Powerful Regimes Controlling State Governments Could Undermine US Democracy

Republicans across the country are weaponizing state and local governments. The states control all elections from dog catcher to President of the United States and Republicans are using that power to ensure they can't lose elections and impose theocratic policies on their citizens.

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Image Credit, Massimo Catarinella

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If there's no national or local control of the police. Like they're like who's like what do you know they behave like a mob. It's so shocking. They behave like a criminal enterprise. And you know and then we talk about sort of like how things have changed from state to state. But also the relationship between the people living in that state and how things have changed is off. talk about that dynamic. Exactly. So this last crisis is sort of an electoral democracy of free and fair elections and responsiveness to majorities and the mass public in the U.S. So a decline of democracy and that goes along with this delegation over the past generation of national power to the states. greater leeway for the states to customize. And then what I show statistically again is especially over the past 20 years and especially since 2010 there's been huge divergence. A huge gap has arisen between states. In terms of how easy it is to vote. The fairness of their districting in terms of gerrymandering and how responsive they are in passing policy compared to what the public of their state actually wants in surveys. and in terms of sort of election integrity and sort of election vote counting and such. so again the US is super super unique. the only real developed democracy to put all that authority over democratic institutions districting vote counting who's eligible to vote and not all done at that lower level unit. and just zooming out a second if you guys remember after 2016 everybody was saying thank god for federalism. Trump can't capture all these state election administrations and every county election administrator is not going to flip. And if it was all centralized in DC we'd be you know we'd be done for we'd have an autocrat in power. and while that's like narrowly true. like once it would be autocrats in Washington dc you don't want to give them all the election administration. but before that over long stretches of time of the 2010s decline of democracy in the states and states regulate elections from like local dog catcher up to president that has enabled and empowered and made more likely a would-be autocrat to take national power. and now has the potential to essentially subvert or steal the 2024 presidential election as you guys have talked about on the show.