You Can't Defend a Broken Democracy. You Have to Restore It.

People aren't just losing faith in their government. They're losing faith in the idea that democracy itself still works. And they're not wrong.

Earlier this week I wrote about why people don't trust their government, their institutions, their society, or their media anymore. One of the most obvious impacts is on our democracy itself—people are losing faith in the very idea that elections matter or work.

And honestly, they're not wrong to be skeptical.

In the last two presidential elections, we've seen complete rejection of results by major chunks of the population. In 2020, Republicans dismissed Biden's legitimate victory and we got January 6th and all the accompanying bullshit about stolen elections. In 2024, there was a subset of Democrats convinced there were shenanigans that led to Trump's victory over Harris. People have been suspect of electoral outcomes since 2000, and it's only gotten worse.

89 million Americans—36% of the voting-eligible population—didn't vote in 2024. That's more people than voted for either candidate. When you ask non-voters why they stayed home, the top reasons are "not interested" (19.7%), "too busy" (17.8%), or "didn't like the candidates or campaign issues" (14.7%). Those aren't people who got confused by complicated ballot procedures. Those are people who've given up on the whole thing.

Look at turnout in places like Oklahoma (53%), Arkansas (54%), West Virginia (56%), Texas (57%), Mississippi (58%), and Tennessee (58%). Even in a presidential election year, nearly half the people in these states didn't bother showing up. Compare that to midterm elections, where turnout in these same states was in the 30s and 40s.

You want to know why people think democracy is broken? Look at the numbers. Incumbents win re-election 95% of the time. When you have a 95% re-election rate, you've created hereditary power without the bloodline. That re-election rate isn't a reflection of voter satisfaction. It's the product of gerrymandered maps, billion-dollar war chests, and a media ecosystem that rewards power. When the re-election rate of United States elected officials is more guaranteed than European royalty holding onto power, you've got a system that's fundamentally broken.

And it's about to get worse. Right now, Texas Republicans are redistricting mid-decade at Trump's request to flip five Democratic seats and give Republicans control of nearly 80% of Texas' congressional districts in a state where Harris got 42% of the vote. Democrats in states like California and New York are preparing to retaliate with their own gerrymandering if Texas succeeds.

Neither party is rejecting this concept. I'm not saying you don't fight fire with fire, but you fight fire with fire and then you tell people that what we actually need is water hoses. You compete in the arena that exists while being clear that the goal is to turn this system off.

The districts are gerrymandered so politicians pick their voters instead of the other way around. Trump would have carried 30 out of 38 seats on the new Texas map, none by single-digit margins, while Democratic voters would be packed into eight districts that Harris would have won by at least 15 percentage points. That's not representation, that's rigging.

Only 22% of Americans trust the government to do what is right "just about always" or "most of the time". Only 29% say democracy is working in the U.S. today, compared with 68% who say it is not. 85% of Americans say they don't think elected officials care what people like them think. This isn't some temporary crisis of confidence. Trust in government began eroding during the 1960s with Vietnam and continued declining in the 1970s with Watergate. Since 2007, the shares saying they can trust the government always or most of the time have not been higher than 30%.

The system is designed to keep people out. Primaries are confusing—we don't know who's running, we don't know when to vote, because everything's convoluted. New York has three different election times. Some of these are jungle primaries, some are party primaries. Independent voters can't participate in most primaries, and independent candidates have a hard time getting traction in both blue and red districts.

The barriers to new parties are massive. Youth turnout dropped from 52-55% in 2020 to 42% in 2024, and young people were the least likely age group to vote, with less than half of 18-24 year olds participating. When your democracy systematically excludes the people who will live with the consequences the longest, you've got a problem.

And let's talk about money. You can have billionaires like Bloomberg spending a billion dollars of their own cash, or Elon Musk buying elections. Sometimes the payments don't work out, but most of the time they do. You're able to see upstart campaigns get strangled in the crib because they can't compete financially, and the media structures their coverage around who can raise the most money rather than who has the best ideas.

Meanwhile, you've got a revolving door that takes people from industries into the bodies that are supposed to be protecting us from them. Regulators leave to work for the industries they used to oversee. Industry executives slide into government roles to write rules for their former competitors. Lobbyists used to work for senators, senators retire to become lobbyists. Citizens United opened the floodgates for unlimited corporate spending while regular people get drowned out. Even incumbents who want to change things feel helpless because the system feels too entrenched, too rigged, and they're unwilling to fight hard enough to actually get it done.

Here's what Democrats keep getting wrong: you cannot defend or call for the defense of something that's fundamentally flawed and broken and that people have already lost hope and faith in. The only thing you can do is call out the ways it's broken and then promise to fix those specifically and then deliver on those promises.

Most Democrats are stuck defending a broken system instead of promising to restore it. They'll talk about "protecting democracy" while incumbents cruise to 95% re-election rates and billionaires buy influence. They'll condemn gerrymandering when Republicans do it but stay quiet when it helps them. People see through this bullshit. We know the game is rigged. When Democrats try to defend the current system, they're asking us to have faith in something that demonstrably doesn't work for us.

If you want people to believe in democracy again, you have to give them a democracy worth believing in. That means making voting simple and accessible with national voting holidays, unified primary calendars, and automatic registration. If we have so many prisoners in this country that we're afraid they can sway an election, maybe we've imprisoned too many damn people. Everyone should get to vote.

It means ending gerrymandering by using algorithms that don't take demographics or voting patterns into account, just divide people into equal districts of around 750,000 people. It'll look like octagons or hexagons because people don't know what district they live in anyway. They know their town, their community, their neighbors. Not their congressional number.

It means getting money out of politics. You can't have billionaires buying elections and call it democracy. Whether it's Bloomberg's billion-dollar vanity campaign or super PACs flooding districts with dark money, it's got to stop. Citizens United needs to be overturned. The revolving door between government and industry needs to slam shut. When the people writing financial regulations used to work for Wall Street and plan to work for Wall Street again, those aren't regulations—that's capture.

It means term limits and age limits. The founders never imagined people serving for decades. If you elect us, we will implement term limits. We'll look at age limits on the upper end. The system needs fresh blood and new ideas.

It means ranked choice voting so people can vote for who they actually want instead of just against who they hate most. It means open primaries where everyone can participate, ending the closed-door bullshit where parties pick their own voters.

It means transparency and accountability. If 85% of people think elected officials don't care what they think, that's because elected officials don't act like they care. Make them explain their votes. Make them hold town halls. Make them accessible.

Look, I get it. When Texas Republicans are gerrymandering to steal five seats, Democrats feel like they have to respond in kind. Fine. Do what you have to do to compete in the system that exists. Whether it's raising money to compete with AIPAC through super PACs or other independent expenditure entities, you compete where you have to compete.

But be clear about what you're doing and why. Don't pretend the current system is worth defending. Tell people you're fighting dirty because the other side made it dirty, but the goal isn't just to burn it all down—it's to build something better. A robust, functional, exciting democracy where people actually want to participate because they believe their voices matter and their votes count. When you get power, use it to restore democracy instead of just managing the broken system you inherited. Show people what a government that actually works for them looks like. Give them a reason to believe again.

You can’t defend something that 68% of Americans think is broken. You can only promise to fix it and then deliver on that promise.