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Presidents who lost the popular vote often faced economic turmoil. See the pattern from Harrison to Trump and how a 50-state strategy could change it.
Alan Mazzocco/Getty Images
Path Forward from Economic Consequences of Non-Popular Vote Presidents
Sep 29, 2026
While losing the popular vote does not inherently cause economic ruin, the structural political weakness of entering office without a democratic majority mandate often compounded the economic challenges their administrations faced. These terms were marked by distinct economic hardships, structural imbalances, or severe financial crises.
Destabilizing Partisan Protectionism
To compensate for a lack of broad popular support, some non-popular vote winners leaned heavily into aggressive, special-interest economic policies—such as hyper-protectionist tariffs—to satisfy the narrow geographic coalitions that elected them.
Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893): Harrison lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College by carrying key industrial states. To reward his base, Harrison championed the McKinley Tariff of 1890, which raised import duties to historic highs of nearly 50%.
The Fallout: The tariff triggered retaliatory trade measures, depleted the federal surplus via reckless spending, and severely strained the U.S. gold supply through the concurrent Sherman Silver Purchase Act. This volatile mixture directly triggered the Panic of 1893, one of the most devastating depressions in American history. The 1894 midterm elections ballot-box response delivered the largest incumbent-party reversal in U.S. history. Voters used the ballot box to punish the incumbent party, stripping them of 127 house seats, their remaining 93 seats represent a preservation of 42.27% of their peak 220-seat strength, and usuring in the Progressive Era (1890s to 1920s).
Deficit Expansion and Systemic Market Shocks
In the modern era, non-popular vote terms have aligned with massive shifts in wealth distribution, severe regulatory overhauls, and historic macroeconomic collapses.
George W. Bush (First Term: 2001–2005): Taking office after the razor-thin, contested 2000 election, Bush implemented sweeping tax cuts that primarily benefited high-income brackets. Combined with the subsequent dotcom bust and the immense, unbudgeted military expenditures of the post-9/11 wars, the structural fiscal health of the country inverted from a projected federal surplus to deep, compounding deficits. The deregulation favored during his broader tenure ultimately culminated in the subprime mortgage meltdown and the Great Recession of 2008.
Donald Trump (2017–2021): Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 through narrow victories in economically distressed manufacturing hubs, despite losing the popular vote. His economic agenda focused on aggressive trade protectionism (imposing sweeping tariffs on allies and adversaries alike) and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. While these moves initially catalyzed short-term stock market rallies, they severely expanded the national debt. His term ultimately concluded with the catastrophic structural and labor shocks of the COVID-19 economic crisis.
A comprehensive path forward addresses structural economic disparities caused by non-popular vote presidencies whose policy priorities often favor specific battleground regions, while concurrently building a 50-state voter engagement strategy and national economic cohesion.
Structural & Policy Interventions
To mitigate economic fragmentation driven by hyper-localized political pandering, policy must pivot toward universal economic baselines and state-level legislative innovation.
National Economic Anchors: Standardizing macro-economic baselines—such as indexing the federal minimum wage to inflation—insulates low-income workers from shifting federal executive agendas.
State-Level Campaign Finance Control: Utilizing state corporation-defining powers to enact a "Corporate Power Reset" targets and restrict dark money spending in federal and local elections without requiring federal constitutional amendments.
Regional Disparity Mitigation: Advocating localized infrastructure investments and modern workforce initiatives balances out "swing-state" subsidies, building resilience against economic anxiety in neglected markets.
A 50-State Electoral Engagement Strategy
Sustained national economic stability requires transforming the electorate from passive bystanders in "safe" states to active participants via comprehensive systemic reforms.
Structural Voting Reforms
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC): State legislatures can join the compact to pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, guaranteeing the presidency to the candidate who secures the most votes nationwide. For more details, see: Virginia Joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact Puts the Finish Line in Sight
Pro-Voter Statutory Alignment: Transitioning states toward nonpartisan primaries or ranked-choice voting (RCV) alters candidate incentives, forcing them to appeal to a broader national demographic rather than a highly polarized base.
Rebuilding Civic Infrastructure
Universal Civics Education: Treating civic training as essential cultural infrastructure rectifying the civic empowerment gap between affluent and underserved voting districts.
Protecting Local Funding: Insulating local equity-based education grants from federal budgetary shifts prevents the weaponization of educational access based on partisan administrations.
Grassroots & Intermediary Engagement
Off-Cycle Organizing: Shifting the mobilization pipeline away from high-stakes October blitzes to year-round civic engagement maintains political literacy and voter retention.
Digital Peer Networks: Utilizing decentralized community spaces creates incremental touchpoints that boost political interest and lower the barrier to real-world ballot participation long before election day.
The Bottom Line
In a fifty-state presidential landscape, candidates could no longer rely on hyper-local pander or culturally isolated wedge issues. Instead, they would be forced to run macro-level campaigns addressing unaffordability, technological disruption of daily life, government accountability, and a reassessment of global commitments—issues that resonate uniformly across America's entire geographic layout.
Hugh J. Campbell, Jr., CPA, is a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) professional and a student of W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician often credited as the catalyst for the Japanese economic miracle after WWII.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is seen in the electronic viewfinder of a television camera in the Oval Office at the White House on September 18, 2026, in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
How Democracy Dies Alongside a Constricted Press
Sep 28, 2026
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists.
We asked Malory Shaw, a Fall Fulcrum Fellow, to share what democracy means to her and how she sees its current health.
Local news informs voters, and informed voters fuel democracy. It holds politicians accountable, even when they go unnoticed, and it helps voters choose the candidates who will serve them best.
I experience democracy and a free press firsthand in the public media newsroom where I intern. We interview every candidate and ask about the issues voters care about, from police surveillance to data centers in northern Nevada's deserts.
I interviewed Reno’s new police chief as he settled into his role, appointed by the City of Reno. Our broadcast let listeners judge for themselves whether the decision to appoint him was right, given concerns about surveillance and immigration. We keep a record of what officials promise, so voters can look back and see: what was fulfilled and what wasn’t?
Local reporting connects with people like nationals may not. If our station or other local outlets don’t cover it, no one else will.
The free press has deteriorated with democracy. In the U.S., democracy has exponentially declined. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance's annual Global State of Democracy report reveals that the U.S. has reported an all-time low in democracy under President Donald Trump’s administration. I don’t believe we’ve ever had a robust, healthy democracy where every group was represented. But the decline is sharper under President Trump, whose attacks on the press are attacks on democracy itself. Democracy is the basis of our country.
President Trump has banned CNN, Politico, and MS NOW, citing false and inaccurate reporting. On Sept. 21, the White House launched Trump TV, which livestreams government highlights 24/7. These attacks aren’t new under his administration. The Pentagon required journalists to sign off on restrictions, such as having an escort and reporting on news with official approval.
These restrictions control the narrative and create gaps in what the public can know. In some Latin American countries, state-run media only highlights the government’s successes. Democracy is based on knowledge, and without it, how do we know how to vote? That is feigned democracy, in name only but not in practice.
In a functional democracy, the press should not be restricted in any form or state vetting.
Brazen restrictions aren’t the only tactic. Journalists at protests are pepper-sprayed and mistreated, which discourages others from doing the work. A chilling effect the First Amendment is meant to dissuade.
If journalists are brutalized and expected to be harsh, nobody would shame them for feeling dissuaded. Nobody should blame a reporter for feeling deterred. The most passionate and committed journalists keep working despite this, but there is a limit to what a reporter should endure to get information to the public.
The University College London Social & Historical Sciences department says maintaining a healthy democracy requires politicians to avoid eroding public trust in the media. President Trump releases barrages of insults against the media he dislikes, helping create a polarized country that is unable to trust the mass media.
No media should be trusted blindly, but its role in democracy remains and should be treated with incredible respect.
Public funding and support is not a favor to the journalist. It is securing an investment in a healthy democracy where accountability is at the forefront.
Politicians must go the extra step and advocate for public media funding. The newsroom I intern with holds politicians accountable with minimal resources. Our station has four impassioned reporters and several interns, but how can a station this size fully cover Reno and all of northern Nevada? More reporters would mean a stronger democracy here.
Governments and politicians have a duty to give reporters the resources they need to maintain a healthy democracy.
Malory Shaw is a student at the University of Nevada, Reno. Malory's reporting is grounded in building trust with communities — from pesticide‑affected families in rural Costa Rica to Latino neighborhoods in Nevada — and in examining how law enforcement technology impacts democracy.
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Declaration of Independence
Housefinch1787, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Path to a Fourth Founding
Sep 28, 2026
For centuries, a grim pattern has governed how nations arrive at new political orders. An old order exhausts its legitimacy, the strain builds until it erupts into war, and only afterward do the survivors gather to write the terms of what follows: at Westphalia after the seventeenth-century wars of religion; at Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars; and at San Francisco after the Second World War.¹ In each case, the table was set only after the old world had died. Even then, the terms of the new order were not guaranteed. The liberal order that emerged after the Second World War — a framework of universal rights and democratic governance — was not secure until the Cold War ended forty-five years later, and it is still contested.
Given the current level of polarization and rising political violence in the United States, it is time to ask ourselves a tough question. Can we set the table for renewing our system of self-governance before the catastrophe? I believe the answer can be yes, if we find the will to come together across our lines of difference and excavate our common ground.
I spent my career assessing and supporting democracy abroad. Not long ago, I joined my colleagues — former American diplomats and democracy professionals — to turn our assessment framework on our own country. Our central finding was that the United States faces a consensus crisis: a breakdown in our shared agreement about the role of government, the rules of political competition, and national identity itself.²
What has frayed is our social contract — the agreement beneath all our laws about who holds power and how it is checked, who belongs in our country, and what we owe one another. The Constitution is the written expression of that social contract.
Sadly, our current political system will not repair itself, because these failures are products of its own incentives. In 2024, 87 percent of House races were effectively settled in primaries — decided by just 7 percent of eligible voters.³ The most expensive election in American history — roughly $15.9 billion in campaign spending, with the wealthiest one percent of donors supplying about half of all the money raised — has put the price of being heard beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.⁴ An officeholder’s surest road to defeat is no longer to fail the country but to be challenged from the extreme of his or her own party. Those who hold the privilege of power under such rules will not, of their own accord, surrender the advantages the rules confer.
What is a Founding?
Americans have faced moments like this before — and answered them with what we rightly call our Foundings. By a Founding I mean a two-part test: first, the people renegotiate the fundamental terms of the social contract, in other words we decide to treat each other differently and engage with our institutions in new ways, and, second, they write the result into the Constitution, beyond the reach of any single election to undo. Our First Founding — from the Declaration of Independence through the 1787 Constitution and the Bill of Rights — set the original terms. The Second Founding remade our social contract and system, but only after the Civil War, following the grim pattern of history. The Reconstruction Amendments ended slavery, guaranteed citizenship and equal protection, and forbade denial of the vote on account of race.⁵
Entrenchment in the Constitution is what distinguishes a Founding from ordinary reform. Still, the renewal of a country’s social contract goes deeper than the amendments that anchor it. A social contract is lived in statehouses, city councils, and communities, not only in the Constitution’s text. The Second Founding, for example, also included the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau, civil rights enforcement statutes, and state-level changes. The amendments were the keystone that locked the rest in place.
Which was our Third Founding? There is disagreement on this point. Some scholars point to the New Deal, which recast the relationship between citizen and government.⁶ A rising account — embraced by a bipartisan national commission on our democracy — counts the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.⁷ My own view is that the women’s suffrage movement counts as a Founding. As the legal scholar Reva Siegel has shown, the Nineteenth Amendment “transformed We the People — not simply by adding voters, but by democratizing the family” — a renegotiation of the social contract that was also entrenched in the constitutional text.⁸
We do not need to settle that argument here. Whichever account you hold, the Third Founding is spoken for — it lies in the past. What matters is that, in the twentieth century, Americans renewed our social contract without a civil war. The suffragists won their transformation by amendment, through decades of organizing, and the Civil Rights Movement won through disciplined nonviolence. These examples prove that Founding-scale change without catastrophe is not a fantasy. It is part of our inheritance.
Why do reforms struggle to hold?
Despite these achievements, the twentieth century also carries a warning. Much of what the New Deal and the civil rights revolution built lived in statutes and reversible court rulings rather than in the Constitution’s durable architecture. In recent years, the Supreme Court has narrowed the Voting Rights Act and ended race-conscious admissions, dismantling by reinterpretation what was never anchored in the country’s foundational text.⁹ The result is an exhausting pattern: reforms are won and unwon as power changes hands, with no endgame in sight.
Meanwhile, the one instrument our country has for making change durable has seized up. Members of Congress have introduced more than ten thousand constitutional amendments since 1789; only twenty-seven have ever been ratified, and only one since 1971.¹⁰ The Equal Rights Amendment demonstrates the challenges: Congress passed it in 1972, the thirty-eighth state voted to ratify it in 2020, and the amendment still failed — a process fumbled across five decades of missed deadlines, rescinded ratifications, and court rulings. Amid today’s polarization, the Constitution has become, in practice, unamendable — so change migrates instead to the courts, whose reinterpretations, unlike amendments, can always be undone.
The need for a Fourth Founding
This is why I believe the work of our generation is a Fourth Founding. I am not the only one. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ bipartisan Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship — launched at the challenge of Stephen D. Bechtel Jr., a Republican philanthropist — reached the same conclusion. Its 2020 Our Common Purpose report found that the conditions of the twenty-first century “pose an urgent threat to the future of our democratic way of life” and therefore require a fourth founding.¹¹
A Fourth Founding would mean renewing our social contract — finding new ways of living together across our lines of difference — and entrenching the deepest common-ground reforms into the Constitution before a significant violent rupture rather than after one. Let me manage expectations clearly: a Fourth Founding would not entail enshrining one faction’s agenda as the will of the whole. What a genuine consensus process settles on would look less like any party’s platform than like the sober center — and that is the point. Although there is research demonstrating that Americans have plenty of common ground, we should not presume the answers. To determine the national consensus on what kind of country Americans want to live in moving forward, we propose to co-create a legitimate, lawful process that lets the American people deliberate on this question.
That raises an important question: by what process could a free people renegotiate its social contract in peace — with everyone at the table and legitimacy no one can deny? That is the subject of my next essay: the Great American Deliberation.
Danielle M. Reiff is a retired American diplomat, peacebuilder, and writer.
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A personal 9/11 reflection on American resilience — how ordinary kindness, community, and quiet strength endure amid political noise and division.
Jacob Wackerhausen/Getty Images
America’s Quiet Strength: Rising Above Power, Chaos and Cruelty
Sep 28, 2026
As Americans look back on 9/11 in this 250th year, we remember a nation shaken — yet rising, again and again. America is cracked, but Americans are not broken. Our resilience is the quiet force holding this country together.
Today, we find ourselves in a moment thick with noise — global conflicts, corruption, rising prices, healthcare struggles, and political division designed to exhaust us. Every day brings a new headline, a new crisis, a new attempt to distract or divide. The chaos, fatigue, and uncertainty are real. Yet even in this noisy, chaotic time, Americans continue to rise — not because life is easy, but because rising is who we are.
Across the country, Americans are searching for ways to survive the noise — corruption, turbulence, and dysfunction. They are navigating an affordability crisis dismissed as a “hoax,” a healthcare system buckling under pressure, a measles outbreak, and rising global instability, including the Iran war. They are watching unqualified people confirmed to positions of national importance while an election-denying president dominates the news cycle, abuses the office, and evades accountability. They see institutions strained, rights challenged, and democratic norms tested. Many are simply trying to hold on — to their peace, their sanity, their hope.
And in the middle of all this, Americans turn toward one another — toward kindness, community, faith, humor, and resilience — because that is where real care still exists. In the absence of compassion from the top, they make the most of what they have.
But chaos is not the whole story. Noise is not destiny. And noise is not who we are. Through it all, Americans continue to rise. I saw that resilience on 9/11. Living in California, my husband — who worked in aerospace — narrowly missed his flight to New York. My cousin’s subway train in Manhattan stalled underground. One of my Muslim teachers told me her husband did not want her to come to work because he feared she would be mistreated. She said, “My principal values diversity — she will keep me safe,” and she came anyway. My niece in northern Virginia watched military planes fly overhead. In those hours, Americans of every background prayed together, comforted one another, and showed extraordinary courage. I remember asking my entire school to pause for a moment of silence. Even in unimaginable grief, America rose.
Hard times do something unexpected: they make love stronger. Couples hold each other closer. Friends become anchors. Communities tighten their circles. Look at the neighborhoods surrounding Haitian families and other immigrants — people who came to America, built lives, contributed to their communities, and helped make those communities stronger, only to find themselves facing fear, uncertainty, and political hostility. Yet communities stepped in. Neighbors share food. Families donate to food banks even when their own budgets are thin. People with almost nothing find ways to give. My mother used to say, “You can’t miss what you have never had.” And she was right. Americans know what it means to depend on one another. They rise through empathy, connection, sacrifice, and love.
There is also a striking contradiction. The president is the son of an immigrant, and he has married two immigrant women: his late first wife, Ivana Trump, who was born in Czechoslovakia, and his current wife, Melania Trump, who was born in Slovenia and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Both are white European immigrants. Yet Haitian and other immigrants of color can find themselves facing fear, uncertainty, and political hostility. America is not strengthened by deciding who is worthy of belonging. It is strengthened when people see one another as human beings worthy of dignity.
Just today, my nephew sent me pictures and videos from Symphony in the Park in Atlanta — a huge crowd of diverse people gathered under the open sky. “Everybody is here,” he said. And he was right. People of every background were talking, laughing, sharing food, and enjoying the evening together. Strangers spoke with strangers. Families relaxed side by side. Here they were, choosing joy over noise, community over cruelty, and connection over division.
Even now, Americans continue to show quiet acts of goodness. My sister in Virginia found herself part of a “pay it forward” chain at Walmart. I experienced it myself in a fast-food drive-through — someone paid for my order. I watched a man in a grocery store hand a woman two dollars when she was short on her bill. “Take the $1.67 and keep the change,” he said. No politics. No division. Just humanity.
A grieving mother adopted a five-year-old girl her late daughter had planned to adopt, carrying forward her daughter’s love. A waitress patiently read a menu to a confused customer, restoring their dignity. An older man paid for another person’s groceries and simply said, “Been there, kid.” These moments are not small. They are evidence of who we are.
America may feel far from the country many of us remember. This administration has cast a cloud over that spirit — a cloud of cruelty, division, intimidation, and corruption. But resilience remains the quiet force holding this country together. Americans are struggling to endure an affordability crisis and a political crisis at the same time. Yet they smile. They rise.
My mother taught my siblings and me something simple that stayed with me throughout my life: Don’t look down. Keep your head up. Look toward the heavens and smile.
I did just that.
Years later, I had a supervisor whose tactics seemed designed to break people. I watched adults under his supervision cry, quit, give in, or become loyal to him simply to survive. He once asked me why I was always smiling. He told me people were suspicious of me because I was always smiling.
I looked at him, smiled, and walked away.
He could not break me. He did everything he could to keep me from being promoted, but his tactics did not work. Thank goodness I had learned something long before I entered that workplace: another person does not get to decide whether I surrender my spirit.
People need to remember that inner strength now. Resilience is not pretending hardship does not hurt. It is knowing that hardship does not have to define you. Sometimes strength is simply keeping your head up, looking toward the light, and refusing to let someone else take your joy.
Do not give in to the noise. Weed through lies and conspiracies. Do your research. Seek the truth. Remember the past, especially when leaders claim they “did right by you.” Make a plan to vote. And vote.
Don’t get sidelined by party loyalty, election interference, or intimidation. Protect your voice. Protect your power. Protect the Republic.
Protect something else, too: your inner strength. Step away from the noise when you need to. Look up. Smile. Breathe. Stay connected to people who remind you of hope and possibility. Believe that your effort matters.
My mother used to say, “No one can take your joy. You can give it away, but no one can take it.”
She was right.
We may not be able to control every storm around us. But we can decide whether we will surrender our humanity, our hope, our voice, or our joy to it.
America’s quiet strength has always lived in its people.
And still, we rise.
Carolyn Goode is a retired educational leader and former principal who has spent her career advancing civic responsibility, equity, and public engagement. She writes about democracy, leadership, and the values that strengthen American communities.
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