Americans are spending more and more time alone, and more than a third reported experiencing “serious loneliness" in 2021. The director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development -- the longest study of human life ever conducted -- concluded in a new book that close personal relationships are the "one crucial factor [that] stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health and longevity." A lack of those relationships can actually have an impact on political behavior and interest in extreme ideologies. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with the director of the Harvard study, Robert Waldinger, about the lessons his findings have for politics in America.
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Following the Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais ruling, MBA students explore Selma's civil rights history and the urgent lessons of democratic leadership.
Getty Images, Kirkikis
What We Owe Democracy
Jun 09, 2026
The day before we flew to Alabama to lead a civil rights and leadership trek with 30 MBA students, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case we were watching closely in light of our upcoming trip. Writing for the majority, Justice Alito substantially narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ruling that states may draw congressional district lines on partisan grounds even when the practical effect, and many argue the intention, is to dilute Black voting power. Justice Kagan, in dissent, called it the completion of the majority’s “demolition” of the Act.
It was with this backdrop that our students stood with us on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama—the very place that birthed the Voting Rights Act, where the courageous actions of a small group of people helped, as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. so famously put it, “bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice.”
We had just left Brown Chapel, where we met the extraordinary Joyce O’Neill, a small but mighty woman of 76 who told us in incredible detail about crossing that bridge on Bloody Sunday as a teenager and about her churchgoing mother, a beloved teacher in Selma who always followed the rules. And yet, in the spring of 1965, she would turn away from her students to face the chalkboard so she wouldn’t be culpable while her students slipped out the door to prepare to march.
The bridge is smaller than you might expect, with a gentle arch and very little traffic, which makes it harder to understand how hundreds of people walking peacefully across it could have been met with the terrorizing sight of Alabama State Troopers on horseback, with billy clubs and tear gas. We had spent the previous day in Montgomery at the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, where more than 800 steel monuments hang suspended, one for each county where a known lynching occurred. As we moved through both sites, we kept asking the students a single question: “What does this have to do with you?” Many of them knew about Rosa Parks and Dr. King’s speeches, but the history they’d learned was one almost exclusively of triumph. Standing on that bridge, the Court’s ruling felt less like legal news and more like a lesson in moral leadership.
Ours was a diverse group of students, as was fitting, led by two women who would not have been expected to be standing there together in 1965: one of us black, and one of us white, both colleagues and friends at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. Dr. Ella Bell has spent her career studying race, power, and institutions, and Ashley Zwick led the Tuck Research Center on Workplace Inclusion under Dr. Bell’s direction. We have found that our differences, honestly engaged, are a pathway to deeper learning. This trip was an expression of that conviction. It was also, for Dr. Bell, one of the last acts of teaching. After a long and distinguished career, Dr. Bell is retiring from Dartmouth later this month, and she chose to spend some of her final days as a faculty member not in an Ivory Tower, but in Selma, Alabama. We think that tells you something about what we both believe the university is for.
We have been leaders and teachers in some of the most elite business schools in this country. Our students will run companies, sit on boards, manage large institutions, and make decisions that touch thousands of lives. They have learned to read balance sheets, build effective teams, and navigate crises. What these schools do not emphasize enough is the importance of understanding history through the lens of social change, and the role of leaders in either creating more equity or diminishing it.
This isn’t only a criticism of business education. Universities are under increasing pressure to demonstrate return on investment and to prove that the degrees they issue are worth the escalating cost of tuition. This too is important, but not at any cost. Universities, at their highest purpose, have a unique role in American life: to produce active and engaged citizens. When you stand at the 43-foot-tall Monument to Freedom in Montgomery, Alabama, and read some of the 122,000 surnames of formerly enslaved people, something shifts. Several of our Black students were able to look up their family names and locate them on that monument—to place themselves in that history in the very place where it happened.
Universities that are serious about leadership should be asking what it means to develop leaders for a democracy that is visibly under strain. The answer cannot be more case studies, another speaker series, or a required ethics course that students treat as a box to check on the path to graduation, and a job at McKinsey. It has to include immersion in the actual history of American civic life, in the places where that history was made and is still being contested. This means genuine investment and institutional commitment from University leadership, in the form of funding and teaching resources.
Bryan Stevenson, whose Equal Justice Initiative built the remarkable Legacy Sites that our students walked through, has written that we are all implicated in the history of racial injustice in America—that the question is not whether we will engage with it, but whether we will do so honestly. Universities that send graduates into positions of power without that honest engagement are not neutral. They are complicit in a civic illiteracy that has real consequences, as Louisiana v. Callais makes plain.
Universities cannot restore what the Court has narrowed. But they can decide what they teach and where, and what kind of graduates they are trying to produce. They can fund programs that take students to the places where American democracy was tested most severely. They can treat this not as a supplement to leadership education but as its foundation.
As we stood together on the hallowed ground of Selma, Alabama, we couldn’t help but remark on the fact that these students who stood beside us will be in positions of influence when the next chapters of this argument are written. What they carry from that afternoon—the scale of what was sacrificed, the fragility of what was won, the immediacy of what is now at risk is not incidental to their education.
It may be the most important thing they learn about leadership in Business School.
Ashley Zwick is the former Executive Director of the Research Center on Workplace Inclusion at Dartmouth College.
Dr. Ella Bell is Professor of Business Administration at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, where she teaches Wicked Societal Challenges. She is retiring from Dartmouth in May 2026 after a distinguished career studying race, power, and institutions.
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Recommended
The Best Utility Is a Public Utility
Jun 09, 2026
Utilities are boring until the power goes out. US Census data shows that one in three households struggles to pay their energy bills, resulting in millions of electricity shut-offs each year. Poor management by electric companies leads to more outages and wildfires. At the same time, many of us feel that we have little say in energy decisions that affect us. In Utah, the recent approval of a data center twice the size of Manhattan has left residents struggling with the real cost of growing electricity demand—on the environment and on our wallets.
Often overlooked in the conversation about cost is the fact that most of our utility sector is run for profit. There is a better way. I’m a public power organizer in New York’s Hudson Valley, and people like me from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, are fighting to take control of our investor-owned utilities and turn them public. Making electricity not-for-profit and community-owned means lower bills for customers and more say in our shared resources.
Public utilities work as a division of local government. Some utilities are traditionally public, like water. It’s not hard to understand why ensuring equitable, safe, and reliable access to water is not something we want competing with a profit motive. Electricity should be run similarly.
Where public electric utilities exist—the entire state of Nebraska, for example, as well as cities like LA and San Antonio—customers pay lower rates. Over the last three years, the American Economic Liberties Project reports that residential electricity rates for privately owned utilities have increased by 49% more than inflation, while those for publicly owned utilities have increased by 44% less than inflation.
Savings from public utilities come from different sources, such as cutting shareholder profits. There are other benefits of going public, too: Investor-owned utilities often charge customers for lobbyists and lawyers that help them secure high rates. Public utilities can borrow money more cheaply - they have access to municipal bonds – and those savings are passed along to customers, too.
The real advantage of a public electric company, though, is that its incentives are aligned with its customers, not its shareholders. For-profit utilities are rewarded for building the most expensive systems possible, and they often defer cheap maintenance and low-cost efficiency upgrades that would better serve customers and keep us online. We already know that there are several simple, cost-effective ways to improve utility performance: replacing old lines, installing distributed energy resources like batteries and solar panels, and implementing programs to adjust energy use during peak hours. But investing in maintenance means fewer shareholder profits.
The consequences of this deferred maintenance are easy to spot. People with public utilities have 90 fewer minutes without power each year than people with for-profit electric. This year alone, five states—Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi—face the risk of blackouts from storms and heat waves.
The increasing fights over data centers highlight the risk of leaving our electricity decisions in the hands of executives who live far from the territories they serve. In publicly run utilities, community members form a board that oversees the utility, giving them a voice in rates and the sources of our electricity.
Private utilities - and the industry associations representing them- oppose the transition to cheap and clean energy like solar, even when it means customers’ bills could plummet. This is because when energy is cheap, utility companies won’t be able to deliver high returns to shareholders or make money by building more expensive infrastructure.
Some may wonder what’s so bad about utilities making a profit; after all, even small businesses need to earn more than they spend. But electric utilities are state-granted monopolies. You don’t have a choice about whether you are served by PG&E in San Francisco or ConEd in New York. You can’t opt out of an exploitative for-profit electricity company or shop around for better rates or cleaner energy. This makes electric utilities particularly liable to abuse their power.
Private utilities’ profits are soaring while we struggle with our bills, and many investor-owned companies are using their money to try to crush campaigns to take investor-owned utilities public. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Movements for public power are gathering momentum, pointing the way to cheaper, cleaner energy. People can join these fights where they are already happening and start them elsewhere. Write to your local elected officials, support existing campaigns, and connect with local organizers.
Electricity powers hospitals, schools, and homes. It is a public good, and we should treat it that way.
Shivani Radhakrishnan is an assistant professor of political philosophy at Vassar and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project in partnership with the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation.
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Democratic Autopsy and AI
Jun 09, 2026
After every defeat, organizations conduct autopsies. The good ones are honest, like NASA’s Rogers Commission report after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff. In addition to identifying the infamous O-rings as the proximal culprit, it looked at organizational culture, communication failures, normalization of risk, management pressures, and institutional blind spots. The best ones are uncomfortable, and make a serious effort to understand “why did we mess this up so badly?” I’ve personally seen both good “autopsies” and bad ones throughout my decades of experience in true life-or-death realms: the SEAL Teams and as an Emergency Medicine physician.
Following the 2024 election, the Democratic National Committee produced a lengthy report titled Build to Win. Build to Last. Yet it is not a serious document because it does nothing to prepare for the unstoppable and very near future staring us right in the face. It is nearly 200 pages long and attempts to explain what went wrong and how the party should prepare for the future. It discusses organizing, communications, coalition building, fundraising, digital strategy, and voter outreach. It is filled with references to data, analytics, and technology.
In fact, the report mentions "data" 405 times. It mentions "technology" 25 times, yet never mentions artificial intelligence.
Not once.
There is no discussion of AI. No discussion of machine learning. No discussion of AI native campaigns. No consideration of how rapidly advancing AI capabilities might transform campaigning, political communication, voter engagement, opposition research, fundraising, media production, or governance itself. The omission is striking, not because AI is a trendy buzzword. It is striking because AI may prove to be the most consequential technological shift since the internet itself.
Imagine a corporate board issuing a strategic plan in 1998 that never mentioned the web. Imagine a newspaper in 2007 producing a future-of-the-industry report without discussing social media. Imagine a transportation company in 2010 analyzing its competitive challenges without acknowledging smartphones. We would immediately recognize those omissions as evidence that leadership was looking backward instead of forward, and that is exactly what has happened here.
The conversation around AI in politics has largely been confined to two questions: regulation and misinformation. Can deepfakes deceive voters? Should campaigns disclose AI-generated content? What guardrails are necessary to prevent abuse?
These are important questions. They deserve thoughtful answers.
But they are not the only questions, and if the Democratic Party’s understanding of AI begins and ends with slop videos of politicians committing gaffes they never made, the Republicans once again will win elections through news cycle dominance and operating inside Democrats' OODA Loop. They will make decisions faster, and this will be a competitive advantage at scale.
But a more important question may be whether “small d” democratic institutions are willing to engage with the technology at all.
Because while political leaders debate hypothetical dangers, AI is already reshaping the information environment in which politics operates. It is accelerating research. It is changing how citizens consume information. It is transforming media production. It is lowering barriers to entry for sophisticated communication. It is altering expectations about speed, responsiveness, and personalization.
Modern campaigns, from POTUS to dogcatcher, are information-processing organizations. They collect information, interpret information, communicate information, and respond to information. AI affects every one of those functions. That does not mean campaigns should replace people with algorithms and never knock on another door, but it does mean that campaigns, parties, and civic institutions must understand the tools that are reshaping the environment in which they operate.
Ignoring them is not a strategy.
One of the recurring themes in Democratic post-election analyses is the need to meet voters where they are. That principle is correct. The challenge is that voters themselves are increasingly interacting with information through AI-mediated systems. Search is changing. Content discovery is changing. Information consumption is changing. More importantly, the companies that compete and win in the attention economy are already using AI to place ads in front of viewers that they want to reach. It is happening now, and the electorate is moving into a world shaped by artificial intelligence, whether political institutions are ready or not.
The question is whether those institutions intend to move with it.
Some advocates understandably fear that AI will make politics worse. They worry about disinformation, manipulation, and the degradation of trust. Those concerns are legitimate. Every major communication technology produces new opportunities for abuse. But refusing to engage with transformative technology rarely prevents its adoption. It simply ensures that others determine how it is used. The challenge facing democracy is therefore not whether AI should exist in politics. It already does.
The challenge is whether democratic actors will help shape responsible norms around its use. That means emphasizing transparency over deception. Guardrails over slop. Human accountability over algorithmic opacity. It means establishing standards that strengthen democratic participation rather than weaken it.
Most importantly, it means acknowledging the reality that AI is not the future; it is the present.
The party that describes itself as the defender of democratic institutions should be leading the conversation about how emerging technologies can strengthen those institutions. It should be exploring how AI can help citizens access information, understand policy, engage with campaigns, and participate more effectively in civic life. It should be debating best practices, building expertise, and developing ethical frameworks.
Instead, the technology is absent from the conversation altogether. This is an enormous mistake. A post-election report is supposed to be about the future. If artificial intelligence is missing from that discussion, then the Democratic Party will be the ostrich with its head in the sand.
Daniel Barkhuff is the CEO of Civly.
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Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe
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US Democracy at 250: Closing the Gap Between Reality and the Ideal
Jun 09, 2026
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, one question at the heart of the American experiment feels more urgent than ever: What does democracy mean to the people it is meant to serve?
This question feels more relevant given the recent unprecedented executive overreach and the failure of our system of checks and balances. At the same time, Americans in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and throughout the country have demonstrated resolve to protect our freedoms, even in the face of intimidation.
In this moment, Americans are not just arguing about policies, they are also wrestling with the very idea of democracy itself. New research by Metropolitan Group (MG), led by the author of this post, and the Kettering Foundation (in partnership with Gallup) offers an illuminating window into how people across the country understand democracy today, what they value about it, and where they believe it is falling short.
Two Studies Looking at Democracy from Different Angles
The Democracy for All Project, a partnership of the Kettering Foundation and Gallup, recently released “Is Democracy Working?” the first report from an annual survey of Americans’ attitudes toward and experiences with democracy.
The “Pro-Democracy Playbook” is a research project MG conducted to examine the narrative landscape around democracy. The project’s core finding that “freedom matters” is an evidence-based narrative that can be used to advance the principles, institutions, and practice of inclusive democracy in the United States. As part of that effort, which included focus groups conducted before and after the 2024 presidential election, we engaged Prime Group to survey US adults in late July 2025. The findings from this survey are described in the “Research + Findings Report” as part of the launch of the “Pro-Democracy Narrative and Message Guide.”
The Kettering-Gallup research report serves an important diagnostic purpose by providing insights into current perceptions of democracy and the life experiences and circumstances influencing those perceptions. Our study actively tested ways to advance a new narrative about democracy that would resonate across a broad swath of the American public to provide guidance to pro-democracy advocates in pushing back against the rising tide of authoritarianism in the United States.
Together, these two studies suggest six clear takeaways and actionable insights on how to resolve the gap between the ideals and promise of democracy to which Americans are deeply attached yet carry disappointment with its current reality. Opportunities to increase understanding and participation are also identified.
1. Americans Prefer Democracy but Are Disappointed by Its Performance
Both studies found that 67% of those surveyed agree that either “democracy is the best form of government” (Kettering-Gallup) or they express a strong preference for “a political system for the US in which leaders are accountable to the people, no one is above the law, and no branch of government has too much power” (MG). Notably, the Kettering-Gallup survey explicitly referenced “democracy” but allowed the respondent to define the term while the MG survey defined democracy without explicitly naming it. Together these results show that the democracy “brand”—including the values and expectations people associate with democracy, like freedom, fairness, and having a voice—is still strong.
At the same time, Kettering-Gallup found that 51% of Americans believe US democracy is performing poorly. This sentiment also surfaced repeatedly in the focus groups we conducted before and after the 2024 presidential election. People’s frustrations are concrete rather than abstract. They point to a justice system they do not trust, leaders who do not seem accountable, institutions that feel distant from everyday life, and a belief that democracy works better for some than for others.
The Kettering-Gallup survey found that views on democracy are deeply tethered to a person’s financial security and quality of life. It found that 63% of Americans who find it “very difficult” to get by financially believe democracy is performing poorly and they are significantly less likely to feel they have opportunities to participate in it.
Recognizing the disappointment with democracy that had been increasingly observed in numerous studies both globally and here in the US (including our own focus groups in 2024 and 2025) over recent years, MG developed and tested messaging in the July 2025 survey directly addressing it. Referencing a set of freedoms at the heart of our democracy (“the right to have our voices heard, to make our own decision, to be treated fairly by the justice system, and to vote in free and fair elections”), we tested the following: “Our country hasn’t fully lived up to these freedoms, but a strong democracy isn’t afraid to admit that and do the hard work of being better tomorrow.” This was a persuasive reason for 62% of respondents who said that Americans should work together to improve our democracy. This statement was also strongly endorsed by MG’s focus group participants across the political spectrum for whom acknowledging their disappointment was critical to retaining the believability of the tested narrative.
2. Openness to Authoritarianism Exists, Especially Among Young Adults
Our survey found that support for authoritarian leadership (i.e., “a leader who has decision-making power without limits or accountability to the people, Congress, or the courts”) is relatively low, with only 5% strongly preferring such a system for the US and another 7% leaning in that direction. However, our survey also found that those who strongly support such a system of government are more likely than the survey sample (by 10 points) to be 18–34 years old. The Kettering-Gallup report reveals that only 53% of adults aged 18–29 believe democracy is the best form of government, 10 points lower than the next age group and nearly 30 points lower than seniors.
3. Americans Are United on Democratic Principles—Especially Freedom
Reinforcing what other research has shown, both studies found that core democratic principles resonate powerfully with Americans, including the right to free, nonviolent expression. The qualitative and quantitative research by MG has found that freedom is, in fact, the most powerful and unifying value associated with democracy. In our survey, more than 90% of respondents connected freedom directly to democracy.
When democracy is described in terms of the freedom to speak, live, and participate without fear, it resonates across political differences. This framing consistently outperformed more technical descriptions of democratic institutions or processes.
4. Views of Democracy Are Shaped by Lived Experience
The Kettering-Gallup study found that perceptions of whether democracy is working are closely tied to lived experience. Among those “living comfortably,” 76% say democracy is the best form of government. Just 12% of those struggling financially think US democracy is working well. For many Americans, dissatisfaction with democracy is closely linked to economic stress and a feeling that the system is not delivering tangible benefits in their lives.
Our focus groups and survey tested messages that explicitly linked democratic freedom to economic opportunity, health care, education, and housing, and found these messages resonated strongly. Democracy feels more relevant when it is connected to daily realities and pathways to stability and prosperity.
5. When Democracy Is Seen as More than Voting, Interest Increases
The Kettering-Gallup study found that 72% of Americans say it is easy to vote, though this varies by race and education level. But far fewer feel confident in other forms of participation. Only 48% feel they can effectively share concerns with officials, and many struggle to define democracy beyond elections. MG’s qualitative research found that people often ask, “What else can I do besides vote?” Interest in engagement increased when democracy was described as speaking your mind, holding leaders accountable, participating in community decisions, and expecting checks and balances. People want to participate more, they just need a clearer picture of how and reassurance that their participation matters.
6. Americans Believe in Pluralism and Compromise
Despite deep political polarization, and overt efforts to encourage it, the Kettering-Gallup survey found that Americans overwhelmingly agree that having a mix of races, religions, and cultures benefits the nation and that those elected to lead us should compromise to get things done. In the MG survey, 63% agreed that debate and compromise are signs of a strong democracy. People do not see compromise as weakness. They see it as how democracy is supposed to work and as evidence that leaders are listening to different perspectives.
What This Means at 250 Years
Taken together, the research efforts by MG and Kettering-Gallup point to a clear conclusion: Americans have not lost faith in democracy as an ideal. They are frustrated by how it is functioning in practice, uncertain how to engage beyond voting, and eager to understand how democracy connects with their everyday lives.
The research also suggests practical ways forward: talk about democracy in terms of freedom, fairness, and everyday life; connect democracy to economic opportunity and security; emphasize justice, accountability, and checks and balances; acknowledge where democracy is falling short and remind people that we can improve it together; and show people how they can participate beyond elections using plain, human language.
As the nation marks 250 years, the task is to reconnect democratic ideals to people’s lived experiences and restore a sense that democracy is something people can see, feel, and shape in their own lives. The gap between belief and experience is real. and closing this gap is where renewal and recommitment to a democracy for we, the people is most possible.
This article was originally published as part of From Many, We, a Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that highlights the insights of thought leaders dedicated to the idea of inclusive democracy.
Kevin T. Kirkpatrick is the head of strategic communications at Metropolitan Group, a strategic and creative social impact agency that supports change agents in building a just, healthy, and sustainable world. Kirkpatrick is the principal author of Metropolitan Group’s approach to narrative as a tool of social change and has worked extensively on pro-democracy narratives and messaging both globally and in the United States.
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