The redrawing of legislative district boundaries. A 1967 federal law requires House members be elected from single-member districts that (within each state) have nearly identical populations. House maps must be redrawn after reapportionment but before the first congressional election of each decade, based on population changes in each state revealed by the census.
United States Capitol building shows classical architecture and an American flag waving against a clear blue sky.
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists.
We asked Alejo Cruz, a Fall Fulcrum Fellow, to share what democracy means to him and how he sees its current health.
Every election cycle, we the people are subject to different takes on democracy. It’s essentially become America’s favorite mad-lib — each new phrase stitches something new onto the idea of democracy for the people to rationalize in their minds. Democracy is [x], democracy is [y]. But the word “democracy” was originally a byproduct of two concepts. The root words being “demos,” meaning “the common people” and “kratos” meaning “power/rule”. The word itself is simple, yet the idea has become complex… and beastly.
Democracy does not need another definition; It doesn’t need another pundit, politician, or podcaster to overcomplicate it. Just as poets cannot debate their interpretation of a poem before agreeing on its prose, new interpretations of democracy will keep misdirecting discussion unless we agree on what democracy means. By minimizing democracy to its simplest terms, we can then begin to make sense of our differences. By cutting away the connotations that have turned “democracy” into a beast of a word, we learn the debate is not with democracy itself. But rather with the people it governs.
The beast created by ancient Athens was a simple creature. Combined, democracy meant that the common people have power. Every other characteristic we associate with democracy (i.e., electoralism, liberalism, egalitarianism) was added after years of people trying to make sense of the word. That’s not to say that these characteristics are invalid– equal rights, individual freedoms, and free and fair elections have been the basis on which American progress has been founded. These are the cornerstones of our democracy that make the United States so desirable.
But American democracy has been reduced to a chimera, with each generation of politicians stitching a new part onto a beast so distorted it exists for us as a distant dream.
Somewhere along the line, democracy became more of an idea rather than a practice.
Disillusioned, the American people don’t know what to make of a beast with the ears of a donkey, the trunk of an elephant, and the wings of an eagle, all stitched onto the body of a buffalo we were told could fly.
As the U.S. grew, so did our democracy. Westward expansion gave our beast the arms of a grizzly and tail of a scorpion, turning our democracy into the stuff of legends. But in creating a powerful democracy, we gave life to a beast that is a mere echo of what we had at the start. Unrecognizable and ravenous, we’ve set our democracy loose on the world — and it’s out for blood. From the jungles of Latin America to the islands of Southeast Asia, we’ve let the beast roam free under the pretense of spreading “democracy.”
The American chimera is sick and hungry. But how do we, as a nation, feed the beast? How do we satiate the democracy we so quickly defend? And how will we justify creating a creature that consumes without end? We feed it our tired, our poor; turning our backs on the homeless with barbed wire at the door.
All that to say that our democracy is not well. One can point to our civil rights, liberties, and elections and claim that our democracy remains robust. But how can a country pride itself on a system that gives power to the people, when its people are at the mercy of power? Instead, the power has been consolidated amongst the ones with the time and resources to participate.
Participation is a prerequisite to a sound democracy, yet it’s taken historic political polarization in the U.S. for voter turnout to rise. And even at our peak, elections have only reached about two-thirds of the American population. And while that may be cause for celebration, whose voices are being left out of the conversation? Who are the Americans being fed this idea of democracy, but hunger for something of sustenance?
An overworked mother may “have” the resources, but little time. An unhoused man may “have” time, but little resources. How are either expected to participate in a democracy that does not consider them members of the people Capitol Hill is supposed to represent? It’s far too easy for the opposition to blame those who have not had the privilege of participating in democracy. Lack of civic engagement is often framed as a personal shortcoming, rather than a systemic issue. But as someone who has watched my mother be drained of her youth and my father stripped of his humanity, no one can convince me that their existence is a flaw in our democracy. When it is our flawed democracy that has neglected their existence.
We’ve reached a point in our democracy where people are priced out of power. And that’s because those in power do not view certain Americans as the people our government is meant to represent. The beast we’ve created feeds on the marginalized to protect those that can afford to be regarded as people. It’s time we strip the beast of its power and see it for what it is: a fantasy. If we are to cure our democracy of its ailments, we must reduce it back to its simplest terms. America must return to the buffalo and begin again.
Alejo Cruz is a student at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Cruz draws on his experience growing up in an immigrant household and his reporting with unhoused people and asylum seekers to center human rights and community voices in his journalism, a commitment he hopes to deepen through solutions‑focused reporting with The Fulcrum.
Hand with "VOTE" stickers
For years, I thought California’s Central Valley presented one of the more puzzling electorates I encountered as a public-opinion researcher.
I conducted dozens of surveys throughout the Valley, including communities that would eventually become parts of David Valadao’s congressional districts. One pattern was difficult to miss. Democratic registration, particularly among Latino voters, often suggested a considerably more Democratic electorate than appeared on Election Day. Participation was uneven, and Latino Democratic registration did not translate into equivalent electoral strength.
By 2016, I was describing Valadao’s district publicly as “a mystery to everyone who has ever looked at it.” It had a large Latino population and a substantial Democratic registration advantage, yet it continued electing a Republican to Congress.
Even then, however, there were signs that the mystery might lie less with the voters than with how outsiders understood them. I had seen in my own survey work that Democratic registration and Latino population did not translate automatically into Democratic votes. I had also come to believe that Central Valley political identity could not simply be inferred from the partisan and demographic categories that described the district on paper.
A decade later, I am less certain that the voters were ever mysterious.
Perhaps our categories were.
In LatinoLand, Marie Arana begins a discussion she calls “the myth of the Latino vote” with Ronald Reagan’s famous suggestion that Hispanics were Republicans who simply did not know it yet.
Democrats have sometimes behaved as though the reverse were true.
Both assumptions ask ethnicity to predict political behavior more reliably than it does. Latino voters differ by national origin, generation, occupation, religion, education, income, geography and political experience.
My experience in the Central Valley suggested another distinction that is equally important:
The population is not the electorate.
A heavily Latino district may not produce an equally Latino electorate. Democratic registration advantages do not guarantee Democratic voting, and presidential preferences do not necessarily extend down-ballot.
Population, citizenship, registration, likely-voter status, actual turnout and candidate choice represent different stages in the political process. Treating them as interchangeable can make understandable election results appear mysterious.
For years, Democratic strategists could look at registration and demographics and see the components of a durable Democratic constituency. Republicans could look at actual election results and see something different.
Both were observing real political facts. They were simply not observing the same electorate.
David Valadao’s career provides an unusually useful case.
He first won election to the California Assembly in 2010 and an open congressional seat two years later. He was reelected in 2014 and 2016.
Then came 2018.
Democrat TJ Cox defeated him by only 862 votes amid the national Democratic wave that transferred roughly 40 House seats and control of the chamber to Democrats. Two years later Valadao returned and defeated Cox, who by then had the advantage of congressional incumbency.
Since beginning his elective career in 2010, that 2018 race remains Valadao’s only general-election defeat.
Consider 2016. Hillary Clinton carried the old 21st Congressional District with 55.2% of the vote to Donald Trump’s 39.7% — a margin of 15.5 points. On the same Election Day, Valadao defeated Democrat Emilio Huerta 56.7% to 43.3%.
A district that preferred the Democratic presidential candidate by more than 15 points simultaneously returned a Republican congressman by more than 13 points.
Aggregate returns cannot reveal how much of the divergence came from crossover voting, turnout differences or ballot roll-off. But they establish something important: presidential partisanship was an exceptionally poor predictor of the congressional outcome.
The 2018 loss is revealing for another reason. It is sometimes remembered as evidence that Democrats finally discovered how to mobilize the Central Valley electorate. Democratic organizations certainly worked to increase participation among Latino and younger voters.
Yet Cox received roughly as many votes as Huerta had received two years earlier. Much of the decisive movement occurred on Valadao’s side of the ledger during an exceptional national Democratic year.
From my experience studying Central Valley elections, I have always regarded Cox’s victory less as proof that Democrats had solved the Valadao problem than as evidence that the political environment of 2018 was finally strong enough to push a Democrat narrowly across the line.
Then came 2020. Cox was now the incumbent. Democrats controlled the House. Joe Biden carried the district comfortably.
Valadao won anyway.
Without the normal advantage of incumbency, he reclaimed a district whose voters preferred the Democratic presidential nominee. Across those elections, presidential partisanship, incumbency and even a national wave repeatedly failed to predict Valadao’s congressional performance.
The question is why.
National political journalism frequently describes Valadao as a moderate or pragmatic Republican. Those descriptions capture part of his appeal, but perhaps not the most important part.
Valadao’s biography is unusually legible in the Central Valley. He was born and raised in Hanford, graduated from the local high school, attended community college and entered his family’s dairy and farming business. Agriculture and water are not abstractions in his political biography. They are the economic world from which he came.
None of this makes Valadao an independent disguised as a Republican. He has operated comfortably within Republican politics and was closely associated with neighboring Central Valley Republican Kevin McCarthy.
But he has also supplied voters with visible evidence that his party identification does not determine every political decision. Most dramatically, after returning to Congress in 2021, Valadao became one of only 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Donald Trump after January 6.
That did not transform him into a Never-Trump Republican. With Trump again in the White House, Valadao says he communicates with the president and works with the administration.
That combination is more interesting than the label “centrist.” Valadao remains institutionally connected to his party while maintaining a strong local identity. He does not have to explain why agriculture matters to him or convince voters that he understands the economic culture of the southern San Joaquin Valley.
His biography makes the argument for him.
There is a useful historical comparison.
For years, Mississippi Democrat Gene Taylor represented a congressional district that voted strongly Republican for president while continuing to send him to Congress by large margins. Taylor developed a local political identity partly independent of the national Democratic Party. Eventually national partisan sorting overwhelmed it, and he lost in the Republican wave of 2010.
Valadao presents something resembling the partisan mirror image. The comparison is not ideological. It is structural.
Both cases ask the same question:
How long can voters maintain a distinction between their judgment of a national political party and their judgment of someone they regard as their local representative?
Valadao’s career suggests that nationalization may be powerful without being complete.
Central Valley Democrats developed their own response to the region’s political culture. There is even a name for it: the “Valleycrat.”
The term, attributed to former Assembly Speaker and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, came to describe Democrats willing to depart from their state or national party on questions such as agriculture, water, oil and taxes when they believed Valley interests required it.
But Valleycrat has always communicated more than a set of issue positions. It expresses regional identity.
Bakersfield is not Los Angeles. Fresno is not San Francisco. A Valleycrat could therefore communicate something politically useful:
I am a Democrat, but I am a Valley Democrat.
The strategy rests on a plausible theory of the electorate. Democratic registration has historically overstated Democratic Election Day performance. A Democrat therefore seeks crossover voters by emphasizing ideological moderation, local concerns and some distance from the national party.
Rudy Salas represented that tradition when he challenged Valadao in 2022 and 2024. Jasmeet Bains represented another version of it in the 2026 Democratic primary.
National Democrats initially concluded that this remained the best formula.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee intervened in the 2026 primary on behalf of Bains.
The reasoning was conventional. In a highly competitive district, a moderate Democrat with an established legislative record appeared better positioned to win swing voters against an unusually durable Republican incumbent.
But Democratic leaders in Kern, Tulare, Fresno and Kings counties backed Randy Villegas and objected publicly to Washington’s intervention. What national strategists regarded as an electability decision could be interpreted locally as an outside institution deciding what kind of Democrat the Valley should nominate.
Republicans made almost precisely the same calculation from the opposite direction.
A super PAC aligned with House Republican leadership spent money portraying Villegas as a left-wing progressive who was too extreme for the Central Valley. The unusual intervention was widely interpreted as an effort to raise his visibility among Democratic primary voters, reflecting a Republican calculation that a progressive nominee would make for a more favorable general-election matchup.
The symmetry was striking. National Democrats preferred Bains because they thought a moderate would be harder for Valadao to beat. National Republicans appeared to prefer Villegas because they thought a progressive would be easier.
Democratic primary voters chose Villegas anyway.
That does not prove the national parties were wrong. It gives November a more interesting test.
Villegas is particularly interesting because his biography and scholarship suggest a theory of Central Valley politics different from the traditional Valleycrat approach.
He was born and raised in Bakersfield, attended Bakersfield College and CSU Bakersfield, left to earn a doctorate in politics at UC Santa Cruz, and then returned to the Valley to teach political science and serve on a local school board.
His dissertation, Voices from the Valley of Vulnerability, examined political participation among young people from mixed-status families in Kern and Fresno counties. His argument was that local contexts could constrain political engagement while community organizations and youth organizing groups could serve as bridges to participation.
That is remarkably relevant to the electoral problem Democrats have faced in the Valley.
There is no basis for claiming that Villegas constructed his congressional strategy from his dissertation. A dissertation is not a campaign plan. But the parallel is difficult to ignore.
The traditional Valleycrat strategy attempts to adapt the Democratic candidate to the electorate that turns out.
Villegas may be attempting something different:
changing the electorate that turns out.
His national associations with Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Working Families Party make it difficult to present him simply as another centrist Valley Democrat. His campaign instead emphasizes economic populism, working families, grassroots organizing and local roots.
Whether that strategy works depends on an unforgiving distinction:
Registration is not turnout.
A Democratic advantage on paper matters only if those Democrats become voters. Villegas therefore has to do more than demonstrate that a favorable electorate exists. He has to help produce that electorate on Election Day.
The contrast leaves several explanations in play. The Valleycrat approach emphasizes adaptation and crossover persuasion; Villegas places greater weight on mobilization; Valadao’s history points to the additional power of candidate-specific and local identity. These mechanisms can operate together, and an election result alone cannot tell us which mattered most.
The contrast between Valadao and Villegas is more subtle than “moderate Republican versus progressive Democrat.”
Both can legitimately claim Central Valley roots, but they embody different relationships to the place.
Valadao represents something close to continuous embeddedness: Hanford, community college, dairy farming, agricultural institutions and Valley politics.
Villegas represents departure and return: Bakersfield, local colleges, graduate education outside the region, scholarly study of Valley political participation, and then a return to teaching and public service.
Neither biography is inherently more authentic. But both candidates must prevent national political identities from overwhelming their local ones.
Valadao must persuade voters that being a Republican congressman does not make him interchangeable with Donald Trump or every position of the national Republican Party. His impeachment vote provides unusually credible evidence for that claim.
Villegas faces the reverse problem. Republicans will have every incentive to make Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and the national progressive movement define him rather than his Central Valley career.
The race therefore asks the same question of both candidates:
When national party labels and local political identities point in different directions, which one do voters use to make sense of the candidate?
This may be the broader lesson of the race.
Campaign professionals commonly speak of “the electorate” as though it were a population waiting to be measured.
It is not. The electorate is partly produced by politics.
Who registers, who becomes attentive, who is contacted, who is mobilized and who eventually casts a ballot all help determine the electorate that appears.
Persuasion asks how to win the electorate likely to vote; mobilization asks whether the electorate itself can be changed.
Neither approach is inherently superior. But they are different theories of campaigning.
The uncertainty surrounding Latino political behavior makes the distinction particularly relevant. Campaign professionals increasingly describe Latino voters not as a uniform partisan constituency but as regionally diverse and persuadable. The industry has become extraordinarily sophisticated at identifying and reaching Latino voters at the same moment that it has become less certain what the category “Latino voter” actually predicts.
That is why the Cox election matters. If 2018 is interpreted simply as proof that Democrats permanently unlocked a latent majority in the district, Valadao’s 2020 return becomes difficult to explain. If instead 2018 is understood as the interaction of an extraordinary national environment with a distinctive local electorate, the sequence becomes more coherent.
The puzzle has become sharper in 2026. California’s new congressional map made Valadao’s district more favorable to Democrats by conventional measures. Democrats now hold roughly a 16-point registration advantage, while a district Donald Trump carried by about six points in 2024 would have given him an advantage of less than two points under the new boundaries. The political arithmetic that has long made Valadao’s survival look improbable has moved still further against his party.
That makes the district an unusually useful test of the argument running through this history. The national parties can measure registration, turnout probabilities, precinct behavior and demographics with precision unimaginable to the campaigns I worked on decades ago.
But what does that information explain?
It can identify a registered Democrat and estimate whether that person is likely to vote. It is much harder to measure whether a voter regards a dairy farmer from Hanford as “one of us,” or whether a professor from Visalia can persuade a marginal voter that participation is worth the effort.
Those factors can be studied. But they are not interchangeable with the variables we most easily measure.
If Villegas wins, it will be tempting to announce that progressivism has discovered a new formula for the Central Valley.
That would go beyond the evidence.
A victory could result from changed district boundaries, stronger Democratic turnout, the national environment, economic conditions, campaign spending, persuasion, mobilization, dissatisfaction with Republicans or some combination of them.
If Valadao wins, it will be equally tempting to declare that the Valleycrat theory was right and that Villegas was simply too liberal.
That conclusion would also require evidence.
Perhaps Democratic turnout remained depressed. Perhaps Valadao again attracted voters who supported Democrats elsewhere. Perhaps his agricultural and local identity remained unusually powerful. Perhaps voters rejected Villegas ideologically. Or perhaps national conditions shifted.
Election results tell us who won. They do not automatically tell us why.
For decades, politicians, pollsters and journalists have classified voters using categories that are valuable precisely because they simplify an extraordinarily complicated electorate: Latino or white, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, presidential voter or midterm voter.
The trouble begins when description becomes explanation.
Arana’s challenge to the idea of a single Latino vote, the Valleycrat tradition, Gene Taylor’s resistance to partisan nationalization and Villegas’s work on political participation all point toward the same conclusion. So does my experience surveying Central Valley voters and Valadao’s remarkable electoral career: the categories we use to describe an electorate do not necessarily explain how that electorate behaves.
For years, David Valadao appeared to violate the political characteristics of his constituency.
Perhaps he did not.
Perhaps ethnicity, registration, turnout, presidential preference, ideology and attachment to a local candidate simply measure different dimensions of political behavior — and we created the contradiction by expecting them to measure the same thing.
If so, California’s 22nd Congressional District is not really a story about unpredictable voters.
It is a story about the limits of the models we use to predict them.
California’s 22nd District and the Myth of the Predictable Voter was first published by California Latino News and is republished with permission.
Kent C. Price is a retired Professor of Political Science.
U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on September 21, 2026, in Washington, DC.
Less than two months before the November election, it is turning into a referendum on President Donald Trump’s second term. The key question that is usually asked in referendum elections like this one is: “Am I better off now than I was two years ago, at the time of the last election?
In answer to that question, the United States is kind of in a schizophrenic place—stuck between statistical indicators of how the economy is doing and individual Americans’ perceptions of how their own personal situation is faring in the Trump economy. Looking at the economic indicators – which at this point are unlikely to change between now and November – the performance is fairly mixed. Not great, but not horrible.
Yet most Americans’ perception of the economy and their own individual situation is increasingly negative. As Joe Biden and the Democrats found out in the 2024 election, oftentimes “perception is reality.” And that clearly has President Trump and the Republicans worried about the upcoming election. Recently, he said the economy is booming, but if it were, why would he have to offer a financial sweetener of $5000 to each American adult? Some are calling it an electoral bribe that would likely add another trillion dollars to the national debt.
Let’s look at some of the key economic indicators.
Economic growth. The nation’s economic growth in the first part of the year was decent at 2.1 percent, but it slowed dramatically to 1.5 percent in the second quarter (April-June), well below economists’ estimates. However, most economists expect the economy to gain steam later in the year, but the Iran war and the unpredictability of the Trump tariffs create a lot of uncertainty around forecasts. On the positive side, the stock market and the S&P 500 is up a robust 26 percent since the start of this Trump administration, but unfortunately only a small minority of Americans benefit from that since only 10% of the wealthiest Americans own 90% of the stocks.
Unemployment. It’s hard to say if the glass is half empty or half full. Unemployment remains relatively low at 4.1 percent; however, that is a sizable increase from mid-2023 under President Joe Biden when it was around 3.5%. That 0.6% increase represents nearly 10 million more Americans out of work. Until recently, new hiring was sluggish, but in August the economy added 162,000 jobs, almost triple the 55,000 jobs forecast by economists. Signs of a new turnaround?
Higher interest rates…Other red flags for the economy include the Federal Reserve recently raising interest rates in order to cool inflation. However, the Fed’s decision to raise rates will likely hurt some borrowers for home mortgages and auto loans. Higher interest rates will exacerbate housing unaffordability by increasing construction costs. Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Homebuilders, says the Fed’s recent rate hike will increase the cost of financing for builder and land developer loans, which are more directly connected to short-term interest rates.”
… and higher borrowing costs, alarming national debt and bitcoin collapse
In addition, the borrowing costs for the US government have risen sharply in recent weeks, with the 10-year Treasury yield hitting a high not seen since 2007. Borrowing costs have risen substantially amid worries that the national debt will hit a historic high of $40 trillion. The debt has risen across multiple presidents, but much of the recent increase has been driven by President Trump’s budget-busting One Big Beautiful Bill passed in July 2025, which gave massive tax deductions to the wealthiest of Americans. Even the White House-supported bitcoin mania has taken a dive, with investors jittery about an AI bubble and selling off riskier assets. Bitcoin is now below its value level when Donald Trump took office in January 2025.
The economic picture is mixed
Nevertheless, the leading economic indicators aren’t flashing major red. What’s driving a pessimistic outlook among many Americans is the sky-high cost of living, which in turn is contributing to higher levels of uncertainty and anxiety.
Inflation has slowly climbed to 3.4 percent, well above the Fed’s 2.0% target, driven by global energy shocks and supply disruptions stemming from Donald Trump’s war against Iran. While inflation is down from 4.2% in May, it’s higher than 2.9% in 2024 under the Biden administration and has generally been heading in the wrong direction.
Weighing even more on Americans’ minds is the cost of living for fuel, groceries, and utilities, which is really rattling consumer confidence. Combine that with the cost of borrowing, with home mortgage rates climbing to nearly 6.7% (compared with 3.5% in late January 2020), and the American Dream of homeownership continues to fade for many Americans, whether Republicans, Democrats, or independents.
While economic indicators are mixed, Americans don't weigh them equally. It's this last indicator, the cost of living, that is most likely going to backfire mightily against Donald Trump and Republicans. Just as it did against Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2024. And Trump's promise of a $5000 check is not likely to allay these concerns. In fact, it might rebound because, with a $40 trillion debt hanging over this and the next generation’s future, more Americans are realizing the nation's finances can't afford such a cheap election trick just to win some votes. Even as housing affordability continues to fade for so many Americans, especially young adults, it’s tantamount to trying to buy off voters with money the nation doesn't have, saddling young people with even more debt.
On the other hand…consumer spending remains robust?
Given the high cost of living for basic commodities like food, groceries, utilities, and gas at the pump, another mysterious indicator points in another direction. Paradoxically, personal consumption — measuring how much US households spent on goods and services — rose 3.2% year over year, much higher than predictions of 2.2% growth and a sign that Americans are continuing to spend.
But how can this be? If average Americans are beleaguered by high prices and cost-of-living woes, how can they keep spending at such a robust pace?
The answer is simple: Americans are filling the gap by borrowing and taking on more personal and household debt, including credit card and unpaid loans. Credit card balances have reached $1.26 trillion, which is very close to an all-time record. The percentage of credit card balances more than 90 days delinquent rose from 7.6% to 12.8% from mid-2022 through early 2026, as many households live paycheck to paycheck and take on "buy now, pay later" loans.
Auto loan and home equity line of credit (HELOC) balances continue to rise. Auto loan debt has reached $1.71 trillion, a new record high. More households are falling behind on payments, and it wouldn’t take much bad luck for these Americans to wind up delinquent on their loans. More American families are trapped in a cycle of debt, forced to rely more on credit to cover rent, utility bills, and other basic necessities. For too many Americans, the precarity of their individual situations forces them to hang on by their fingernails.
Economic uncertainty weighs on Americans’ minds
Beyond the indicators and numbers, beyond a spiraling cost of living and rising debt levels, a lot of economic uncertainty hangs over the big picture. The on-again, off-again war with Iran (and to a lesser extent the war in Ukraine) and the White House tariffs continually disrupt any sense of stability. In a very real way, Trump and the GOP may end up as victims of their own erratic policymaking, which, as we head into a November election, has many voters on edge.
That uncertainty, combined with real cost-of-living increases, has left consumer confidence low, and polls show that a high percentage of Americans rate the national economy as poor. A recent Gallup poll found that 45% of Americans rate the economy as poor, another 34% rate it as fair, and only 19% rate it as positive. Consumer sentiment, of course, is down among Democrats and Independents, but tellingly it is also down among Republicans. This reality has created a growing gap between mediocre economic indicators showing a few macro-level market gains and everyday household financial stress gripping three-quarters of Americans.
Most likely, this gap between the indicators and public perception is what will hurt Trump and Republicans in this November’s election.
Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote, and political reform director at New America. See more of his writing at his Substack newsletter DemocracySOS.
American Flag, Capitol building and the United States Constitution
Every lawyer admitted to practice in the United States takes a formal oath to support the Constitution and faithfully discharge the duties of the profession. In recent years, bar associations and courts around the country have held voluntary oath reaffirmation ceremonies, inviting lawyers to publicly renew their commitments and reaffirm the profession's responsibility to uphold the rule of law.
Between us, we have taken the oath eight times - having been admitted to practice law in six jurisdictions, across five states, and both having organized oath reaffirmation ceremonies in our respective Virginia hometowns.
Why would lawyers who hold law licenses stand in courthouses and take their oaths again?
To Reflect on our Commitment
What do our oaths ask of us?
Lawyers, of all people, know how to qualify obligations. We layer our clients’ contracts with conditions, exceptions, and standards. Yet our oaths contain none of these.
We promise to support the Constitution—no strings attached.
Different areas of practice reveal our obligations in different ways. For lawyers who support business transactions, the legal infrastructure is so dependable that it is easy to take for granted. Every commercial transaction rests on the assumption that contracts will be interpreted fairly and enforced by independent courts.
For others, the rule of law may arrive attached to a person. Someone calls with a problem. You think: I would really like to help.
Then the other thoughts come in. But the case won’t make money. It could be seen as political. This could upset powerful people in my community.
Sometimes the reasons not to get involved can seem to drown out your own ethical compass.
To Honor What We Inherited
As America reflects on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, lawyers have a particular reason to consider what we have inherited and what we are responsible for preserving.
Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 25 were lawyers - they risked charges of treason, carrying the punishment of death, to sign their names to the grievances against King George III. They still signed and pledged “[their] Lives, [their] Fortunes, and [their] sacred Honor.”
Preparing for the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Bar Association’s oath reaffirmation ceremony, president Nicole Faut (one of the co-authors of this article) highlighted the Association’s July 12, 1943 minutes. They recorded that the Association had 26 active members in 1942. After the United States entered World War II, more than 34 percent of Association members abandoned their practices and entered the service of their country—some going on to die in that service.
It is tempting to admire this country’s history from a safe distance behind a desk. The Association lawyers in 1943 did not know themselves as historical figures. Neither do we. They had practices. Clients. Families. They made choices without knowing how it would end, and so must we.
To Come Together
Today, we are witnessing attacks on the institutions charged with administering and maintaining our constitutional republic.
Just one example is the federal government using executive orders to punish law firms associated with disfavored lawyers or clients. Federal judges have repeatedly held those orders unconstitutional—and the federal government has been unperturbed.
The questions lawyers in the United States face today are critical: whether we can represent unpopular clients without governmental retaliation; whether courts can constrain executive action; and whether legal obligations remain obligations when power would prefer otherwise.
We must remember that the legal profession can enable abuses. Lawyers and judges in Nazi Germany helped bend legal institutions toward the regime through decrees, legislation, and reinterpretation. They helped give an increasingly lawless and brutal system the appearance of legitimacy.
But a profession acting together can also make resistance to attacks on our Constitution ordinary rather than heroic; rather like our oaths. Institutions - firms, bar associations, and other professional organizations - distribute courage. When the profession acts together to defend the rule of law, no individual lawyer must bear the entire cost of doing so alone - and seeing the cumulative impact of our efforts can grow momentum.
To Meet This Moment
Most of our tests will not look heroic.
They will arrive in inboxes and intake calls. In the moments between, I should do something and all the sensible reasons not to.
The “somethings” need not be limited to our practice: LDAD volunteers submit comments to proposed federal rules, speak at community organizations about Constitutional rights, organize democracy-focused community art installations, donate money when time feels scarce, and alert friends and family to what we, as a nation, stand to lose.
Lawyers can disagree fiercely about politics and law. Constitutional government wants us to do that.
The oath asks us something different. It asks: what will we do when the Constitution becomes inconvenient to defend?
Whether you were sworn in decades ago or just this year, our oaths are still binding: no political exceptions, no client exceptions, no exception for waiting until someone else goes first.
We take our oaths as individuals, but none of us is alone. Take action, in community with other lawyers, to find hope and agency.
This series from Lawyers Defending American Democracy connects the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to current events that threaten democracy and the justice system. Each piece highlights the unique responsibility lawyers carry—through their oath, professional obligations, and roles in their communities—to help the public understand what’s at risk and to speak out when democratic principles are under threat. LDAD’s call to action is straightforward: as the Founders once did, we must recognize threats to constitutional values, demand accountability, and act to defend them.
Nicole Faut and Amanda Pollard-Faut practice primarily in plaintiff-side employment and civil rights and are the immediate past president of the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Bar Association. Pollard has practiced corporate and transactional law for more than a decade, across private practice and in-house roles.
