Oct. 5 · Elections
The Zombie Democracy: Trump Doesn’t Have to Cancel Elections for Our Democracy to Be Dead. On Nov. 3, We Find Out if It Already Is.
Democrats can win the House. What's that mean if Trump still decides how our money gets spent and who gets prosecuted?
Author’s note: This piece does not explore whether voting machines or vote counting have altered election results, not because there is or is not evidence of that, but because the subject is expansive enough to deserve its own exploration. Our own report on that subject is The Comprehensive 2024 Election Theft Fact Check, and the Substack This Will Hold has been a great recurring source on election tampering and equipment tampering.
“A vote for Donald Trump may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in,” Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman and vice chair of the House Jan. 6 committee, said on NBC’s “Today” in December 2023. In July 2024, Trump told a crowd of Christian voters in West Palm Beach, Florida: “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
A lot of people said our democracy was done if Trump became president again, and the Nov. 3, 2026, midterms are where we find out if that’s true. Something we should consider is that he doesn’t have to cancel elections for that to be true.
Kenneth Roth, then the executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote about governments like this in Foreign Affairs in July 2021. He called them zombie democracies, “the living dead of electoral political systems, recognizable in form but devoid of any substance.” Their rulers, Roth wrote, “still hold periodic elections since their people have come to expect them, but they do not even pretend that these empty rituals are free or fair.”
The Varieties of Democracy Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg downgraded the United States in March 2026 from liberal democracy to electoral democracy and wrote that “the speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.” Electoral democracy remains the category for countries whose citizens choose their leaders in “meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections.”
Steven Levitsky, the Harvard political scientist who co-wrote How Democracies Die, told NPR in February 2026 that the United States has become “a mild form of competitive authoritarianism.” In that kind of system, the ruling party still holds elections and uses attacks on the press, prosecutions of critics, disenfranchisement of voters and threats against opponents to improve their odds of winning.
To be clear, I’m not predicting the result. This article is meant to share the research and the experts’ views, and on Nov. 3 we will see whether our democracy is already dead. The yardstick is a functioning democracy, where everyone who wants to vote is able to do so, and the party that wins is handed the powers of the offices they won.
Let’s first look at the best-case scenario for Democrats, a House majority, and explore what that majority means in 2027. Currently, Democrats lead the generic ballot by 9 points in the polling average released by Nate Silver, the forecaster who founded FiveThirtyEight. Inside Elections, the nonpartisan newsletter that rates every House and Senate race, projects them to gain seven to 15 House seats, and they only need three for a majority.
A Democratic House can refuse to pass Trump’s bills, great. Except it must be noted that he has governed this term by executive order and emergency declaration. Next, a Democratic House can write appropriations, too bad the Supreme Court has already let him withhold appropriated money, even though per the U.S. Constitution that is a congressional authority. So much for originalism, right, Chief Justice Roberts?
In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Biden v. Nebraska that Joe Biden’s education secretary could not cancel $430 billion in student debt without clear authorization from Congress. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion. In September 2025, the same six justices let Trump keep withholding $4 billion in foreign aid that Congress had appropriated, in an emergency order suggesting the aid groups that sued may have no right to bring the case. Trump withheld the money through a “pocket rescission,” a request to cancel spending sent so late in the fiscal year that the money expires before Congress votes on it. In the first case, the president could not forgive debt owed through an executive branch agency without congressional authorization. In the second case, the president could withhold $4 billion that Congress had appropriated.
So long as the Roberts court can shrink power when Democrats have it, and expand it when and where Republicans have it, our democracy is on the edge of a cliff or perhaps already looking at the view from halfway down.
Democratic House committees can subpoena Trump’s officials and refer them for prosecution, but the purged and loyalty-tested Justice Department decides who gets charged. Justice Connection, a network of department alumni, estimates the department fired more than 230 lawyers, agents and other employees in 2025. In June 2022, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the department declined to charge Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino, Trump’s former chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, after the House held both men in contempt of Congress. Referrals become charges when a Justice Department acts on them, or when state prosecutors bring charges under state law. The House can also impeach him, but 34 senators is all it takes to prevent a conviction and removal from office. So long as the GOP can hold on to those 34 seats, by hook or by crook, they buffer themselves from accountability federally.
Removal and a veto override each take 67 senators. Only 35 Senate seats are on the 2026 ballot, 22 of them held by Republicans, and Inside Elections projects Democrats to gain three to five seats. That leaves Republicans with 48 to 50 senators.
An override also takes 290 House members. In Gallup’s polling since 1946, a president below 50 percent approval has cost his party 37 House seats on average, and a 37-seat gain would take Democrats from the 215 seats they won in 2024 to about 252.
Democrats last won 67 or more Senate seats in the 1964 landslide, when they took 68, and Republicans broke that majority in 1966 by taking three Democratic seats.
Democrats last held 290 House seats after the 1976 election, when they won 292. In 2008, Democrats won 257 seats with a 10.6-point margin, the largest House margin for either party since 1982.
In 2009 and 2010, Democrats held 60 Senate seats, the number that ends a filibuster, for a little over five months. Their 60 included both senators from four states: Arkansas, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia. Republicans hold all eight of those seats today.
How can elections save you when Democrats need 290 House seats and 67 senators, and Republicans need 34?
Trump has faced a hostile House before. In 2019, after a 35-day partial shutdown, Congress gave him $1.375 billion for border barriers. He declared a national emergency and moved $3.6 billion from military construction to build more wall. Congress passed disapproval resolutions twice, and he vetoed both. An appeals court ruled the transfer illegal in October 2020, 20 months after he declared the emergency and successfully ran his operation for the duration.
An Associated Press review found that federal judges ruled the administration in violation of court orders in at least 31 lawsuits during the first 15 months of Trump’s second term, and in 15 of those cases a higher court allowed the policy or limited the judge’s remedy.
Judges also blocked his executive orders on elections, the Postal Service’s mail-ballot rule, the Justice Department’s voter-file suits and the National Guard deployment in Chicago.
ICE detention grew through all of it. The agency held more than 65,000 people in July 2026, about 70 percent of them with no criminal conviction, up from 39,703 in January 2025.
Detention Watch Network counts 50 deaths in ICE custody from January 2025 through mid-July 2026. In January 2026, federal agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens, in Minneapolis.
Of what use are lower court “wins” if the administration ignores them, acts anyway, and faces no consequence?
In February 2026, Trump said Republicans should “nationalize“ voting in at least 15 places, days after the FBI searched the Fulton County, Georgia, election office for records from 2020. He has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which remains available to him even after the Supreme Court ruled in December 2025 that he hadn’t met the requirements of the National Guard statute he used in Chicago. The administration has been loyalty testing and purging specifically to minimize remaining upper ranks leadership in the U.S. military and to ensure those that remain are loyalty test approved. At Marine Corps Base Quantico on Oct. 1, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said 10 percent of the military’s generals and admirals had been fired and ordered another 10 percent cut: “Now the media calls that a purge. I call it accountability, and long overdue.” What did the court’s ruling do to prevent future deployments and domestic occupation?
And what about the “Court Wins” for the Justice Department’s political targets? U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie dismissed the indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James in November 2025, ruling the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed, and two grand juries later refused to bring new charges. In September 2025, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, pressed ABC and the network’s affiliates over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
To further contextualize the coming months, we can look at what happens to governments when their legislature is disempowered through judicially validated executive aggrandizement. After Venezuela’s opposition won 112 of the National Assembly’s 167 seats in December 2015, the country’s Supreme Court declared the assembly in contempt, and in March 2017 the court took over the assembly’s legislative powers. President Nicolás Maduro then convened a Constituent Assembly that assumed lawmaking authority.
After voters denied Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party a parliamentary majority in June 2015, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called a new election for November, and the party, known by the Turkish initials AKP, won the majority back. William Chislett, writing for Spain’s Elcano Royal Institute, summarized the result: “The AKP won the election freely but not fairly.”
Even as we review all these barriers to the upcoming election, we must reckon with one facet of American voting that has never been sufficiently protected and that’s the right to vote. For the U.S. to be a fully functioning democracy, we need to have accessible mail-in ballots, automatic voter registration, Election Day as a holiday and a week of election days, everything maxed out to improve opportunity and reduce friction for people to exercise their right to vote. In the 2022 midterms, 45.1 percent of eligible Americans voted. We, as in the public, are often trained to blame the voters rather than the zealots, extremists, and ultra-wealthy interests that do everything in their power to make it more difficult to vote.
So where are we as of today? In a poll of 2,140 adults taken Sept. 24 to 28 by The Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago, 69 percent disapproved of the job Trump is doing. In Silver’s average of polls, the share of Americans who disapprove of Trump is 22.7 points larger than the share who approve. A House that split the way the AP-NORC poll did would have 300 of its 435 members opposed to Trump and his agenda. Inside Elections projects Democrats to win 222 to 230 seats. These are two data points worthy of their own deep dive in the future, how so many Americans can disapprove of Trump’s actions and yet congressional representation and outcomes can be so incredibly detached from public sentiment.
What’s the point of having a House of Representatives if they’re nowhere near representative?
So just how rigged are our elections, in empirically sound terms? Rigging, measured before anyone votes, is the margin a majority of voters has to clear to win a majority of seats. In Silver’s forecast, Democrats are favored to win the House only if they win the national House vote by 3 points or more, and they’re underdogs at anything less.
In July 2025, Trump urged Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional districts in the middle of the decade, and nine states now use new House maps, seven of them drawn to even further favor Republicans. Mapmakers favor a party by packing the other party’s voters into a few districts they win overwhelmingly and cracking the rest across districts they narrowly lose.
An Axios analysis found that before the redraw, Democrats needed to outperform Kamala Harris’s 2024 district margins by 3.1 points to win the House, and under the new maps they need 4.9 points. If every new map performs as designed, Republicans net up to nine additional seats.
In April 2026, the Supreme Court held in Louisiana v. Callais that challengers to a map under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act must show intentional discrimination, and several Southern legislatures redrew their maps after the ruling. Both parties draw maps for advantage, and California voters approved a Democratic counter-map in November 2025 in answer to Texas. The net still favors Republicans, due to the more rural distribution of their voters and due to the number of GOP-controlled states that instantly complied, and had already been complying, with unfair gerrymandering practices, compared to a tepid response from most Democratic states to counter GOP gerrymandering with their own. In October 2025, Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson, a Democrat, announced the Senate would not redraw the state’s congressional map.
Democrats’ 9-point lead clears the 3-point threshold, and on the new maps they win fewer seats with that lead than they would have along the 2024 lines.
The voter rolls changed alongside the maps. State legislatures enacted 44 restrictive voting laws from January 2025 through April 2026, more than in any two-year federal election cycle since the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law began counting in 2011. Expect that trend to continue leading into 2028.
The victory often touted in defending federal elections is that the Justice Department sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for their full voter files, and courts have dismissed 26 of those lawsuits. The less inspirational side of that story is that 16 states have provided, or said they will provide, their full voter lists, including driver’s license and Social Security numbers, handing the Trump administration the personal data of every registered voter in those states. Those 16 states hold 142 of the 435 House seats and 32 of the 100 Senate seats. But it’s not like the GOP has a history of election tampering, so everything should be fine.
In 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder ended preclearance, the requirement that states and counties with histories of discrimination get federal approval before changing their voting rules. A Brennan Center study of nearly 1 billion vote records found that by 2022, the white-Black turnout gap in the formerly covered counties was 5 points larger than it would have been under preclearance, a difference of hundreds of thousands of votes from voters of color in that year’s midterm.
The effect of the 2025 and 2026 voter suppression laws becomes measurable when voter files from the Nov. 3, 2026, election are released.
If you only take one thing from this article, besides the importance of voting, it’s that should Democrats gain the majority of the House and Senate in the midterms, most of the solutions we need only require a simple majority to pass and a president who will sign them, which means January 2029 at the earliest. Senators can change the Senate’s rules by majority vote, as Democrats did for nominees in 2013 and Republicans did for Supreme Court nominees in 2017. In January 2022, 52 senators voted down the change that would have let the voting rights bill pass by majority vote, and the two Democrats among them, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have since left the Senate.
The bills we need are already written. The Freedom to Vote Act provides automatic registration, same-day registration, early voting and an Election Day holiday. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which Sens. Dick Durbin and Raphael Warnock reintroduced in July 2025 with every Senate Democrat, restores preclearance. The Fair Representation Act, which Reps. Don Beyer and Jamie Raskin reintroduced the same month, requires multi-member districts elected by ranked-choice voting.
A fourth bill would repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the House at 435 members when the country had 123 million people. The Constitution caps the House at one representative for every 30,000 people, which on the 2020 census allows as many as 11,000 members. A larger House elected from multi-member districts gives each party a share of seats that follows their share of the vote.
No matter how captured the federal government becomes, the United States retains a powerful toolkit of defenses against authoritarian capture. While many view “checks and balances” to merely count the bicameral legislature, judicial branch, and executive branch, the founders created a masterful cascade of additional safeguards in the form of subnational governments granted powers to be directed by the residents of those states. The founders knew tyranny well, and they knew that local governance carries a benefit in fighting a centralized authoritarian force, as a result of dispersing and dividing the resources of that authoritarian body. In the United States, the officials outside the president’s appointment power include state prosecutors, the governors who command each state’s National Guard, the officials who certify each state’s results and the judges on state courts.
States can act in their 2027 sessions with the following:
a state voting rights act
automatic voter registration, already law in 24 states and the District of Columbia
same-day registration
a ballot mailed to every registered voter, already law in eight states
prepaid postage on every returned ballot
a voters’ pamphlet mailed to every household
Election Day as a state holiday
Washington State already has the first seven in law, from the Washington Voting Rights Act of 2018 to the postage the state pays on returned ballots.
So what does all this mean? First, that it’s less likely that a midterm outcome will provide the sort of wide-reaching change we really need to begin “fixing this,” such as prosecutions, convictions on impeachments, presidential veto overrides, or even constitutional amendments. If Inside Elections’ projection is right, we get “some degree of slowing the arterial bleed.”
Second, that no amount of autocratic action surrounding the midterms takes away the robust powers of cities, states, tribal communities, neighborhoods, and even individuals, to fight back and in ways that prove effective. Each of the levels of response which I just outlined carries its own tools, advantages, and challenges. Each is here no matter what Trump and his ilk try.
Hopefully losing support is still a sufficient factor to influence elections. Trump has lost plenty of support, and the midterms are the true test of whether that still decides meaningful electoral outcomes. On Nov. 3, we watch whether eligible voters are removed from the rolls or turned away, and whether the candidates that win are even seated into their new and duly elected roles.
If Democrats win the House and Trump still decides what gets spent and who gets prosecuted, then our elections are what Roth described, “recognizable in form but devoid of any substance,” and the United States is a zombie democracy.
So what do we do with this information?
Educate, Activate, Recruit, and Repeat. These are the stages for all effective social movements. They’re what build a movement that grows as circumstances become more challenging, making success inevitable. Learn more in The Existentialist Republic Library of free resources, all at the bottom of this article.
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CALL TO ACTION
Who you’re contacting and how: Reach out to one of your state legislators. You can do that by email, phone, FaxZero or even a printed letter. You could even go to their office, and you could even invite friends to join you.
Find your legislators by clicking on this sentence.
What you’re asking for: Ask them to publicly endorse all eight of these for your state:
a state voting rights act
automatic voter registration
same-day registration
a ballot mailed to every registered voter
prepaid postage on every returned ballot
a drop box for every 15,000 registered voters
a voters’ pamphlet mailed to every household
Election Day as a state holiday
Let them know who you are, what you want, and why you care. Offices count identical messages once, so write it in your own words.
The Existentialist Republic Library
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The Existentialist Republic Library
Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download
Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download
Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download
Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download
Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download
Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative
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