I. The Existential Threat of Hyper-Partisan Polarization

A broad consensus exists among political experts that American democracy is in a brittle and threatened place, with an increasingly dysfunctional government that has lost the trust and goodwill of the American people. Though there are certainly many causes for this moment of crisis, the overwhelming balance of expert judgment places hyper-partisan polarization at the core.

The reasons why hyper-partisan polarization is a threat to the stability of democracy are straightforward and simple to understand. Democracy depends on a shared foundation of fairness around elections. Winning parties must win graciously and not use their newly acquired powers to prevent their opposition from effectively challenging them in the next election. Losing parties must acknowledge that they have lost and acknowledge the legitimacy of the election. When this shared sense of fairness and fair play breaks down, violence or the threat of violence becomes the alternative. One pithy definition of democracy is that it is a system in which parties can lose elections.¹ Democracies die when one side believes that winning the next election is so important that it is willing to use extra-democratic means to achieve its goal.²

A core problem with hyper-partisan polarization is that it has a reinforcing feedback quality, what I’ve called “the two-party doom loop.”³ That is, as the parties move further apart from each other, they engage in more aggressive hardball tactics and rhetoric. These aggressive hardball tactics and rhetoric further push them away from each other. This occurs both at the elite level and the mass level, both of which feed back on each other. The more partisan elites demonize their opponents to win elections, the more partisan voters punish leaders who compromise with “the enemy.” The less compromise, the more that the trust, goodwill, and cooperation necessary for governing break down. All of these processes feed on each other in an escalating spiral of tit-for-tat. What may begin as a small slight can reverberate through intensifying grudges and retaliations.

Democracy depends on all participants accepting the legitimacy and fairness of core democratic processes. What distinguishes the current moment is not simply the intensity of disagreement, but the systematic erosion of confidence in the institutional mechanisms that have historically resolved disputes. This erosion follows a predictable pattern: Hyper-partisan polarization creates “doom loops” in democratic institutions through escalating cycles of tit-for-tat retaliation, where each party’s actions—whether actual or merely perceived—justify increasingly aggressive countermeasures by the opposition. Each escalation becomes evidence justifying the next, and appeals to norms or procedural fairness lose traction when both sides believe the stakes are existential.

Two domains illustrate this dynamic with particular clarity: election administration and legislative redistricting. Both reveal how hyper-partisan polarization transforms routine governmental functions into battlegrounds where unilateral restraint equals political suicide, yet mutual escalation corrodes democratic legitimacy itself.

The 2020 presidential election shattered the professional norms that had historically insulated election administration from partisan warfare. The systematic campaign to overturn the results, culminating in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, represented not merely an assault on a single election outcome, but an attack on the institutional legitimacy of election administration itself.

The tactics deployed in 2020 have become permanent features. Between 2020 and 2024, at least 35 county election officials across eight states voted to refuse or delay certification of election results.⁴ In 2022, 22 county officials in battleground states voted to delay certification.⁵ Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative documented approximately 170 election-related incidents of threats or harassment targeting officials nationwide.⁶ The human toll: 39 percent of local election officials left their positions between 2018 and 2024, compared to a 28 percent baseline.⁷

Simultaneously, state legislatures engaged in a legislative arms race. Between 2021 and 2024, states enacted 79 restrictive voting laws and 202 expansive laws.⁸ Red states pass restrictions claiming to prevent fraud; blue states respond with expansions claiming to protect access; and each side cites the other’s actions as justification.

This creates a challenge for election administrators. Following established procedures exposes them to primary challenges, death threats, and accusations of partisan bias from their own party. But bending to partisan pressure destroys their credibility and invites retaliation from the opposing party. Both sides see themselves as victims of the same issue, even if the situations are not entirely equal. Republican election officials who certified Biden’s 2020 victory faced extraordinary pressure and threats. Democratic election officials who implement voter ID requirements face accusations of voter suppression. Both parties perceive the other as ruthlessly wielding election administration for partisan advantage, and both perceptions contain elements of truth.

Both parties aggressively gerrymander when they control the process, both cite the other’s gerrymandering as justification, and both recognize that unilateral disarmament constitutes political suicide.

Following the 2020 census, both parties produced gerrymanders that independent analysts graded as constitutional failures. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project assigned “F” grades to Republican-drawn maps in Texas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, and to Democratic-drawn maps in New York, Illinois, and Oregon.⁹ State courts struck down partisan gerrymanders by both parties. In North Carolina, Republican-drawn districts virtually guarantee a 10-3 congressional delegation in a 50-50 state. In Illinois, Democratic-drawn maps reduced Republicans to fewer than four seats for the first time since before the Civil War.

Multiple Democratic-controlled states voluntarily adopted independent redistricting commissions, believing procedural fairness might prove contagious. No Republican-controlled states followed suit. In Colorado, the independent commission produced a map that resulted in Republican election-denier Lauren Boebert winning by fewer than 600 votes—a district Democrats could have eliminated.¹⁰ In New York, courts struck down the Democratic gerrymander, and court-appointed maps made three Democratic districts competitive.¹¹ Republicans won four seats by five points or less in 2022.

The escalation reached a new level in 2025. Texas Republicans passed mid-decade redistricting seeking to shift five congressional seats.¹² California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed retaliatory redistricting: “If we don’t do it, they will do it, they’ve done it, and they will continue to do more.”¹³ New York Governor Kathy Hochul echoed: “Texas, knock it off, we’ll knock it off, and let’s get back to governing.”¹⁴ Virginia codified tit-for-tat retaliation in a constitutional amendment.¹⁵

Virginia State Senator Scott Surovell, defending his state’s 2025 constitutional amendment allowing retaliatory mid-decade redistricting, argued that maintaining fair processes could “amount to unilateral disarmament.”¹⁶ Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog historically opposed to all gerrymandering, announced it would not “call for unilateral political disarmament in the face of authoritarian efforts.”¹⁷

The two-party “doom loop” operates through mutual perceptions of ruthlessness grounded in reality. Democrats correctly perceive ruthless Republican gerrymandering. Republicans correctly perceive aggressive Democratic gerrymanders. Each party views the other as willing to abuse power, while seeing itself as merely responding in self-defense. Both beliefs can be true at the same time.

This creates a subversion dilemma: When both parties believe the other will break democratic norms, unilateral adherence to the rules becomes a sucker’s game. But when both sides color outside the lines, trust in the system erodes and institutions lose legitimacy. The dilemma runs on perception—it matters less whether the opposing party is actually subverting processes than whether substantial majorities believe they are. This changes procedural questions into existential ones. “How should we draw district lines?” becomes “Will my party survive if I don’t rig the map?”

For election administrators and secretaries of state, this creates an impossible situation. You cannot unilaterally fix the problem by being scrupulously nonpartisan. You watch your colleagues engage in behaviors you consider destructive, while your own coalition pressures you to respond. You face threats whether you resist these pressures or accede to them. The professionalization you have built has become politically coded rather than neutral.

The fundamental problem is that hyper-partisan polarization transforms institutions dependent on mutual restraint into arenas of mutual defection. Neither party can unilaterally step back without suffering electoral consequences that seem existential. The doom loops are structurally embedded: Escalation begets escalation, and the people operating within these institutions cannot fix this through individual virtue.

In earlier times, a large enough number of moderate representatives and senators would have pushed back against these radicalizing tendencies to keep them at bay. These moderates served as the core of a broad cross-partisan governing coalition able to work out compromises on important and pressing policy concerns. But the slow and steady collapse of the political center has decreased the number of compromise-oriented moderates in Congress (and in many state legislatures) to hold back the forces of extremism and conflict.

To understand why structural changes are necessary, we need to understand why the current two-party system cannot and will not self-correct without institutional changes. And to understand that we need to first explore how and why the political center has collapsed.