Is US democracy dying? States from Georgia to Michigan can tell us

By Mary Ellen Klas

If you want to understand the health of American democracy, what happens in state legislatures matters just as much as what happens in Washington, DC, and Mar-a-Lago.

In 2025, we can assess the health of democracy at the state level by watching four pressing issues: how states respond to federal spending cuts; how legislatures handle November’s ballot initiatives; whether local officials keep trying to subvert elections; and how far states get in eroding the wall between church and state.

Federal spending cuts

The Biden administration ushered in unprecedented federal investments in infrastructure, technology and clean energy that buoyed local economies across the country. President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to extend the 2017 tax cuts threatens to endanger many of those commitments. His plan to cut social programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid and housing assistance also will exacerbate existing inequities in both big cities and rural areas.

Democrats should have no problem telling the story of how Trump’s policies disproportionately benefit the wealthy and hurt the working class. But Republican-led states will also be hit harshly, and opposing Trump’s priorities is politically trickier for them. If their vulnerable communities are to be protected, Republican leaders will have to find funds to plug the gaps or work to mitigate the federal cutbacks. How they manage it will tell us whether state-level Republicans are totally cowed by Trump (and Department of Government Efficiency figurehead Elon Musk) or whether they are willing to fight for their own voters.

Ballot measures

Over the last four years, Republicans in one-party-controlled states plowed forward with unpopular policies on abortion and school vouchers. In November, voters in several red states overruled them. Those GOP legislators now have two choices: They can either respond to the majority sentiment and adopt more moderate policies, or work to nullify election results and make it more difficult to get a ballot measure passed.

Unfortunately, legislators in several states are signaling they want to entrench their partisan control — voters be damned. For example, after voters in Missouri chose to repeal the state’s abortion ban, Republicans filed legislation imposing new restrictions reproductive rights and advanced plans to raise the bar for new constitutional amendments.

In Utah, Republicans legislators took a pre-emptive strike against future ballot measures with a constitutional amendment that gave them the power to rewrite anything that voters approved through a ballot initiative. The state Supreme Court ruled their proposal deceptive and invalidated it.

And Republican legislators aren’t the only ones undermining ballot initiatives. In Democrat-controlled Massachusetts, legislators are trying to water down a voter-approved ballot measure that allows the state auditor to audit the legislature, including its final budget, which Democrats traditionally hammer out with little transparency.

Ballot measures are a relief valve for frustrated voters, especially in an era of gerrymandered state legislatures where it’s almost impossible for voters to unseat lawmakers whose policies they dislike, says Jake Grumbach, an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

Voters don’t like it when legislators take their rights away. Lawmakers should remember that.

Election rules

After the 2020 election, some states started to become what Grumbach calls “laboratories of democratic backsliding,” in his State Democracy Index, which tracks developments at the state level since 2000.

Trump-supporting election officials attempted to transfer election administration from independent to partisan actors. Georgia and Arizona required election workers to do hand counts at polling sites on Election Day, a change that seemed designed to delay the count and enable election denialism.

Just as disturbing has been the absence of outrage among Republican officials over Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, and the role the so-called “fake electors” played. Eight of them, who have been indicted in Michigan and Nevada for sending false certificates to elect Trump in 2020, were among the electors who cast Electoral College votes in their states this year. It’s incredible that they haven’t been removed from their roles.

Now that Trump has gotten what he wanted, the question is whether his allies at the state level will continue to undermine election norms and standards.

Separation of church and state

Alarmed by the decline in Christianity in America, religious conservatives in some states have required public schools to include Christian teachings in their curriculum. Louisiana legislators passed a law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments. In Oklahoma, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters ordered public schools to incorporate the Bible into lessons for grades 5 through 12.

These decisions are not about religious freedom. They use faith to advance a political ideology, Christian nationalism, and teeter dangerously close to obliterating the separation between church and state. (A federal judge halted the Louisiana law and parents are suing over the Oklahoma rule.) States undermine our founding principles when they use government to cherry-pick which religion is favored.

Governors and legislatures play a crucial role in maintaining democracy, and when it comes to fixing what’s broken, many voters trust their state officials more than representatives of the federal government. The incoming Trump administration will present states with a dramatically different landscape on dozens of issues — from the mass deportation of immigrants to shaking up public education. States will have to decide whether to go along with policies that increase inequality among their citizens and impose more burdens on their taxpayers, or push back against this democratic backsliding. How governors and legislatures handle these issues will determine how — and if — they are prepared to shore up our fraying democracy and mend a splintered nation.