BridgeUSA is an investment in the future of American democracy. We champion ideological diversity, promote a solution-oriented political culture, and teach responsible discourse in order to develop a generation of political leaders that value empathy and constructive engagement. Our organization works with America's future leaders on college campuses to foster spaces wherein a diverse range of ideas can engage one another through the practice of responsible discourse.
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Primary Elections Skew Representation: Inside the 2026 Primary Problem
May 02, 2026
Earlier this year, the Bridge Alliance and the National Academy of Public Administration launched the Fellows for Democracy and Public Service Initiative to strengthen the country's civic foundations. This fellowship unites the Academy’s distinguished experts with the Bridge Alliance’s cross‑sector ecosystem to elevate distributed leadership throughout the democracy reform landscape. Instead of relying on traditional, top‑down models, the program builds leadership ecosystems—spaces where people share expertise, prioritize collaboration, and use public‑facing storytelling to renew trust in democratic institutions. Each fellow grounds their work in one of six core sectors essential to a thriving democratic republic.
Below is an interview with Beth Hladick. Beth is the Policy Director at Unite America, where she oversees original research and commissions studies that diagnose the problems with party primaries and evaluate the effectiveness of reform solutions. In addition to her research portfolio, Beth leads outreach efforts to educate stakeholders on elections and reform. She brings a nonpartisan perspective shaped by her experience at the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Oregon State Legislature, and the U.S. Senate.
Her Fellows for Democracy and Public Service Initiative will create “The 2026 Primary Problem: Diagnosing the Divide.” The project will use the 2026 midterms to shift the national narrative from "horse race" coverage to structural analysis and rigorously document how partisan primaries disenfranchise voters and fuel polarization.
Question: Tell us about your journey to this project. What experiences or feelings led you to believe that this project is important?
Beth Hladick: In working in the service of elections, I saw firsthand how their incentives shape their political behavior and how primary elections often reward ideological intensity over. I've spent years researching what we've diagnosed as the “primary problem,” which is that there is a low turnout in party primaries. In 2024, just 7 percent of Americans effectively elected 87 percent of Congress. And if you're wondering why Congress doesn't represent us or solve the urgent problems facing our democracy, I think it's because they're beholden to less than 10 percent of the electorate that reelects them in party primaries. We're in a midterm election season that will be the least competitive of our lifetimes, meaning that no matter who wins or loses in November, this will be the least accountable Congress of our lifetimes.
Question. Could describe your project, your approach, and your anticipated stakeholders.
Beth Hladick: The project is called the “2026 Primary Problem Diagnosing the Divide.” The plan is to raise the salience of the problems with party primary elections and the evidence on the impact of reform to demonstrate that it's the largest solvable structural democracy issue of our time. The project will use the 2026 midterms, from horse race coverage to structural analysis, and rigorously document how party primaries disenfranchise voters, distort representation, and fuel division in our politics.
Question. What practical outcomes do you expect? What tangible forms or actions can be executed?
Beth Hladick. We’ll produce two explainer videos and have a lot of rich analytical insights into how those videos perform. Who are those videos reaching? What's compelling? How are viewers engaging with that content? We live in an entirely new digital age, where the average American now spends about 150 minutes a day on social media, and about two-thirds of that time is spent watching video. So, we’re excited about the opportunity to reach people through video, knowing that's where many people spend their time.
Question. How might citizens or other key stakeholders utilize your work on this project to improve American democracy?
Beth Hladick. I think journalists can use our research and visuals to contextualize primary outcomes beyond horse-race coverage. I think it's also important that journalists pay attention to the primary type, especially in states that use closed primaries. Over 17 million Americans are locked out of elections entirely just because they're registered independents in closed primary states. Also, policymakers can draw on our research to better understand the implications of their state's primary system. Lastly, I think citizens can better understand how election design affects governance and can demand that systems reflect broader representation, participation, and accountability.
You can watch a video of Beth’s interview here:
- YouTube youtube.com
Bradford Fitch is the former CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, a former congressional staffer, and author of “The Citizen’s Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials."
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Young woman holding a "I Voted Today" sticker after voting.
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Gen Z Cares about Politics, We Just Don’t Believe Politics Cares about Us
May 02, 2026
As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
We've entered a big election year, and people are asking the same tired questions: whether the next generation will show up to repair the broken democracy they've inherited or if apathy will keep them home. I used to believe the myth, but last November proved otherwise. And even in places where youth turnout wasn’t record-breaking, the idea that young people don’t care simply doesn’t match reality. After all, survey data from the 2022 midterms suggests that only 28% of Gen Zers didn’t vote because they thought it wasn’t important. I’ve spent the past two years mobilizing students on dozens of college campuses across the US to register to and cast their votes, and I’ve seen firsthand just how deeply my generation cares about the fate of our country—and why their passion so often stops short of the ballot box.
Every day, thousands of my fellow students across the nation are working tirelessly to make their campuses and communities better places. From supporting the operations of local food pantries to administering free flu shots to healthcare workers and providing free income tax assistance, our issue is not indifference. It’s that our preferred forms of engagement often happen outside the orbit of electoral politics.
But this raises an important question: if Gen Z is so invested in social change, why isn’t that energy showing up in voting numbers? The answer is simpler than you may think. For students, casting your ballot is often just plain hard.
I’ve had dormmates from out of state who didn’t have a local driver’s license, meaning they needed to fill out a paper registration form and physically drop it off at the county elections office. Without a car, facing limited public transportation options, and in the middle of a full course load, it was easier for many not to vote. My own voting experience was not without issue. I ordered an absentee ballot to my campus P.O. box, waited weeks for it to arrive, and by the time I filled it out and returned it to my home state, the deadline for acceptance had passed. No matter how engaged college students might be, structural barriers —and often, deliberate disinformation campaigns— pose significant challenges to being able to have a say in our future.
Unfortunately, this leads to a major chicken-and-egg problem. When the existing system prevents young people from voting, candidates and elected officials don’t see young voters as a constituency they must answer to, leaving us feeling unheard and further disengaged. When leaders offer genuine hope, speak to young people’s concerns, and present a future we can imagine ourselves thriving in, something shifts. Just look at Zohran Mamdani’s recent success in New York City. Rather than demonizing his opponents and painting an apocalyptic picture of the Big Apple if he wasn’t elected, he campaigned on a future that would address issues young people care about, such as affordability and housing.
When young people feel seen, when the system opens space for their voices, and when casting a ballot feels like building something new and better, participation stops being a chore and becomes the natural next step.
So, how do we move towards a world where young people are both deeply engaged in their communities and habitual voters? How do we remove the structural challenges students face while countering the narrative that Gen Z doesn’t care?
For young voters, campus organizers, and other interested parties, the answer is simple: get involved with organizations and people who are passionate about closing the voting gap. Nonpartisan groups like the Fair Elections Center’s Campus Vote Project and Every Vote Counts work directly with colleges and universities nationwide to provide students with the resources, information, and opportunities they need to get to the ballot box. From institutionalizing pro-voting campus reforms to directly challenging legislative barriers, exposing disinformation, and supporting nonpartisan voter registration drives, these nonprofits play a critical role in bringing Gen Z’s civic energy to the polls.
But they can’t do it alone. These groups need student leaders like me to help turn our campus networks into real voting power. If we want a government that reflects our needs and the needs of those who come after us, we have to channel the same energy we bring to every other part of our civic lives into the ballot box. We’ve already seen what our votes can do when we show up, and that momentum is ours to build on. With students stepping forward—and with real support from our institutions and communities—we can make voting a habit and strengthen the civic muscle our generation has already proven it possesses.
Jason Vadnos, 19, Nashville, TN
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Agents draw their guns after loud bangs were heard during the White House Correspondents' dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 2026. President Trump is attending the annual gala of the political press for the first time while in office.
(Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
Whenever political violence erupts, Washington starts playing the blame game
May 02, 2026
A heavily armed California man was caught trying to storm the White House correspondents’ dinner Saturday with the apparent intent to kill the president.
It didn’t take long for Washington to start arguing. Democrats denounce violent rhetoric from the right, but the alleged assailant seemed to be inspired by his own rhetoric. President Trump, after initially offering some unifying remarks about defending free speech, soon started accusing the press of encouraging violence against him. Critics pounced on the hypocrisy.
The argument about hypocrisy isn’t about mere inconsistency. The point of the accusation is to say that condemnations of violence are insincere. “Your team says it’s against violence” or “your side says my side encourages violence” but just look at what your language inspired!
The hypocrisy is bipartisan.
Indeed, for two decades now, it seems that whenever political violence erupts, there’s a moment where partisans wait to learn the motives of the perpetrator so they can start blaming the other side for inciting it. Sometimes they don’t even wait. Jared Loughner, the man who shot former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed several others, was instantaneously labeled an agent of the tea parties and Sarah Palin. The truth is he was such a paranoid schizophrenic, a court found him incompetent to stand trial.
I don’t have the space to run through the dozens of examples — the congressional baseball shooting, the Charleston AME church slaughter, the El Paso Walmart massacre, the recent murder of Minnesota lawmakers, the Jan. 6 riot or the failed attack Saturday night. But in the wake of these bloody crimes, partisans of left and the right will scour the killer’s social media or read their “manifestos” and place the blame on the rhetoric of the team closest to the assailant’s ideology.
Now, my point isn’t to say that blaming the rhetoric of nonviolent people for the crimes of violent people is wrong. It is wrong, of course, particularly as a matter of law. If I quote Shakespeare and write, “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” I am not responsible for someone who actually shoots a lawyer (nor is the Bard). But that doesn’t mean violent, extremist rhetoric is laudable, healthy or blameless for the sorry state of American politics or society or that it never plays a role in inspiring wrongdoing.
However such rhetoric might encourage violence, it certainly encourages the sense that something is broken in American life. More specifically, it fuels the idea that our political opponents are existential enemies.
“Outgroup homogeneity” is the term social psychologists use to describe the very human tendency to think the groups you belong to are diverse and complex, but the groups you don’t belong to aren’t. A non-Asian person might think all Asians are alike, but for Asians the differences between — or among! — Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian people are both obvious and significant.
American politics right now are almost defined by outgroup homogeneity. Many Democrats and progressives think all Republicans and conservatives are alike, and vice versa. That would be bad enough, but the problem is compounded by the fact that each side tends to think the consensus on the other side is defined by their worst actors and spokespeople. This is sometimes called “nutpicking.” You find the most extreme person on the other side and hold them up as representative of all Democrats or Republicans.
Partisan media amplifies this dynamic at scale. Pew finds that Republicans (who watch Fox News) are more familiar with the term “critical race theory” than Democrats, the supposed devotees of it. Democrats recognize the term “Christian nationalist” more than supposedly Christian nationalist Republicans do.
Consider the recent debates over Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes, both prominent social media influencers, one far left the other far right, who say grotesque, indefensible and stupid things. The arguments within the two coalitions are not over whether they should be spokesmen for their respective sides, but whether their “voices” (and fans) should be welcome inside the broader Democratic or Republican tents. Few accommodationists endorse the worst rhetoric from Piker or Fuentes, but they oppose “purity tests.”
On the merits, I think both should be shunned and condemned. But even if the question is purely a political one, they should still be ostracized. Why? Because people outside the respective coalitions will — however fairly or unfairly — hold up the extremists on the fringe as representative of the whole. The only way for either party to prove it opposes extremism to people outside the tent is by opposing it inside their own tents first. Otherwise, their hypocrisy will continue to define them.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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Explore how China is overtaking the U.S. in the global innovation race, from electric vehicles to advanced research, and why America’s fragmented science policy, talent loss, and weak industrial strategy threaten its technological leadership.
Getty Images, Willie B. Thomas
America’s Greatest Geopolitical Blind Spot
May 01, 2026
The global hierarchy of innovation is undergoing a structural shift that Washington is dangerously slow to acknowledge. For decades, the prevailing narrative in the United States was that China was merely the "world’s factory"—a nation capable of mass-producing Western designs but inherently lacking the creative spark to invent its own. This assumption has been shattered. Today, Beijing is no longer playing catch-up; in sectors ranging from electric vehicles and next-generation nuclear power to hypersonic missiles, China is setting the pace.
The central challenge is that China has mastered the entire innovation ecosystem, while the United States has allowed its own to fracture. Innovation is not just about a "eureka" moment in a laboratory; it is a relay race that begins with basic scientific research, moves through the training of specialized talent, and ends with the large-scale commercialization of "hard tech." China is currently winning every leg of that race.
The foundation of American primacy since World War II has been federal support for basic science. As Vannevar Bush, science adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, famously argued, new products do not arrive mature; they are built on fundamental principles discovered in university labs. Bush envisioned a "tessellation" of government, academia, and industry that would ensure the United States remained at the frontier of knowledge. Yet, current U.S. policy is treating these vital institutions not as partners, but as rivals. Since early 2025, research funding has been disrupted by political freezes, and the merit-based system of peer review is being threatened by ideological litmus tests.
Meanwhile, Beijing has recognized its historical weakness in basic science and has moved aggressively to correct it. China has quadrupled its investment in basic research over the last decade. The results are visible in the data. In 2016, the Nature Index featured five American universities among the world’s top ten research producers. By 2025, nine of those top ten spots were held by Chinese institutions. This is a staggering reversal of roles that suggests the intellectual center of gravity is shifting eastward.
Beyond funding, there is the question of talent. The American "secret sauce" has always been its ability to attract the world’s best minds. Historically, 40 percent of American Nobel laureates in the sciences have been immigrants. However, a combination of funding cuts and restrictive visa policies is fueling a "brain drain." Top researchers are increasingly looking toward Europe or returning to China, where the state provides the patience capital necessary for long-term breakthroughs. When Harvard announces a halving of doctoral admissions in the sciences, as it did for the upcoming academic year, it is not just a campus budget issue; it is a national security failure.
China’s success in electric vehicles is a case in point. By providing massive state support through initiatives like Made in China 2025, Beijing created a fertile environment for companies to scale up complex physical products. In contrast, the American venture capital model is often optimized for "soft tech"—software and apps that offer quick returns. Hard tech, such as new battery chemistries or carbon-neutral cement, requires billions of dollars and years of development before reaching commercial viability. This "valley of death" between the lab and the market is where American innovation often goes to die.
The current administration’s reliance on tariffs and direct state equity in firms like Intel is a poor substitute for a coherent industrial strategy. Tariffs can shield domestic firms from competition, but they also reduce the incentive to innovate. Furthermore, when the government becomes a direct shareholder in private tech companies, success becomes a matter of political ties rather than technical excellence. When the U.S. government holds "golden shares" in industrial icons or demands a portion of profits from companies like NVIDIA in exchange for export licenses, it distorts the market signals that have historically driven American efficiency.
What the United States needs is a new institutional framework: a national version of the Engine incubator pioneered by Rafael Reif. This would ideally take the form of an independent federal government corporation. Such an entity, shielded from two-year political cycles and led by a board of scientists and business leaders, could provide the long-term loans and procurement guarantees necessary to bridge the gap for hard-tech startups. It would act as a catalyst for private investment by proving that revolutionary technologies—like grid-connected fusion or electrochemical cement—are commercially viable.
The tragedy of the current American approach is its lack of patience. Private sector investors are often looking for a three-to-five-year exit. But the challenges of the 21st century—from climate change to aging populations—require "patience capital." In China, government-backed funds are willing to wait twenty years for a return on hard-tech startups. While this state-led model has its own inefficiencies, its sheer scale and persistence have allowed China to monopolize the supply chains for solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and real-time LiDAR systems.
History shows that the United States is capable of this kind of mobilization when it treats science as a pillar of national strength rather than a political football. During World War II, the federal government successfully created a synthetic rubber industry from scratch when natural supplies were cut off. In the 1960s, the space race drove breakthroughs in microelectronics and materials science that defined the digital age. But these successes were the result of a deliberate, holistic strategy that linked basic science to industrial capacity.
Today, we see fragmented efforts. Programs like the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant system or the Department of Energy’s loan office have had massive successes—Tesla might not exist today without a 2010 federal loan—but they are overly vulnerable to the whims of whoever sits in the Oval Office. The cancellation of an $87 million grant for Sublime Systems in October 2025, simply because it dealt with climate-focused technology, is a perfect example of how political volatility strangles the very innovation the U.S. claims to prize.
The innovation race is not a zero-sum game, but its outcome determines who will define the standards and security of the 21st century. It is about who writes the rules for the next generation of semiconductors and who controls the green energy transition. If Washington continues to focus on short-term political wins while neglecting the long-term health of its scientific and manufacturing base, it will find itself a consumer in a world designed and manufactured by Beijing.
To lead again, America must return to the basics. This means re-establishing a pact with the scientific community that prioritizes merit over ideology. It means welcoming international students and giving them every reason to stay and build their companies here. And it means creating the financial tools to ensure that the "next big thing" invented in an American lab is also built in an American factory. We cannot stand idly by and count on China to stumble. Unless the United States mobilizes its unique combination of public and private resources with institutional creativity, it will surrender its future to its greatest geopolitical rival. The engine of progress is stalling; it is time to restart it.
Imran Khalid is a physician, geostrategic analyst, and freelance writer.
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