Phil Murphy won his first term by a 15 points in 2017, and then barely held on in 2021. Also bear in mind that Murphy was elected in the shadow of Christie’s “Bridgegate” scandal which did no favors for his Republican lieutenant governor’s bid to succeed him. But this pattern also mirrors other northeastern states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and to a lesser extent Connecticut—places that lean Democratic overall but periodically favor a Republican for governor, often for fiscal or managerial reasons in high-tax states.

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Sherrill is a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who has represented the state’s moderately Democratic 11th congressional district since 2019, specifically the Montclair area just west of Newark. She’s running on as a pragmatic centrist focused on restoring affordability, expanding early-childhood education, and investing in infrastructure. She has emphasized competence and moderation, projecting herself as a steady successor to Murphy but without his polarizing reputation. As of September, an Emerson poll finds Murphy to have a lower approval rating than Youngkin, with 34 percent approving his job and 44 percent disapproving.

Ciattarelli, meanwhile, is making his third bid for governor. His campaign has zeroed in on property taxes, business costs, and crime, arguing that Democratic governance has made New Jersey one of the most expensive and overregulated states in the country. The cost of living is the defining issue of the race. Housing and property taxes remain the highest in the nation, and both candidates have promised relief—Sherrill through targeted rebates and regional cost-adjusted school funding, Ciattarelli through a broad overhaul of the state’s tax code. Voters are also preoccupied with education funding, particularly the long-debated School Funding Reform Act, which suburban districts say penalizes them while underperforming urban schools continue to receive disproportionate aid.

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Other issues animating the race include public safety, infrastructure, and abortion access. Sherrill has called for codifying abortion rights at the state level following national rollbacks, while Ciattarelli, who describes himself as “personally pro-life but politically moderate,” has avoided explicit commitments to change current law. Transportation policy—especially the Gateway Tunnel project under the Hudson River—has also re-emerged as a central campaign topic, symbolizing both New Jersey’s dependence on federal cooperation and its frustration with bureaucratic delays.

In the State Assembly, all 80 seats are up for election. Democrats currently hold 52 seats. For perspective, when Chris Christie won re-election by over 20 points in 2013, Democrats’ retained a majority of 48 seats on 53% of the statewide vote, and while no gerrymandering doesn’t eliminate such disparities, it is almost certainly a factor here. Republicans are unlikely to come close to retaking the State Assembly even with a comfortably Ciattarelli win. In the Senate, Democrats have a four-seat majority and the next elections there will be in 2027.

This year’s races show that state politics remain far more independent than the national storylines suggest. Virginia and New Jersey voters, like most Americans, still respond to costs, schools, and governance that shape daily life—not to Washington’s mood swings. The impulse to treat every election as a referendum on the president flattens a country that still governs itself locally on the things that are most immediately relevant to people.

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At this stage of the New York City mayoral race—an unrepresentative outlier among dozens unfolding across urban America—Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani could probably reverse his positions, or even shoot someone on Bushwick Avenue, and still hold his lead and its a testament to his capacity to sell himself — and sell out as necessary.

Mamdani has successfully developed a personal brand that pegs himself as a policy-substantive candidate. On the brand side, a key to selling oneself as a politician is being able to engage your audience in a suspension of disbelief much the way great brands do regardless of their fidelity to the product. Audiences generally remain fiercely loyal to brands that make them feel a particular way or align with a certain aesthetic or set of values, sometimes, in the case of Mamdani, regardless of whether one rides the bus, lives in a rent-stabilized apartment, or owns a home in a safe neighborhood.

The second part is operating on the pretense of being a policy-substantive candidates even when the candidate has a distinct reputation for pitching policies that are empirically challenged or politically unworkable. In 2016, the current president had ideas about immigration and trade that he spoke about with urgency but nobody called him a policy-substantive candidate the way Mamdani’s defenders have which goes to show how low the bar is in an age dominated by cults of personality in terms of what constitutes substance.

Though Mamdani has considerable support among middle-class New Yorkers, it was a surge among residents in heavily gentrifying neighborhood including what has been dubbed the “Commie Corridor”—the high-income riverfront Brooklyn neighborhoods packed with young professional progressives — that boosted him in the Democratic primary.

For these voters, Mamdani has tapped into the micro-brand culture trends that permeate social media. The heavy dependency on aesthetics for things like candles, sunscreen, apparel and energy drinks, but also the ubiquity of personal brand development on social media within the last decade reward campaigns with striking visuals and engaging personalities. This combined with his campaign have had something like a multiplier effect. A New York City voter, might have ambivalent feelings about political values but they might be more inclined to “wear the brand” if they see others they like wearing the brand. This reveals an irony of Mamdani’s appeal: among the smaller number of richer, politically-engaged, young professional supporters less likely to be impacted by his policies, his support was much stronger in the primary. Among the working class, who tend to be more politically detached, his support was weaker despite his supposedly policy-substantive platform being targeted at them.

As far as policy goes Mamdani’s platform mixes lofty ideals with the kind of grounded, fix-it-local pragmatism New Yorkers tend to appreciate. The most realistic parts—expanding childcare and making more bus routes fare-free already have been implemented to varying degrees. Expanded pre-K proved the city can scale early education, and the city has experimented with free bus pilots. Shifting some police duties to civilian responders or cracking down harder on negligent landlords could also move ahead without rewriting state law, just tightening what’s already there.

The most ambitious parts of his agenda—freezing rents, building 200,000 affordable units, launching city-owned grocery stores, setting a $30 minimum wage, and hiking taxes on the rich to pay for his agenda—are another story. Those depend on Albany’s permission, new funding, or both. Most will probably be shaved down into pilot programs, drawn-out studies, or smaller wins dressed up as big ones.

Among his most diehard supporters, though, Mamdani can do almost no wrong. They recognize to the extent he has to entertain feedback from Wall Street isn’t a sign of selling out but a prudent step to winning power — paradoxically the kind of pragmatism progressive populists would deride if his chief opponent, former governor Andrew Cuomo, were instead leading by 15 points. To this extent, there is no clear limit as to how much of his agenda Mamdani could voluntarily moderate before he’d cost himself meaningful support. Should he be elected, when the rubber meets the road, his mayoralty will likely resemble what New Yorkers would’ve gotten under someone like Andrew Cuomo, a former governor who has arguably the most progressive record of accomplishment of any elected executive in modern United States history.

Among the likelier outcomes of a Mamdani mayoralty will be that incrementalism—the very thing so often lambasted by people who call themselves democratic socialists. The rhetoric may be revolutionary, but the machinery of government isn’t—not simply because of corruption, bureaucracy, or special interests, but because of the accountability mechanisms and division of power that guarantee representation regardless of who’s in charge.

Acknowledging the limits of his agenda is the kind of buzzkill that doesn’t go viral among supporters. Conversely, his critics meanwhile are playing into the “kayfabe” nature of the race. The “communist” label they slap on him ignores the grind of budgets, state law, and administrative bottlenecks in seeing his glorious vision to completion.

But it’d be wrong to say that anyone — including many of Mamdani’s supporters, detractors, and those covering his campaign — care only or even primarily about the race’s implications for New York City. Remember, much of the political-media infrastructure is either located in New York, and those that aren’t are heavily influenced by commentators and tastemakers in the city. What looms over this mayoral race is the extent to which Mamdani’s victory or defeat will bolster high-profile figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for higher office but more so pivot the national Democratic Party in a progressive populist direction.

All of this is despite the fact that the New York City electorate is less representative of the median New Yorker let alone the American voter. Virginia, which also has a gubernatorial election this year and is at least within the ballpark of the median American voter, will likely elect its first woman governor with decent odds of it being among the widest margins for a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in decades — and yet few reporters are probing national Republicans over their views on Abigail Spanberger, and nobody really is framing the Virginia race as defining the direction or tone of the national Democratic Party.

Much has been commentated on about the parallels to the popularity of Mamdani and Trump — that they are populists talking about “real” stuff, like border security, trade and high prices. And there is a degree of truth to that despite the aggrandizement of a public executive’s influence over prices. But what’s primarily propelling these candidates isn’t what we think of as substance or, believe it or not, necessarily rational.

Among comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s greatest work wasn’t a stand-up routine but an acceptance speech for an advertising award he was given, in which he roasted the entire pretense of the affair:

I love advertising because I love lying. In advertising, everything is the way you wish it was. I don’t care that it won’t be like that when I actually get the product being advertised because in between seeing the commercial and owning the thing I’m happy and that’s all I want.

Despite how much trash is leveled at the current president, the former New York governor, or current city mayor for that matter, the more compelling brand will probably win out because when it comes to any sort of campaign, it’s less about what you what people to think than what you want them to feel. The best brands don’t need to deliver, they just need to look like they can to enough people.

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This term, the U.S. Supreme Court took up a case in oral arguments — Louisiana v. Callais — that could reshape the electoral districts drawn by states that elect state and federal lawmakers. Observers posit that the Court is poised to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, designed to ensure a certain number of majority-minority districts exist to retain the ability for racial minority voters to elect their preferred candidates. The plaintiffs argue that forcing states to meet racial targets is unconstitutional. A previous case sheds light on how I think the Court could — or could not — rule and the extent to which the federal electoral ramifications would be exceptional.

In Louisiana, the case centers on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a key part of the law that bans voting rules or district maps that make it harder for racial or language minorities to have an equal voice in elections. One way states have sought to do this is by creating majority-minority districts — the surest way minority voters can elect their preferred candidates.

Louisiana created a second majority-black congressional district after its hand was forced during previous litigation that argued the state’s packing of black voters into a single district diluted black voters’ overall representation in a state where they constitute about a third of the population. Now, the state is arguing that the district it was forced to draw is a form of racial discrimination, even if the ends, defendants would argue, are designed to protect minority representation. For decades, Section 2 has been used to challenge unfair maps without proving intentional racism — only that the results are discriminatory. Now, the Court is being asked whether that very rule is constitutional, or whether requiring states to consider race when drawing fair districts violates the Constitution’s promise of equal protection.

I’m not a legal expert, but I do want to observe a path the Court could plausibly take based on another case also involving the Voting Rights Act — one that reignited litigation around the landmark law — Shelby County v. Holder.

In that case, the Court struck down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, nullifying Section 5’s federal preclearance requirement for states with histories of racial discrimination. The coverage formula, based on outdated 1972 data, had never been revised despite congressional renewals. Chief Justice Roberts argued that “our country has changed,” and laws must reflect current conditions. Importantly, in a related preceding case out of Texas, Austin Utility District v. Holder, Roberts signaled to Congress that the data governing Section 5 was outdated. At the time the ruling came down, Democrats held a nine-seat majority in the Senate and a substantial majority in the House. Congress didn’t act, and so Section 5 remains not so much “gutted,” as critics often write, but neglected by a more polarized Congress.

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As interesting in this case is the extent to which members of the Court may be amenable to a new standard that places local geography at the heart of fair representation. In Callais, the Supreme Court seems to entertain that idea, based on analysis from the oral arguments. During oral arguments, several justices signaled interest in narrowing Section 2 rather than dismantling it. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh questioned maps that link distant black communities, suggesting states should prioritize compact, locally coherent districts before considering race. Kavanaugh’s comments about a “time limit” on race-based remedies pointed to recalibration, not repeal, while Justices Alito and Gorsuch stressed that race cannot outweigh traditional map-drawing principles. Together, their questioning hints at a “local-first” standard — one that elevates geographic integrity and community boundaries, curbs Section 2’s scope, yet still allows minority influence to emerge naturally where population patterns support it.

In Louisiana specifically, a “local-first” ruling would have immediate and tangible effects. The state’s current map, which added a second majority-black congressional district under federal pressure, links distant communities from Baton Rouge to Shreveport with little geographic or cultural continuity. If the Court adopts a standard requiring compactness and local coherence before racial considerations, Louisiana could be permitted to revert to a map more reflective of its parish boundaries and regional identities. Such a change would likely reduce the number of majority-black districts but would emphasize political representation grounded in shared local interests.

One 2019 survey finds that 37 states require compact state legislative districts, while 21 states require compact congressional districts. Such a pivot, if the Court were to take one, would be well within a standard that a large majority of states apply in congressional or state legislative redistricting, or both. However, “even where compactness standards exist,” the study finds, “courts have difficulty enforcing them. There is no clear threshold at which a given compactness measure’s numeric value indicates a violation.” Iowa, Colorado, and Michigan, for example, have quantitative measures. Other states rely on phrasing like “reasonably compact.” It’s also worth mentioning that a “local-first” compactness isn’t intended to strike a proportional partisan balance by one measure or another. It is designed to represent communities with like interests based on geography. Everything else is secondary. After looking at some congressional and state legislative maps, it becomes easy to guess which states have compactness requirements and which don’t.

An even more interesting question is the opportunity such a ruling presents in indirectly tempering political gerrymandering as a second-order effect, which the Court declined to weigh in on back in 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause.

State courts could cite the Callais opinion as persuasive authority under their own constitutions to strike down extreme partisan gerrymanders, while legislatures and redistricting commissions might codify those neutral principles into law. Such language could elevate the integrity of local geography as a predominant factor and could be incorporated into how states shape new maps.

Such a decision could make sprawling districts easier to attack, particularly for Democrats who would be eager to cite how certain state lawmakers’ approaches to redistricting may contrast with that of the conservative Supreme Court. Even if the ruling were to apply only to race-related cases, the logic could make its way further into popular discourse, onto referenda, and perhaps into state constitutions. Or not. Such a ruling would almost certainly secure broad discretion for states, perhaps to keep districts with high proportions of minorities local and compact while others remained sprawling.

Whatever the outcome, Callais will test whether the Court still trusts states to govern their own representation. A “local-first” standard wouldn’t end the politics of race or power, but it could quietly shift where those fights are fought. Even so, there remains work for Congress to take up in restoring voting rights protections before, in 2031, the Voting Rights Act is set for renewal.

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Beyond That Patchwork

An assortment of recommended media

• “No Kings wasn’t cringe” by ,

• “Democrats and ‘The Vision Thing’” by ,

• “Stolen Louvre Jewelry Worth Over $100 Million, Paris Prosecutor Says” by Ségolène Le Stradic, The New York Times

• “Record-High 62% Say U.S. Government Has Too Much Power” by Frank Newport, Gallup

• “Deadbeat” by Tame Impala

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The violence simmering beneath American politics isn’t just the product of resentment but the product of expectation. The conventional wisdom among political figures and journalists is that divisions within the country are existential because they threaten the unity of a singular, monolithic entity that Teddy Roosevelt would popularize as “America.” Ever since then, unity has become central to the American civic religion—what Roosevelt called “Americanism”—where national harmony is a virtue and signs of difference, ethnic pluralism, and federalism pose obstructions or existential threats to a prosperous America. Today, it would seem that the divisions within the country are differences, tolerable if not benign, that are aggravated by an insistence on a unity that has come to feel like an imposition of one defining vision over another. After over a century of political centralization, it’s worth examining the forfeiture of a self-governed United States for a mythical “America” that only exists in our imagination.

In the early republic, identity was layered, not singular. People were Virginians, New Yorkers, or Pennsylvanians first—citizens of local communities that made the Union possible. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45 that federal powers would be “few and defined,” while those of the states would be “numerous and indefinite.” Jefferson trusted government closest to its citizens; Washington urged unity but warned against “overgrown domination.” Localism was not fragmentation but liberty’s architecture—proof that a diverse people could coexist under one constitutional roof. When Tocqueville visited in the 1830s, he saw democracy alive in communities and associations. “The strength of free peoples,” he wrote, “resides in the township.” The early United States thrived because it did not demand sameness. It was a political covenant, not a moral creed—confident that freedom could survive without uniformity.

Unity, at the founding, was meant as a safeguard, not an ideology. The new republic needed coherence to collect debts, defend borders, and manage trade among quarrelsome states. The Civil War brought that logic to its breaking point. Lincoln confronted an existential crisis with tools the Constitution had never anticipated: suspending habeas corpus, expanding the army without authorization, censoring opposition papers. These were extraordinary acts for an extraordinary moment, yet they left an indelible precedent—that democracy might need to act undemocratically in the name of unity.

In his First Inaugural, Lincoln cast the Union itself as perpetual writing that “perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments.”

This moral claim disguised as law became the war’s philosophical center. Radical Republicans such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens called the Union “organic and perpetual,” a fiction that justified occupation while denying secession. Even after victory, Southern states were deemed never to have left yet were barred from Congress until they ratified the Reconstruction Amendments. In Texas v. White, Chief Justice Salmon Chase declared the Union “indestructible,” closing the circle.

Political theorist Clinton Rossiter later observed that democracies often suspend themselves to endure—what he called “constitutional dictatorship.” Lincoln, he argued, “stretched the Constitution to the limit” to save it. The writer Robert Penn Warren saw the moral consequence: victory gave the Union a “treasury of virtue,” a sense that righteousness could excuse any future overreach. Together, these ideas formed a habit—the belief that the Union’s survival proved its moral destiny, and that destiny could justify whatever power preserved it.

Notably, Lincoln’s claim of perpetuity of all countries was extraordinary for his time and remains extraordinary now. In the 1850s, few nations imagined themselves eternal. Britain’s union was political, not metaphysical; France reinvented itself repeatedly without believing the nation had died; Italy, Germany, and Switzerland were held together by consent, not divine permanence. Lincoln’s insistence on an indestructible Union blurred the line between constitution and covenant. Even today, few federations share it. Canada allows for negotiated secession; Switzerland calls its federation permanent but voluntary; the European Union enshrines the right to leave. The United States stands almost alone in treating endurance as destiny.

By the time Roosevelt entered the presidency in 1901, the centralization born of the Civil War had become habit. He turned that inheritance into moral creed. Roosevelt’s nationalism was not cynical—it was fervent, confident, and missionary. In an age of industrial disorder and corporate excess, he cast the nation as a living organism whose vitality depended on unity of spirit. In “True Americanism,” he drew a line between those who merely lived in the United States and those who belonged to it: “We have room for but one flag… and but one loyalty.” It was a creed of inclusion through assimilation, a democracy that demanded moral uniformity as its price of admission.

In “The Strenuous Life,” he elevated struggle to gospel. Hardship was not to be avoided but embraced; through it a people proved their worth. Roosevelt believed that a strong citizenry would forge a strong nation—and that a strong nation had a moral duty to assert itself. This conviction shaped his imperialism. Expansion abroad was, to him, an extension of moral character: a vigorous nation should shoulder the burden of civilization, even by conquest. His defense of America’s war in the Philippines and the construction of the Panama Canal were not pragmatic acts of statecraft but expressions of destiny. “The American people,” he said, “should face the future steadily, ready to do their duty wherever and whenever it becomes necessary.”

That same belief guided his view of domestic power. Roosevelt saw federalism less as a safeguard than as a constraint. State governments, he argued, had become “machines of stagnation,” too beholden to local interests to serve the public good. In The New Nationalism, he dismissed “states’ rights” as an excuse for inaction, insisting that only the federal government could act “for the common good.” Two years later, in The Right of the People to Rule, he charged that legislatures had become obstacles to democracy, claiming that the presidency alone represented the entire people.

This faith in national virtue reshaped the presidency into a vessel of moral command. The “bully pulpit” gave Roosevelt a direct line to the people, bypassing intermediaries—Congress, party, and press alike. He governed through exhortation and spectacle, casting himself as the nation’s conscience as much as its executive. It was a form of charismatic democracy that blurred the line between moral leadership and authoritarian temptation. Roosevelt spoke the language of the common good but often treated disagreement as weakness and checks on his power as affronts to it.

In 1915, at Carnegie Hall, he declared, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism… A hyphenated American is not an American at all.” His message was meant to inspire, but it revealed the cost of his creed. Roosevelt’s Americanism left little room for the pluralism that had defined the early republic. He offered unity as a moral good but planted the idea that allegiance and virtue were one and the same—a notion that still haunts American politics, where loyalty to one vision of the country so easily becomes a test of belonging itself.

Centralization would accelerate under Roosevelt’s cousin as he and overwhelming congressional majorities navigated crises like the Great Depression and World War II, that also set a lasting precedent that the federal government should define and direct the national good. Successive leaders deepened this orientation. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI pursued ideological conformity in the name of American security; Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society expanded Washington’s reach into nearly every facet of public life. Their motives were often noble—security, justice, equity—but each built on a centralizing habit that equated federal power with national virtue. These developments and those like them are regarded as progress more than they are foreshadowing of our contemporary struggles with identity and the role of legally-binding authority be it on immigration, during a pandemic or the latest culture war.

Crucially, transformations in the media ecosystem have bolstered the conceit of a singular “America”. National broadcasts collapsed regional distinctions into a shared set of symbols, rituals, and narratives, while cable and internet news created a constant sense of collective crisis. As audiences fragmented, media responded not by localizing content, but by doubling down on making those local developments everybody’s business from coast to coast. The result is a political culture that frames every issue through the lens of one imagined public, flattening regional realities and fueling the notion that disagreement threatens the integrity of the whole.

Roosevelt’s “Americanism” now underwrites nearly every political ritual we perform. Our entire public discourse operates on the “America” pretense—one that burdens each citizen with the impossible goal of unifying across six time zones, fifty governments, and 340 million lives. Every issue must be national; every controversy a referendum on what kind of country we are. Ordinary disagreement feels existential because the nation has made an elusive consensus a condition of belonging. The result is exhaustion and high stakes that drive people to the brink. Polarization becomes the natural byproduct of a republic that mistakes moral unity for civic health.

In many ways, the moral and economic diversity of the United States has outgrown the machinery of a single national consensus. A modern form of dual federalism—one that grants states broad autonomy not out of nostalgia but necessity—would acknowledge that pluralism, not unanimity, is the republic’s natural state.

Local authority, by contrast, allows adaptation, experimentation, and trust to reemerge where national politics have created incentives that push local lawmakers to toe national party lines—a trend that has saddled local elected officials with the baggage of national party brands. A renewed federalism would not fracture the nation but preserve it—by allowing Americans to live differently without having to live apart. Americans could visually and orally elevate their local and state identities to place themselves in the civic mindset of seeking to participate in governing their own backyard before they reflexively burden themselves by pursuing an insurmountable national consensus.

A renewed federalism need not mean retreating from national coordination on major issues, particularly defense, maintaining a currency or protecting civil rights. A modern revival of federalism would also not be nostalgic or resort to how “the Founders intended” for things to be. After all, the Founders—both Anti-Federalists and Federalists—advanced ideas and enshrined clauses in the Constitution that sought to centralize power that later became decentralized, decentralized power that later became centralized, and limited power that later expanded. All of them, however, though they disagreed vehemently, operated on the premise that authority should be dispersed. The circumstances today justify resurrecting that fundamental American idea arguably more than it did at a time when the Union was still vulnerable to attack by its oppressors.

Roosevelt sought to make the United States worthy of its promise. But in sanctifying unity, he taught the republic to expect too much from itself—to confuse moral consensus with democratic health. The more the United States pretends to be a singular America where it is not, the greater risk will come from placing the hand of unity over the vents of an already heated polity.

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If Washington fell off the edge of the world, would anyone notice? The obvious answer is yes: the federal government does an enormous amount to defend the country, maintain a currency, and redistribution. But if you’ve been observing American federal politics for at least the last 15 years, you’ll observe that the rhetorical bark of a government shutdown — and the optics of such on cable news that cover it with an apocalyptic countdown clock — are much worse than its bite. There are clear adverse impacts including the many federal workers that are furloughed who have to find temporary financial arrangements to pay bills in the days and possibly weeks the shutdown persists.

Much of the impact centers around delays in the regulatory, oversight and civilian-facing services. Aviation training and nuclear regulatory review slow. Though Medicare and Social Security benefits continue to be disbursed, customer service may be slowed. Getting your renewed passport back might take more time. Federal courts and military slow down or delay practices. Customers and border enforcement slows. Federal payments and grants stall. And of course, the national parks close probably ruining lots of people weekend trips as the weather becomes more pleasant.

But much of what halts in a shutdown is not indispensable to daily life or national security. It’s administrative machinery—grantmaking, permits, compliance checks—that could just as easily be handled by states, local governments, or even interstate compacts. The very fact that life carries on with only mild inconvenience shows how much of Washington’s domestic role is managerial rather than essential. What the shutdown really exposes is how deeply the federal government has embedded itself into functions that, by design or practicality, could be localized without consequence.

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Federal oversight of parks, housing, education, and small business lending, for instance, could all be managed closer to the communities they serve.

When the National Park Service shutters, for example, trails and monuments, states like Utah have repeatedly stepped in to fund and operate them temporarily. Housing and urban development programs, largely composed of grants and vouchers, could be administered by state housing authorities already familiar with regional markets and zoning patterns.

The federal Department of Education primarily redistributes funds and enforces standards, roles that state education agencies already perform. States could pool resources through compacts to ensure portability of credits or credentials, achieving coordination without federal micromanagement. Environmental and agricultural regulation could also shift downward: most states have their own environmental quality and agriculture departments capable of enforcing standards tailored to their geography.

Transportation is another area. When federal grants and approvals freeze, infrastructure projects stall not because states lack capacity, but because they depend on federal sign-offs for funds they themselves contributed through federal taxes. State departments of transportation already build and maintain most highways, regulate transit, and oversee airports. If funding and decision-making were localized—with the federal government retaining only interstate standards for safety and commerce—projects could proceed without Washington bottlenecks and the political brinkmanship that holds them hostage.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s most common shutdown effect is delayed inspections and permitting. Yet nearly every state already has an environmental quality department. Federal oversight could narrow to issues that are truly interstate in nature—rivers, air basins, migratory species—while leaving routine enforcement to local agencies. The same logic applies to agriculture, where Washington’s role is mostly to issue subsidies and manage rural development grants that could be more precisely targeted by state governments familiar with their own economies.

So what would best be left to the federal government indefinitely?

Of the areas affected by a shutdown, only a few must remain federal: air traffic control, customs and border security, national defense, the federal courts, and oversight of interstate systems like the power grid and nuclear regulation. These require uniform national standards and coordination across state lines. Everything else—permits, grants, regulatory reviews—can pause without endangering safety or sovereignty, underscoring how little of daily governance truly depends on Washington.

But it’s also the case that something that theoretically be deferred to the states — like air traffic control — could be more plausible in practice. The conventional wisdom is that dispersing the responsibilities of air traffic control poses too many risks to human life and a higher likelihood of accidents occurring over a lack of clarity over standard policies.

On the other hand, the heightened risk involved can make it more likely, not less likely, that states converge on a uniform standard without federal involvement. The idea being that entities, whether they are businesses or states, wind up adopting the same standards because of mutual incentives particularly on interstate matters. In fact, states have already converged on a number of policies including corporate and sales tax structures, environmental regulation, traffic safety, and so on.

So why defer to the states at all? For one, convergence isn’t universal. There are plenty of areas where states diverge—reflecting different priorities, cultures, and economic conditions—and that diversity is healthy. Second, civic participation and policy change are more accessible and less polarized at the state and local levels than in Washington. Residents can still shape policy through direct contact with their representatives or through ballot measures, something nearly impossible in the machinery of federal politics. Third, centralized power often serves as an agent of the status quo, defended on the grounds of “stability” through uniformity. But that stability carries its own risks. Federal bureaucracy can develop blind spots, unable or unwilling to reassess the efficacy of uniform standards in a changing landscape. A small number of national lawmakers and bureaucrats—often influenced by well-funded interest groups—end up steering policy away from adaptation. And there’s the subtler but corrosive risk of precedent: uniform policies tend to beget more uniform policies. The reasoning becomes self-reinforcing—“we already did X with Y policy, so why not do X with Z?”.

A shutdown doesn’t just expose dysfunction—it shows how avoidable it is. By clinging to responsibilities that states could manage, Washington turns everyday services into collateral. When Congress stalls, not for lack of local capacity, but because federal control makes them hostage to national politics. Devolving more functions to the states could insulate vital services from these recurring standoffs and keep governance steady even as Washington treads water on the responsibilities that it does have.

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The West Coast Health Alliance didn’t form out of blue-sky idealism. It was an act of necessity. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismantled the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee—the group that for decades set the country’s immunization schedules—California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii banded together to fill the void. They decided not to wait for Washington to right itself. They built their own.

“When federal agencies abandon evidence-based recommendations in favor of ideology, we cannot continue down that same path,” said Dennis Worsham, Secretary of Health, Washington State Department of Health, in a California governor’s office press release announcing the alliance. The effort of the WCHA aims to “finalize shared principles to strengthen public confidence in vaccines and in public health. While each state will independently pursue strategies shaped by their unique laws, geographies, histories, and peoples, these shared principles will form the foundations of the Alliance.”

What started this? Though these four states did form a similar alliance of collaboration during the COVID pandemic, this new effort comes after Kennedy halted $500 million in mRNA research, floated a theory about Tylenol and autism — that the president promulgated as fact in a surreal statement from the White House — and dismissed the scientific panels that tethered federal policy to evidence. The man makes himself easy to criticize. But the revealing problem is that a single secretary can cause this much disruption in the first place. HHS is designed to centralize, and when the center falters, it reveals vulnerabilities in the reflexive demand for federal involvement.

The defense is that none of this is binding. CDC vaccine schedules are “just guidance.” States can set their own rules. Insurers and courts aren’t forced to defer to ACIP — the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices within the HHS. All true—and yet in practice the guidance has become the standard of care. Out of administrative convenience, state legislatures outsource the complex work of vaccine scheduling to the feds. Over time, that deference to Washington creates a dependency where states can risk losing funding if they deviate from HHS guidelines. States that haven’t developed their public health infrastructure create legal vulnerabilities for schools and insurers who are dependent on federal guidance. Apart from policy, the CDC has developed a brand, if you will, as the end-all-be-all on expertise, something that has been challenged since the COVID pandemic. Kennedy represents an overcorrection of sorts, revealing that states actually do have the medical schools, research hospitalists and public health infrastructure to take up with work the federal government cannot reliably do.

The WCHA out west is more than a vaccine policy. It’s a declaration that states can pool expertise without waiting on Washington. It points to the deeper lesson: we shouldn’t need to hope for a benevolent HHS secretary to keep things on track. We should have a structure resilient enough to withstand a bad one and a long-term period of distrust in federal institutions like the CDC. That means shifting from hierarchy to network. Each state, or group of states, should be capable of maintaining its own advisory process and standards of care. The federal role should narrow to what only a central body can do: coordinate across borders, fund research, monitor outbreaks.

Science itself argues against the centralized model. Good science thrives on replication and competing interpretations. A single authority—whether captured by ideology or simply wrong—can mislead the entire country. Multiple nodes generate resilience. If California veers, Texas need not follow. If Kennedy drags down the CDC, other centers can keep the lights on. The next secretary might be competent and humble, but the system would remain the same: perched on the assumption that guidance from Washington is the one true standard. The stakes we’ve concentrated at the federal level have made that less convincing, not more so.

The lesson is not that Kennedy is unfit. That much is obvious. The lesson is that the country should never again be in a position where one appointee can upend public health.

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Patrick Henry was too sharp to be soothed by the Federalists’ assurances. The Constitution, signed on September 17, 1787, he feared, would not merely strengthen the union but consolidate it, turning the states into appendages of a distant authority. Madison and others could hardly be faulted for thinking stronger central power was necessary; the Articles had collapsed under debt, rebellion, and foreign peril. Yet their insistence that the states would remain effective checks on the federal government never came to be. In Virginia’s political skirmishes, Henry had already clashed with Madison and Jefferson, the latter once confessing in frustration that he “devoutly” hoped for Henry’s death. So when invited to the Philadelphia Convention, Henry declined with a phrase that made him immortal: “I smell a rat.”

Henry became one of several Anti-Federalists to scrutinize and oppose the directional leanings of the Constitution toward centralized power, going on to pseudonymously write several of the Anti-Federalist Papers, a collection of competing essays outlining all the ways Federalists were laying the groundwork for a single executive, an unchecked judiciary, and a system more broadly that would undermine subnational institutions and the people’s check on power. Otherwise sidelined, Henry and company did manage to successfully lobby for the addition of an explicit Bill of Rights, which, at first, only applied between citizens and the federal government, but would later, through an emboldened Supreme Court, come to apply between citizens and state governments. Most of the first ten amendments have held up much better than the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, scraps thrown at the feet of Anti-Federalists by the Federalists, that clearly failed to limit the usurpations of power from the people and the states by the federal government.

Pivotal as the addition of the Bill of Rights was—and as hard as it is to imagine the United States surviving without them, particularly under the current administration—where the Anti-Federalists demonstrated their greatest prescience was around the presidency, the judiciary, and clauses including the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause, which gradually consolidated an amount of power that can be traced to our toxically existential modern politics. They correctly foresaw the untested idea that a single executive would erode state sovereignty and local self-rule, something that manifested only seven years after signing of the Constitution during the Whiskey Rebellion. They predicted a federal judiciary that would stretch its own powers, something that materialized only 16 years later with the Marbury v. Madison decision. The Anti-Federalists warned of a central government that would use money as leverage over the states, which accelerated during the Progressive Era and is now a fixture of policymaking that transcends ideology and party.

For this foresight and much more, the Anti-Federalists were treated as cranks. They lost the ratification battle, and then they lost the history books, remembered mostly as sore losers to the poetically flawed brilliance of the Founders. Two centuries later, the vindication of the Anti-Federalists in most respects is inarguable. The United States looks far more like the consolidation they dreaded than the balanced federalism they were assured would be secured by their Federalist counterparts.

On the positive side, the framers deliberately set up a federal system that preserved state sovereignty, separated powers to check consolidation, and barred hereditary rule, while also anchoring at least one chamber of Congress in direct accountability to the people. Unintentionally, the system also allowed space for democratic expansion, as suffrage broadened beyond the narrow electorate of 1787 and states exercised their reserved powers to pioneer their own constitutions and policy experiments. But there were intended features that proved corrosive to decentralization: a stronger executive than many republicans of the time thought safe, a standing army provision always waiting to be activated, and vague clauses that invited consolidation. Unintended consequences were even more dramatic: judicial review, nationalized parties, and an imperial presidency.

The Anti-Federalists saw the presidency for what it could become: an elective monarchy. In Cato V, Cato, thought to be George Clinton of New York, the warning is blunt—once vested with military command and appointments, the president would grow beyond accountability and “degenerate into a monarchy.” Brutus No. 1, thought to be Robert Yates of New York, echoed the same concern, pointing to vague constitutional language that left the executive’s scope undefined. Federalists promised the separation of powers would check such ambitions, but experience suggests otherwise. From Lincoln’s wartime suspensions to FDR’s fourth term to modern presidents ruling by executive order and unilateral military action, the office has swelled far beyond what the framers described in Philadelphia. The Anti-Federalists didn’t imagine cable news or social media, but they understood personality-driven politics. Today, the presidency dominates not just law and policy but culture itself. The elective monarchy has arrived, and it was charted on Anti-Federalist maps.

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The Anti-Federalists recognized the presidency as the hinge on which consolidation would swing. In Cato IV, the executive is described as vague in its construction and perilous in its design. He invokes Montesquieu and how great power must be checked by brevity, yet here was vast authority vested for four years, long enough to hatch designs of ambition. With command of the army and navy, control over appointments, the power to pardon even treason, and influence over treaties and legislation, the president would inevitably attract a train of courtiers. A court culture would bloom in the new capital, complete with flattery, intrigue, and idleness. Cato rightly asked, what makes this president essentially different from the king of Britain? Two centuries on, the pomp and reach of the American presidency suggest not a whole lot of divergence.

Brutus saw, earlier than most, the outsized power of the courts. In Brutus XI, he warns the new judiciary would be “totally independent, both of the people and the legislature… ‘No errors they may commit can be corrected by any power above them,’” and that judges could read the Constitution not only by its text but “according to the reasoning spirit of it,” letting their opinions “have the force of law.” That, he argues, would “operate… to a total subversion of the state judiciaries,” shrinking state power with every federal adjudication. In Brutus XV, the point hardens into a verdict: the justices would be “independent in the fullest sense of the word,” with “no power above them, to control any of their decisions.”

The Anti-Federalists saw clearly that consolidation would sap the vitality of the states. In Federal Farmer No. 3, the warning is that a distant Congress could never embody the people’s interests: “I have no idea that the interests, feelings, and opinions of three or four millions of people, especially touching internal taxation, can be collected in such a house.” Representation this thin, combined with the power to regulate elections, would inevitably empower a national elite at the expense of local self-rule. Centinel No. 1, thought to be Samuel Bryan of Philadelphia, sounded the alarm even more starkly: “All the blessings of liberty and the dearest privileges of freemen are now at stake,” for the supremacy and general welfare clauses would enable Congress to seize “every species of internal taxation” and enforce it with a standing army.

The Federalists countered with assurances: the Senate would defend state authority, and the states would retain all powers not explicitly delegated. Yet today, cooperative federalism has made states administrative arms of Washington, hamstrung by grants and mandates. National media and parties eroded state distinctiveness, creating one homogenized political culture.

For the Anti-Federalists, the most dangerous feature of the Constitution was not what it said, but what it left open. Brutus No. 1 zeroed in on the “necessary and proper” clause, warning it would allow Congress to stretch its authority without end: “This government is to possess absolute and uncontrollable power… so far as it extends to all the objects of which it has cognizance, it is supreme.” Such vagueness, he argued, guaranteed expansion. Brutus No. 6 pressed the point on taxation, noting that Article I, Section 8 left “no other limitation than the discretion of the Congress” and that, in practice, the states would not “have the power to raise one shilling in any way, but by the permission of the Congress.” History bore them out. The commerce clause has justified federal regulation of intrastate possession of goods in Wickard v. Filburn, civil rights, healthcare, and even criminal law. What Brutus foresaw—state governments reduced to fiscal dependents of the center—has largely come to pass.

The Anti-Federalists were not prophets without error, but their instincts often carried the ring of truth. At their best, they intended to secure state sovereignty, believing liberty was safest when political power remained close to the people. Their pressure produced the Bill of Rights, perhaps their greatest legacy, and their suspicion of “consolidation” injected a permanent caution against national aggrandizement. Yet some of what they intended was shortsighted: they underestimated the need for a functional central government to manage debt, diplomacy, and interstate order, and their parochialism left space for entrenched local injustices. Unintentionally, their writings gave later generations a powerful canon for resisting federal overreach and reminded us that the Constitution was not a sacred text but a political compromise. But they also left behind a vocabulary that would be twisted in defense of slavery, segregation, and nullification—ironically weakening the very cause of liberty they sought to defend.

If the United States is ever to reform itself toward a more genuinely democratic order, it would follow far more closely the instincts of the Anti-Federalists than the Federalists. A weaker presidency, stripped of its courtly aura and concentrated powers, would restore the executive to its proper place—if it ought to even exist at all. A narrower judiciary, limited in its jurisdiction and unable to dictate sweeping social policy from the bench, would place law closer to the people. Congress, meanwhile, would see its most elastic powers curtailed—its regulation of commerce bound to its original meaning, and its ability to condition funding on state compliance eliminated. These changes would affirm the primacy of the states, and by extension, the people.

A more perfect union would not mean uniformity, but encouraging pluralism—self-determination of a collective but dispersed scale that blurs the lines between small or big government. It would look like states experimenting with their own immigration policies, trade agreements, and social orders—subject always to the people. Elections would be reordered to disrupt the nationalization of political culture, with presidential contests isolated from congressional races. The weight set onto state partisans of having to toe the national party line would be lifted, and they could be given more latitude to pursue a wider suite of policies. Congress would be able to fire members of the president’s cabinet, and most executive orders and measures of any sort would require congressional approval. In this vision, the federal government’s role is neither architect nor overseer but facilitator: safeguarding voting rights, redistributing wealth via unconditional grants to ensure equity among states, and leaving much of the work of domestic governance to local self-rule.

A twenty-first-century Anti-Federalist constitution would not dissolve the union but redeem it. It would recognize that there is not, nor has there ever been, a single conception of American identity or interpretation of American values. It would recognize that crediting the dysfunction of the existing system to the dispersion of power is akin to a ravenous glutton who doesn’t know why their stomach aches. If we are to learn anything from the last quarter millennium, it should compel us to bend toward the distribution of power, and as a result, endless possibilities.

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