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 more unusual sources: lower-court judges, “No Kings” protests, a Disney+ subscriber boycott, and Trump’s own indiscipline and incompetence.
After the 2025 elections, we can add the states to the list. And in some ways, this avenue of resistance may prove to be the most consequential one (at least until the 2026 midterms).
Tuesday’s election results have, specifically, created a major barrier to one of Trump’s most dangerous authoritarian ambitions — an attempted one-sided national gerrymander. But this major development should also be an opportunity for most people, who focus on national politics, to evaluate the power of state governments. The United States is unusual among backsliding democracies in the strength of its federal system, and that creates some major opportunities for institutional pushback that may not have been possible elsewhere.
This is somewhat ironic: For most of American history, states (most notably in the South) have been places where pockets of authoritarianism could exist in a nationally democratic society.
Yet today, as the national government moves in an authoritarian direction, the comparatively major powers invested in states — like control over election administration — are now creating opportunities for small-d democratic to resist a national authoritarian power grab.
The biggest tangible election consequence of the 2025 elections for democracy
For much of his second term, Trump has been preoccupied with the threat of losing the midterm elections. Convinced that such a defeat would spell disaster for his presidency, he has pushed state-level Republicans to engage in a highly unusual round of mid-cycle redistricting: basically, a nationwide attempt to rig the maps in the GOP’s favor.
Of all the many anti-democratic things Trump has been doing, from illegally taking Congress’s power of the purse to abusing regulatory powers to try to silence late-night comedy hosts, this was probably the greatest immediate-term threat to the integrity of the electoral system itself.
Because election administration is almost entirely devolved to the states in the American system, Trump has very limited powers to actually try and rig elections from DC. Instead, gerrymandering at the state level — threatening and cajoling governors and state legislatures into drawing as many safe seats for Republicans as possible — is his best shot at actually stacking the deck in the GOP’s favor in 2026.
There is precedent for this abroad. After coming to power in 2010, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán created a series of single-member districts that were drawn specifically to give disproportionate power to his Fidesz party’s voters. This was a key reason he could maintain power despite rising unpopularity: In the 2014 election, Fidesz maintained over two-thirds of seats in parliament, a majority large enough to amend the constitution at will, despite winning only 44 percent of the national vote.
After last night’s elections, Trump’s pathway to a similarly unfair victory in 2026 got a lot dicier.
The most obvious reason is that Democrats gained new powers to counter-gerrymander. California voters endorsed a ballot referendum in support of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mid-cycle redistricting plan. And Virginia voters handed Democrats a super-majority in the statehouse, giving them the numbers they needed to pass their own new map. The Democratic gains in the two states put together could, per one calculation, cancel out or even exceed GOP gains from currently proposed gerrymanders in states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri.
This is hardly an ideal solution to the problem of gerrymandering. As my friend Kelsey Piper writes in The Argument, gerrymandering in any sense is bad for democracy: It decreases voters’ ability to make meaningful political choices. The best-case scenario would be a national ban on partisan map-drawing, one that would allow Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red ones equally fair levels of representation in the House.
But in criticizing counter-gerrymandering, Piper misses two other important factors: national representativeness and power.
If only one party gerrymanders, then the effect is to give that party an unfair advantage relative to their true level of national support. If both parties gerrymander in ways that cancel each other out, then the results of the national House election look a lot more like the will of the national electorate as a whole. That makes the outcome meaningfully more democratic than a one-sided gerrymander, even if on a district-by-district level it is far less fair and representative than it should be.
More fundamentally, though, counter-gerrymandering is necessary to put a break on Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.
In competitive authoritarian systems like Hungary’s, no individual move is decisive in ending democracy. Democracy instead dies from an accumulation of incremental advantages, each working in tandem to make it nearly impossible for the opposition to win fairly. Of those, gerrymandering is among the most singularly important weapons. It directly raises the threshold of national unpopularity that the incumbent party needs to reach to lose the legislature, and thus lose its power to pass legislation empowering an authoritarian executive.
Preventing the party from attaining that advantage, then, is a direct blow to their attempt to stay in power indefinitely and undemocratically. If Democrats had not won approval for counter-gerrymandering in California and Virginia, Trump would be meaningfully closer to creating a system like Hungary’s.
States and the architecture of democratic backsliding
There is, internationally, a fairly well-worn playbook for an elected leader who wishes to seize autocratic control. They consolidate formal power in their own hands, neuter independent checks on their authority, undermine the fairness of election administration, and impose political constraints on civil society and big business.
In Trump’s second term, he has attempted to check every box — helped along by a completely pliant GOP majority in Congress and a Supreme Court that has only rarely ruled against him on executive power. On paper, this seems like a recipe for democratic failure. In recent cases of resistance, such as Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro failed to consolidate power and lost his 2022 reelection bid, and South Korea, where activists and legislators 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 isn’t the entire ball game. Many of the key functions of state, like election administration and policing, are handled at the local level. That has, as my colleague Ian Millhiser points out, presented significant legal barriers to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation. It is much harder to rig elections or successfully prosecute your political opponents when a real measure of power in those areas is delegated to localities that you do not control.
That being said, federalism is not a panacea against authoritarian takeovers. A recent study by three political scientists found four cases of countries with federal systems where the national leadership attempted an authoritarian power seizure: the US during Trump’s first term, Brazil, India, and Venezuela. In Brazil and the United States, they found that states posed a major barrier to said takeovers. By contrast, states in India and Venezuela were less effective in stymying national backsliding.
In their view, the key differences were the balances of formal and partisan power. In the US and Brazil, states have greater control over core government functions than they did in India and Venezuela. Moreover, the opposition had control over greater numbers of states in the first pair of countries than in the second.
It’s not that strong federalism guarantees democracy: Any look at American history shows that, in fact, federalism can allow authoritarianism to rise and thrive at the local level. Rather, it’s that the US federal system creates opportunities for contestation when the national government is moving in an authoritarian direction — one that people in non-federal collapsed democracies, like Hungary and Turkey, simply didn’t have.
These fights do not just matter for the state in question, but rather directly implicate the powers available to the executive branch. It’s possible to think of states as a kind of “fourth branch” of the federal government, one imposing constraints on the executive’s efforts at power consolidation even when the federal firewalls are failing.
We can see this at work, very obviously, in the 2025 Virginia election results. But there will be many fights to come in statehouses and governors’ mansions, ranging from red-state decisions on complying with Trump’s demands to gerrymander to blue-state decisions over checking abusive federal law enforcement, that can serve as a crucial backstop in the year-plus before the midterm elections provide an opportunity to stiffen federal resistance.
