...to settle in and then we'll get started. Welcome to today's discussion, the eighth session of The Breakdown, where Steve Levitsky and I discuss the struggle for democracy in the United States, reflect on historical precedents here and abroad, and offer evidence-based reflections on the path forward. My name is Erica Chenoweth. I'm the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, and I'm speaking in my personal capacity as a scholar.
Before we begin, I have a few brief announcements. The Ash Center affirms its ongoing responsibility to advance the self-determination, self-governance, and flourishing of Indigenous nations. For nearly four decades, the Project on Indigenous Governance and Development has worked alongside Indigenous nations to strengthen governance and nation building. This partnership is central to the Ash Center's work, developing ideas and fostering practices that support equal and inclusive multiracial and multi-ethnic democracy and self-government.
As we approach the election season, I also want to remind the Harvard community about the Harvard Votes Challenge, which is a nonpartisan university-wide civic engagement initiative that is housed jointly at the Ash Center and the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. The initiative works across Harvard's schools to build a culture of participation by encouraging voter registration and turnout among students, staff, and faculty. If you're eligible to vote, please make a plan to register and cast your ballot. And even for those beyond the Harvard community, if you'd like nonpartisan information about voter registration, voting options, and deadlines, visit hvc.harvard.edu.
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So before we dive in, let me introduce Steven Levitsky, who is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies, professor of government and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a senior democracy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Steve's research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, especially in Latin America. He is co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times bestseller and was published in 30 languages, and the book Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.
So with that, let's turn to today's discussion. And Steve, when we signed off in June with our last session, we were right in the midst of the NBA finals. What do you think of those Knicks after all?
I've been a Knicks fan since 1973, so cannot tell you how much I enjoyed that run. Very, very happy.
Good. So for those who are new to our conversations, Steve and I usually spend a little time at the front end looking at what we see as the most significant challenges to U.S. democracy and the most significant defenses of U.S. democracy just to help separate signal from noise in this very crowded news environment. And it has been a couple of months since we last touched base. So Steve, just to kick us off, I'm curious about what are the things that you noticed over the summer that struck you as the most important challenges to U.S. democracy and the biggest bright spots that you paid attention to over the summer?
I would say that the challenges are mostly persistent ones. I don't see too many major new ones, and the bright spots are newer. The biggest challenge is, first, we have a full-blown autocrat in the presidency, somebody really without a liberal democratic bone in his body. And anytime you hand the presidency for four years to somebody who doesn't believe in democracy, you're putting your republic at risk.
I think potentially, even more important than that, although this is not new, is that really, the entire Republican Party has turned away from democracy. Trump can't do this on his own. He can do much, much more damage and has done more damage because he's got, really at this point, an entire political party behind him that was willing to basically shut down the Congress in the face of extra-constitutional behavior.
One of the most powerful and prestigious legislative bodies in the world stood on the sidelines as Trump abused power and broke the law. That's because he had the whole party behind him. I'm sure we'll talk about the 2026 elections, but if there are efforts at different sorts of electoral shenanigans, it will rely on a party across the country carrying those orders out. So the fact that the Republican Party continues to be really, at this point, from top to bottom, not fully committed to democracy is, I think, the greatest threat.
Couple of bright spots. One is that the judiciary continues to mostly do its job. I would say the Supreme Court's record has been mixed, but it has continued to blunt some of the most egregious efforts at abuse, the most recent being this week with Trump's clearly illegal efforts to stop from the executive branch mail-in voting. So the courts have intervened to block some fairly authoritarian initiatives.
And secondly, Americans continue to turn against Trump, and the war, in particular, has done this administration great political damage. And as we've said many times in the past, popular autocrats, autocrats with 60, 70, 80% approval are much, much greater threat than autocrats with 36 or 38% approval. So the fact that now, a solid majority of Americans have turned against Trump is a good sign. It's a good sign for our democracy.
Yeah. I mean, I think the things that I've paid attention to over the summer, I mean, obviously, there's been a ton that's happened. Every week is a new set of emerging news items that in ordinary times, each would dominate for a month's analysis and whatever. But the two things that have really struck me are the continuing purges of the military and security apparatus as a whole, but in particular, purges of civilian leadership within the Pentagon or quasi-civilian outlets like Stars and Stripes and things along those lines that seem to be indicative of a real attempt to have a loyalist power ground over the security apparatus in the country.
And then, the second piece is just more of the sort of steady flow of information suggesting corrupt self-dealings that seem to also be just really at an unbelievable volume really over the last few months. So that seems to have become just totally normalized. It still makes the news, but it doesn't generate a sense of scandal or outrage in the manner in which you can imagine these things doing in previous administrations.
I think the bright spots for me, certainly, the 2026 midterm elections are just around the corner, but we do have some information about how people have participated in politics over the summer because of the primaries. From what it looks like, at least the data that I've seen, there's been extremely high voter turnout and engagement in primaries, especially among Democrats. Definitely, the highest level of turnout participation in the last 15, 20 years probably, maybe even earlier than that.
And there's not often a very high correspondence between what happens in primaries and what happens in more general elections. But I think it is true that one of the most important things for people to do in context of backsliding is to participate in every manner in which is available to them.
And over the summer, we saw relatively large shares for primaries, which are always much lower than general election voter turnout, but relatively large participation. And that just suggests that people are remaining engaged, that they're not doing the thing we were worrying about in our last session, which is disengaging and just writing off our institutions entirely.
The second is protests are ongoing. That's another form of political participation that we've seen really persistent with unprecedentedly high numbers of events and participants, overwhelmingly nonviolent, just remarkably disciplined in that respect and also seemingly a quite self-conscious turn toward trying to channel that protest participation into power at the polls.
For example, an upcoming October 17th rally that was announced by the No Kings Coalition is explicitly about just trying to channel protest participation into get out the vote efforts and voter mobilization and electoral power. And so, there seems to be some understanding that protests are important as a symbolic way of articulating voice and shaping the agenda, but also that numbers alone don't do much without organization and channeling that into electoral power.
And then, I agree with you, I think that the judiciary has been mixed, but on the sort of most critical redline type items, has upheld the constitution, I would put it, rather than reinterpreted it to meet the president's whims. So that's encouraging as well.
I think obviously, on a lot of people's minds now is what will play out over the next eight weeks and what would potentially play out in the eight weeks after that. But I think this summer, the American civil society seems to have exercised and built some muscle for resilience at least and potential pushback on some of the most severe or acute kind of power grabs as well.
So some of the folks that have been adding questions in advance have a lot of questions about the elections, and I thought maybe we'd just dive in with some of those.
So as we look ahead to the midterm elections, in many other countries, there are attempts to create a playing field in which an aspiring autocrat is able to actually use elections to reinforce and legitimate their hold on power. And maybe before we talk about the U.S. case, we can talk a little bit about the types of things that they do in order to tilt the playing field. I wonder if you might comment on that just from a comparative perspective before we talk more specifically about the U.S.
Sure. There are many things that incumbent governments can do to tilt the electoral playing field. One of them, which I won't delve in too much, is just outright repression. You can scare oppositions into demobilizing, staying at home, either not campaigning or not voting. And so, intimidation and repression is an age-old way of tilting the playing field just by making it too dangerous for opposition to get out and campaign to vote.
Three other things that I think are more relevant to the U.S. case, although not to say that's not relevant at all. One is tilting the financial playing field, is using the state, the government, and using a politicization of tax and regulatory and other government policies to induce business to stay away from the opposition and to give to the incumbent. And that's happened quite a bit.
So an extreme case is Russia under Putin who was literally killing and jailing business people, not just using economic tools, but was able to get the entire private sector to stop giving money to the opposition, and the opposition literally starved of resources. So that's an extreme case. But Viktor Orban was able to buy off much of the private sector such that they had an interest in staying away from the opposition. The opposition had a very hard time raising money there.
And Trump has done that. I mean, Trump has made it very, very clear that the best way to continue making a lot of money in the United States is to be on good political terms with Trump, which reporting suggests is often meant giving large amounts of money, tens of thousands, as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars, to Trump's political organization.
And Trump raised almost $2 billion in 2025, which is I think five times more than any other president in the first term of their presidency, all to his own political organizations by businesses that were basically being extorted into giving money. You give money to remain on good terms, so you get the government contracts or concessions or regulatory decisions that you need.
Now, we're a very wealthy society, and so far, Democratic Party candidates have not been starved of resources like in Russia. They do have access to resources. In some races, like in Texas, the Democratic candidate is out fundraising the Republican. So the playing field hasn't been fatally tilted, but it has been tilted. I mean, Republicans are going to end up with these Trump-backed super PACs are going to be able to out fundraise the Democrats. You don't have a level playing field.
This also happens in terms of media access in other countries. It hasn't happened much in the U.S., it's happened a little, but in other countries, the governments use all sorts of pressure tactics to co-opt the private media and ensure that either the mainstream media doesn't cover the opposition or covers the opposition only in negative terms. So the opposition in Hungary, despite the victory, had almost no access to mainstream electronic media in Hungary. It was almost entirely shut out.
And this has been the case in other so-called competitive authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world, a very, very asymmetric access to media.
Again, that's happened a little bit in the United States. Trump was able to use a weaponized state to get the Washington Post to shift its editorial line, to get CBS News to pretty dramatically shift its programming in a more pro-administration direction. But I think it'd probably be a stretch to say that the playing field has really been tilted. There are still so many places where voters and citizens can get access to information. I don't think that's been decisive at all.
Finally, gerrymandering is a way of tilting the electoral playing field. It's not super common in the world because you need single-member districts like in the United States to gerrymander in this fashion, but Viktor Orban used gerrymandering very, very effectively so that even when his party lost its share of the vote, he was able to maintain a super majority in parliament for many years. And that has, in fact, happened in the United States.
Gerrymandering is obviously not new in the United States, but this was the first time in 2025, '26 that a party engaged in a national campaign to redistrict in the middle of a decade in a way that would prevent losses in vote share from translating into losses in seats.
And at least initially, the calculation that the Republicans themselves made was that this national gerrymandering effort, which centered on Texas and a few other states, was going to net them about 10 seats, which created the... It looks like that may not happen, but that created the possibility that the Republican Party could lose the popular vote in 2026 for the House, could lose in a majority of the seats according to the preexisting map, and yet still retain control of the House of Representatives, which from any perspective would be a less than democratic election.
That's not a likely outcome, but it is a possibility created by this national redistricting effort in 2025. And so, tilting the playing field is not a threat. It is a reality. It may not be a heavy tilt, it may not be a decisive tilt. It probably won't be enough to assure Republicans' victory, but there is a tilt.
It strikes me that one of the ways that the Trump administration basically tries to shape the political environment in which elections will be held is through litigation. So there's just a huge amount of litigation and then appeal and then direct appeals in the Supreme Court that takes place, really, over almost every EO that's challenged is litigated fully by the administration, and then there's also other types of litigation underway.
And I'm wondering if there are other references around the world where you've seen backsliding occur with this kind of executive litigation strategy because it seems like a very particular approach, and it's interesting to ask how unique it is or whether that's becoming more standard fare.
We say it's not entirely unique, but it's fairly unique, and it's a second and third-best strategy for the Trump administration. In most electoral autocracies, governments are more successful than Trump in controlling the judiciary and in controlling the electoral authorities. One of the first moves of most electoral autocrats is to pack both the courts and the electoral authorities, and that hasn't happened much with respect to the courts.
And because we have a very decentralized election system where the executive has almost no power and it's all up to states and localities, it's been really difficult for, although the Trump administration has tried, to control election authorities. And so, as a kind of third-best strategy, the administration is either breaking the law, which is its efforts to use the post office to block mail-in voting, very importantly, I thought you were going to mention this, threats to take criminal action against local election officials who don't do what the federal government says.
So one can imagine a scenario in which Trump says, "You have to stop counting the votes" and local election authority, and Trump has no legal authority, no constitutional right to do that. And a local or state level election official may ignore that illegal order or might want to ignore that illegal order, but fear that they could be investigated and prosecuted by the DOJ for that. The DOJ is threatening that.
Again, I don't know if that will be carried out, but that's incredibly dangerous. So working through the courts, I mean, it's been mostly unsuccessful, and I think it's basically, it would've been much easier to manipulate the elections if the Trump administration could actually control the electoral authorities and control the courts. And all of this litigation I see primarily as a product of the fact that they don't control these institutions.
Yeah. I mean, I think something that you said is really important to repeat, which is this is a very big country, and elections are administered by the states and local election administrators and local officials. And so, it's really hard to assert executive power at the national level over our elections in any kind of lawful way. Congress can write laws in certain respects, but those laws can also be challenged on their constitutionality and everything.
So our elections are extremely complicated, but almost in a good way when it comes to avoiding executive overreach. And so, I think it bears repeating because I think the most important thing for people to understand about our elections in the midterms and otherwise is that voting is the way that people express their voice in our political system the most directly, and that they can both expect that when they do so, that their vote will be counted and that it will be registered and that it will be tallied up with the rest, and they can expect that.
And attempts by the president or any other national official to interfere with that are unlawful, and they should just know that. So I think going into the elections, eligible voters should register. They should vote. They should feel free to do that. They should understand that our system is built to register their point of view at that stage.
So in preparing for potential electoral challenges, whether that's litigation during or after voting or whatever, one audience member asks, "Do we think our institutions are strong enough in the aftermath of an election to make sure that voters are choosing their leaders and that the leaders are being certified and sworn in?"
So certainly, this calls back to the question of January 6th and the drama that played out there, ultimately unsuccessful to try to delay or overturn the certification efforts that the Constitution required of Congress at that moment. So fair question in the United States, what's the plan after the election to make sure that a January 6th-like episode doesn't happen again? And if it does, are institutions are resilient and robust enough to follow through on the voter's choices?
Very good question. You never quite know, unfortunately, whether the institutions are strong enough until the crisis hits. I think institutions by themselves are never enough. And you just pointed to a couple of, I think, answers to the questions embedded in your question, Erica. People have to defend the institutions. People have to make the institutions work. Institutions are not like, I don't know, home alarm systems that automatically go off if somebody breaks in. People have to make the institutions work. And I see kind of good and bad news.
The bad news or the troubling thing is that this is just all very new for most actors in this game. The U.S. judges, even the best intentioned ones, have never experienced a stolen election. It's not clear whether they know the drill or...
There is a decent chance that the government will, on multiple fronts, attempt to break or break the law, violate the law. And the judiciary is independent, which is a very positive thing, but do these guys, are they able to act quickly enough to prevent lawbreaking from doing damage to elections? That we don't know.
I think a reason for optimism is that U.S. society in general, and you've pointed this many times, Erica, is much more aware and much better organized than it was the first time around than it was in 2020. There are numerous organizations filled with excellent lawyers who have been preparing for this day for years now.
You can never know for sure where the crisis will be and on what grounds, but the U.S. civil society and the Democratic Party are much more aware and much better prepared than they were even four years ago to fight this out. So they're not going to be taken entirely by surprise.
That said, there are a few institutions, a few rules, or loopholes and rules that are worrisome. In particular, if the House or the Senate are determined by a small number of seats, actually, I'm talking mostly about the House here, and there are a handful of really contested elections, which is meaning close elections, it is entirely possible for Republicans to scream fraud, even if there's no foundation, and for the leadership of the House of Representatives to say, "Well, we get to decide who gets to fill this seat."
So if District X in Georgia or Texas or Virginia or Ohio, it's a close race, both sides claim victory, it is within the law for Speaker Johnson to say, "Oh, it's the Republican in each of these cases." And that, again, it's not super likely, but it's possible to manipulate the result of the election in that way.
For that reason, it's really important, and this is always the case with election fraud, the larger margin of victory makes a big, big difference. A close election is so much easier to contest, to manipulate, and to steal than an election that is close to a landslide. And so, the best way, the simplest way to avoid fraud or other shenanigans in this election is a decisive opposition victory. And that is exactly what we saw in Hungary, and that's what I think the opposition should aspire to in the United States.
Yeah. So I think that gets us into some of the questions that are coming in about if there is an overwhelming opposition victory, then what next?
So one questioner is working on a guide for groups who are discussing what should come after the MAGA movement, as it were. The questioner says, "There are many examples of democratic reforms in states and in other countries, but most people don't know about them. And if you don't know what's possible, you don't know what to work for." So what do you see as the most promising types of reforms, maybe we can talk explicitly about democracy reforms, that you think are low-hanging fruit for us to talk about?
I know none of it is low-hanging fruit, but let's just imagine the easiest to the hardest things to change in order to make the system going forward more resilient to aspiring autocrat candidates or parties. And what types of institutions that we have in our country are the most conducive to reform and what are just going to be really hard? Yeah.
I mean, in general, unfortunately, institutional reform is unusually difficult in the United States. I mean, I think there are some relatively low-hanging fruits, but because Americans in general have so much faith in our democracy and so much this sort of belief in American exceptionalism and the United States is the oldest and best and most successful democracy, it's harder to convince Americans than it is citizens in many other democracies that the system is in need of reform.
I think Americans are much closer today than they were 20 years ago, but it's still hard. And it's hard to convince Americans that there may be electoral systems in other democracies that work better than ours. So that takes more political work than it does in other democracies, and anything that requires constitutional reform is extraordinarily difficult in the United States.
So basically, reform, most of the time, it requires one of two things. It requires either some bipartisan consensus, which is very difficult in a highly polarized setting like today, or it requires a certain degree of hardball of really cutting corners and using your elbows to get stuff through. And I would argue that that is what happened in a very positive way with the reconstruction reforms in the 1860s and 1870s. To some extent, it's what happened with the New Deal reforms in the '30s.
And so, for example, I have evolved a lot on this issue. Six, seven years ago, I was very averse to Supreme Court reform or unilateral Supreme Court reform. But one of my fears is that even modest steps toward expanding access to the ballot, making it easier, even universal, to register and vote, which is something that's commonplace in most democracies.
If you ask me what a low-hanging fruit is, it should be super easy for any citizen who's 18 years old to register and vote in every state. That's legislation that was proposed by Democrats a few years ago and has stalled in the Senate. That could pass and be blocked by the Supreme Court.
There are a number of measures, simple democratizing measures that with this court, I fear might be blocked. And if the Supreme Court becomes an active obstacle to even, I'm not talking about constitutional reforms, just basic reforms in the electoral system, the voting system, perhaps campaign finance, I think that's an argument for expanding the court. And again, I did not advocate that several years ago, but we are in a much more dire circumstance today than at least I perceived us to be seven or eight years ago, and I think it may be necessary, but that's going to be hard.
Ultimately, we need a set of reforms, some of which are constitutional, that make it much harder for electoral minorities to govern this country. I think we need to abolish the Electoral College. That's not a low-hanging fruit. It's possible, but it's not a low-hanging fruit.
I think we need to change our electoral system so that it is more proportional so that the percentage of the vote translates more directly into the percentage of seats in Congress. And ideally, we need to democratize the Senate, which by giving tiny underpopulated states equal representation really, really distorts our democracy.
Those are reforms though that right now, given that the level of partisan polarization, are impossible. So low-hanging fruit, there's not much, and it's going to depend a little bit on the court's behavior. I don't think we know for sure that the court will be an obstacle. I think if there is a really big opposition victory in the next couple of elections, the court may defer to that somewhat, but I think even low-hanging fruit may require expansion of the court.
Interesting. Our colleague, Jill Lepore, had a book out last year called We the People, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and in it, she makes an observation that while the U.S. Constitution has become nearly impossible to amend, that in different states around the country, amendments to their state constitutions happen all the time.
And so, that actually is another way to answer this question, which is the states are going to be laboratories for experimentation with more democratic ways of voting, in part because the constitution suggests that elections should be handled by the states, and in part because that's often where people have the most direct leverage.
They can build power to influence different types of experiments like this, and that's why we see ranked choice voting and proposals for all kinds of more small-d democratic ways of participating in democracy emerging around the country in different states. And we get then a record of how did it work and what were the trade-offs, and then those can provide models for other states to try.
So I think in a way, my answer to this audience member's question would be to start local and think local about ways to experiment and find different civic leaders and members of political parties that want to work with you on that and see where it goes.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Not to be too much of a Debbie Downer, but we have to recognize that our states are also laboratories for authoritarianism.
