So far, the biggest successes against President Donald Trump’s second-term assault on democracy have come not from Congress and the Supreme Court, but from more unusual sources: lower court judges, the “No King” protests, Disney+ customer boycotts, and Trump’s own indiscipline and incompetence.
After the 2025 elections, we can add states to the list. And in some ways, this path of resistance may be the most fruitful (at least until the mid-2026 term).
Tuesday’s election results, in particular, put a major dent in one of Trump’s most dangerous authoritarian ambitions — attempting a unilateral national gerrymander. But this major development should be an opportunity for most people, who focus on national politics, to assess the power of the state government. The United States is unusual among backward democracies in the strength of its federal system, and this creates some great opportunities for institutional pushback that may not be possible elsewhere.
This is somewhat ironic: for much of American history, the states (most notably in the South) were places where pockets of authoritarianism could exist in a national democratic society.
Yet today, as the national government moves in an authoritarian direction, the relatively large powers invested in the states—such as control over electoral administration—now create opportunities for small-D democrats to resist a national authoritarian power grab.
2025 election is the biggest real electoral result for democracy
Trump has been busy for much of his second term The threat of losing the midterm elections. Convinced that such a defeat would spell disaster for his presidency, he pushed state-level Republicans to engage in a highly unusual round of mid-cycle redistricting: essentially, a nationwide effort to rig the maps in favor of the GOP.
All the anti-democratic things Trump has been doing, from illegally seizing Congress’s purse strings to abusing regulatory powers to try to silence late-night comedy hosts, is perhaps the biggest immediate-term threat to the integrity of the electoral system.
Because election administration is almost entirely vested in the states in the American system, Trump has very limited ability to actually try and rig elections from DC. Instead, his best shot at stacking the deck for the GOP in 2026 is to threaten governors and state legislatures at the state level and draw as many safe seats as possible for Republicans.
There are examples of this abroad. After coming to power in 2010, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán created a series of single-member constituencies specifically designed to give disproportionate power to voters in his Fidesz party. This is a key reason he has been able to hold on to power despite growing unpopularity: in the 2014 election, Fidesz retained more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament, a majority sufficient to amend the constitution at will, despite winning only 44 percent of the national vote.
After the election, Trump’s path to a similarly unfair victory in 2026 became much more detailed.
The most obvious reason is that Democrats have gained new gerrymander-proofing powers. California voters have backed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mid-term redistricting plan in a ballot referendum. And Virginia voters gave Democrats a super-majority in the statehouse, giving them the numbers they needed. Pass their own new map. Democratic gains in the two states can be consolidated, According to one accountGOP gains from currently proposed gerrymanders in states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri could be nullified or exceeded.
This is hardly an ideal solution to the gerrymandering problem. As my friend Kelsey Piper Argument writes, Gerrymandering in any sense is bad for democracy: it reduces voters’ ability to make meaningful political choices. The best-case scenario would be a national ban on drawing partisan maps, which would allow Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red states to have equal representation in the House.
But in criticizing counter-gerrymandering, Piper misses two other important points: national representation and power.
If only one party is proud, the effect is to give that party an unfair advantage relative to their actual level of national support. If both parties gerrymander in ways that cancel each other out, the results of national elections look more like the will of the national electorate as a whole. This makes the results meaningfully more democratic than unilateral gerrymandering, even if at the district-by-district level it is far less fair and representative than it should be.
More fundamentally, though, counter-gerrymandering is needed to give Trump’s authoritarian ambitions a break.
In a competitive authoritarian system like Hungary, no individual action is decisive in ending democracy. Democracy instead dies from the accumulation of cumulative advantages, working together to make it nearly impossible for each opposition party to win fairly. Of these, gerrymandering is one of the most singularly important weapons. This directly raises the threshold of national unpopularity that the ruling party must reach to lose the legislature and thus lose the ability to pass laws empowering an authoritarian executive.
A direct hit is to prevent the party from enjoying that advantage in an attempt to stay in power indefinitely and undemocratically. If Democrats hadn’t approved counter-gerrymandering in California and Virginia, Trump would have moved meaningfully closer to creating a system similar to Hungary’s.
The architecture of the state and democratic retreat
Internationally there is a fairly well-worn playbook for an elected leader willing to seize authoritarian control. They consolidate formal power into their own hands, undermine independent checks on their authority, undermine the integrity of electoral administrations, and impose political constraints on civil society and big business.
In Trump’s second term, he’s tried to check every box — a completely flexible GOP majority in Congress and a Supreme Court that has rarely ruled against him in an executive capacity. On paper, this seems like a recipe for democratic failure. In recent resistance cases, such as Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro failed to consolidate power and lost his 2022 re-election bid, and South Korea, where activists and lawmakers stopped President Yoon Suk-yeol’s overnight coup attempt in 2024, presidents lacked meaningful control over the other two branches of government.
But in the American system, control over the federal government is not the whole ball game. Many important functions of the state like election administration and policing are carried out at the local level. As there is, As my colleague Ian Milheiser points outTrump’s authoritarianism presents significant legal hurdles to consolidation. It’s much harder to rig elections or successfully prosecute your political opponents when a real measure of power in that region is vested in areas you don’t control.
That being said, federalism is no antidote to authoritarian rule. A Recent research Three political scientists found four cases of countries with federal systems where national leadership tried to seize authoritarian power: the United States, Brazil, India and Venezuela during Trump’s first term. In Brazil and the United States, they found that states posed a major barrier to alleged takeovers. In contrast, states in India and Venezuela were less effective in preventing national retreat.
In their view, the key difference was the balance of formal and party power. In the United States and Brazil, states have more control over core government functions than in India and Venezuela Moreover, oppositions controlled more states in the first pair of countries than in the second pair.
Not that strong federalism guarantees democracy: any view of American history shows that, indeed, federalism can allow authoritarianism to emerge and flourish at the local level. Rather, it creates the US federal system chance To compete when national governments are moving in an authoritarian direction – something people in non-federal collapsed democracies like Hungary and Turkey have not had.
These struggles are not only important to the state in question, but also involve powers directly available to the executive branch. It’s possible to think of the states as a kind of “fourth branch” of the federal government, imposing limits on executive efforts to consolidate power even when federal firewalls are failing.
We can see this in action in the results of the 2025 Virginia election. But there will be many battles in the statehouse and governors’ mansions, from red-state decisions to comply with Trump’s demands to blue-state decisions to vet abusive federal law enforcement, which could serve as an important backstop ahead of the midterm elections.
