At the state level, democracy in America is fracturing

The residentsUS of Bristol, Tennessee and Bristol, Virginia share a border, a downtown and even a Nascar speedway. But thanks to the quirks of American federalism, the 27,800 Bristolians who live in the Volunteer State reside in America’s least democratic state, while their 16,800 neighbors to the north live in one of the most democratic.This, at least, is the portrait drawn by the State Democracy Index, developed by Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been measuring within America’s 50 states over the last 24 years. For the 12th year in a row Tennessee has come in dead last.To score the condition of a state’s democracy Mr Grumbach focuses on four main components: which citizens are eligible to vote and how burdensome it is for them to vote, how responsive state policies are to public opinion, the fairness of legislative maps, and .It may come as a surprise that since Mr Grumbach last measured the health of America’s states, up to the end of 2018, his model’s assessment of state-level democracy has modestly improved into 2024. Both Democrat-led and Republican-led states have seen upticks on average. Much of this is thanks to a slight decrease in partisan gerrymandering. The expansion of vote by post and early voting in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic and afterwards also improved scores. Yet there remains a stark partisan divide in the model’s findings: 19 of the 20 worst-performing states in the index voted to the right of the nation in the most recent election, and in all but two of them, Republicans control the governorship and both chambers of the legislature.Twenty states have seen their democracy scores decrease since 2018. And the variance among state scores has increased substantially. For example, Tennessee is now an under-performing outlier even among Republican states, which are on average two standard deviations more democratic than the Volunteer State. The explanation is straightforward, says Sekou Franklin, a political scientist at Middle Tennessee State University: “There’s a non-democratic political culture that’s taken hold of the state.” Gerrymandering is one expression. For years the Republican super-majority in the state legislature has gone to battle with blue cities like Nashville, the state’s capital, and Memphis. In 2022 state legislators split voters in Nashville across three redder congressional districts. Over years, they have also passed a series of laws restricting local government authority.In Mr Grumbach’s model one of the best things a state can do for its democracy is to produce fairer legislative maps. In 2024 Republicans won just under two-thirds of the vote in Tennessee. Yet they won eight of the state’s nine congressional districts. All else being equal, were Tennessee gerrymandered less severely, Republicans today would likely have a slim one-seat majority in the US House of Representatives rather than a five-seat advantage. The spread of early and alternative voting may have improved America’s democracy, but rigged district maps undermine those gains.