With hundreds of elections deniers running in the midterms, democracy is on the ballot this fall. The team at the States United Democracy Center is at the forefront of efforts to ensure free, fair, and secure elections in 2022, 2024, and beyond. Cofounders Norman Eisen, Joanna Lydgate, and Christine Todd Whitman join us this week to talk about how they're doing it in states across the country and how everyone can support their efforts.
Through legal, policy, and communications work, States United is fighting back empowering state leaders as they defend elections. These officials are the frontline champions in the battle for our democracy. Governors help enshrine voter protection into law, and attorneys general defend those laws—along with election results. Secretaries of state oversee elections, and law enforcement leaders make sure they are safe and free from violence. States United’s mission is to bring these leaders together to protect elections, prevent political violence, fight disinformation, and pursue accountability for those who step outside the bounds of our democracy.
Eisen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, former Ambassador to the Czech Republic, and special counsel to the White House for ethics and government reform. Lydgate is the former chief deputy attorney general of Massachusetts. Whitman is the former governor of New Jersey and Environmental Protection Agency administrator in the George W. Bush administration. They are the recipients of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy's 2022 Brown Democracy Medal.
States United Democracy Center
States United: A Survival Guide for Our Democracy - Eisen, Lydgate, and Whitman's book written as part of receiving the Brown Democracy Medal
Amid election deniers and political polarization, it's easy to overlook the times when democracy is actually working. We do that this week in a hopeful conversation about resident-centered government. Elected officials and administrative staff like city planners often have the best intentions when it comes to development and redevelopment, but political and professional incentives push them to pursue projects that lure in outsiders rather than serving people who live in their communities.
Our guest this week is Michelle Wilde Anderson, a professor of property, local government, and environmental justice at Stanford Law School and the author of The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America. The book tells the stories of revitalization efforts in Stockton, California, Josephine, Oregon, Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Detroit, Michigan. In each instance, residents organized to fix small problems that turned into large-scale change. It's a model that anyone can replicate and our democracy will be stronger for it.
The Fight to Save the Town by Michelle Wilde Anderson
The conversation about climate change has come a long way from the days of polar bears and melting ice caps, but as our guest this week shares, there's still a long way to go in creating truly inclusive climate policy. In order to do that, those who are most impacted by environmental racism need to be involved in the policymaking process.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright is the director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute and one of the intellectual architects of the Green New Deal. She grew up on Chicago's South Side and talks about how environmental justice shaped her life from an early age — event if she didn't know that's what it was. We also discuss how climate reform is connected to other parts of America's political system and efforts to reform democracy.
It's no secret that liberalism didn't always live up to its own ideals. In America, many people were denied equality before the law. Who counted as full human beings worthy of universal rights was contested for centuries, and only recently has this circle expanded to include women, African Americans, LGBTQ+ people, and others. Conservatives complain that liberalism empties the common life of meaning.
As the renowned political philosopher Francis Fukuyama shows in Liberalism and Its Discontents, the principles of liberalism have also, in recent decades, been pushed to new extremes by both the right and the left: neoliberals made a cult of economic freedom, and progressives focused on identity over human universality as central to their political vision. The result, Fukuyama argues, has been a fracturing of our civil society and an increasing peril to our democracy.
Fukuyama isthe Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a faculty member at Stanford's Institute on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His previous books include Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment and The End of History and the Last Man.
This episode is part of the series 2022 Midterms: What's at Stake? series from The Democracy Group podcast network. Think of it as an election administrator vibe check as we head into the midterms. Election officials are the backbone of our democracy, but also increasingly the face of fraud allegations from far-right groups and others who deny the legitimacy of elections that don't go their way.
Many of us watched Georgia election officials Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss testify before the January 6 committee about the threats they faced after becoming caught up in conspiracies about the 2020 election. Our guest this week says that stories like this are more common than many of us realize, and that things like erroneous record requests from election deniers are even more common. On top of that, social media platforms are making it more difficult local election offices to share accurate information with voters.
Jessica Huseman is the editorial director at Votebeat, a news outlet that does nonpartisan local reporting n elections and voting. She was previously the lead elections reporter for ProPublica, and helped manage the Electionland project for three federal election cycles, sharing information and tips with hundreds of newsrooms across the United States.
2022 Midterms: What At Stake? series from The Democracy Group podcast network
Power the Polls - poll worker recruitment nationwide
The Democratic Party saw a surge in grassroots activism after the 2016 election, after George Floyd's murder, and most recently after the Dobbs decision. However, the party seems to be sticking to the same old playbook of fundraising emails and text messages, rather than building long-term organizational power. Our guests this week explore why that is and how the Democratic Party can use grassroots mometum to build and expand coaltions.
Lara Putnam is professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and previously appeared on the podcast ahead of the 2018 midterms. Micah L. Sifry is the founder of Civic Hall and writes The Connector newsletter on Substack. They teamed up for a New York Times op-ed in August and a series of follow-up pieces in The Connector.
The New York Times: Fed Up With Democratic Emails? You're Not the Only One
The Connector: An Activist Base is a Terrible Thing to Waste
The Connector: Connections, Capacity, and Impact
Following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision, reproductive rights are heading to ballots in states across the country this fall. Are states the right venue for this and other issues? Our guest this week says yes and makes the case that state courts and constitutions are more democratic than their counterparts at the federal level.
In Who Decides? State as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation, U.S. Appellate Court Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton focuses on the constitutional structure of the American states to answer the question of who should decide the key questions of public policy today. We also discuss work by Jake Grumbach in his book Laboratories Against Democracy and the forthcoming Moore v. Harper case in the U.S. Supreme Court, which grapples with what's come to be known as the Independent State Legislature Theory.
Sutton is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He was previously a partner with the law firm of Jones Day and served as State Solicitor of the State of Ohio. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (Ret.), the Honorable Antonin Scalia, and the Honorable Thomas J. Meskill. His previous book is 51 Imperfect Solutions, published in 2018.
Who Decides: States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation
COVID-19 showed just how essential high-speed Internet is to our everyday lives. It determines how many of us work, learn, and access news and entertainment. Yet, millions of Americans do not have reliable access to broadband and millions more can't afford to pay for the service that's available to them.
Christopher Ali, the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State, unpacks these issues in his book Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity and joins us this week for a discussion about market failures, how communities across the country are democratizing Internet access and how the federal government is now starting to step in thanks to funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in November 2021.
We also discuss some of Ali's more recent work on the relationship between broadband deserts and news deserts, and how the combination impacts democratic citizenship.
The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act shines a light on the administrative state. How will the billions of dollars for Medicaid, green energy, and other provisions be spent and turned into policy? With the help of people whose jobs are largely nonpartisan and non-political. Complaints about government bureaucracy are nothing new but has recently moved beyond rhetoric to a concerted attack on policy implementation.
Don Moynihan, the McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown, writes about the administrative state in his newsletter, Can We Still Govern? He joins us this week to discuss the promise of the Inflation Reduction Act, the looming peril of Schedule F, and whether a bipartisan, policy-focused coalition can emerge in 2022 and beyond.
We're back after our summer break and catch up on what's happened to American democracy while we were on hiatus.
Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, Candis Watts Smith, and Jenna Spinelle are back after summer break to discuss the January 6 committee hearings, which we previously teased as "democracy's summer blockbusters." Did they live up to the hype? Did they change public opinion — and does that matter?
We also discuss the January 6 hearings and the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in the context of democratic pedagogy, or behavior that helps us learn what it means to be good democratic citizens. Finally, we discuss some of the summer's primary elections and what to expect in the general election this fall.
NBC News poll on threats to democracy as the most important issue facing the country
We are part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.