It’s often said that America is as politically divided as it has ever been. This week’s show explores the data from two different groups that study American attitudes. What they discovered challenges some common assumptions about the current state of US politics, and offers a sense of context missing from noisy ‘us versus them’ type arguments.
Red, white and blue sign with an arrow indicating where to go to vote.
Ranked-choice voting has become one of America’s most prominent electoral reforms. It offers voters more ways to rank candidates and can reduce the fear of “wasting” a vote in crowded races.
But it does not address a more basic deficiency in American elections: voters can vote for a candidate, but they generally cannot vote against one.
That gap matters most in elections with no real choice at all. Ballotpedia reported that nearly 70 percent of the U.S. elections it tracked in 2024 were uncontested. In an uncontested race, there is nothing to rank. A voter may support the sole candidate, stay home, or cast a symbolic write-in vote. But a voter who strongly rejects that candidate has no direct way to say so.
The problem also exists in contested elections. Positive votes can be divided among several candidates, allowing a candidate with intense opposition to win. Ranked-choice voting may improve how preferences are aggregated among multiple candidates, but it does not give voters a formal means of withholding consent from any candidate.
A simple reform could do that: Negative Vote, also called the Balanced Ballot.
Under this system, each voter has one vote. The voter may cast a YES vote for the candidate they most support or a NO vote against the candidate they most oppose. A YES counts as +1; a NO counts as −1. The candidate with the highest net total wins. If every candidate receives a net-negative result, the election is rerun.
Consider a two-candidate contest. Candidate A receives YES votes from 34% of eligible voters; Candidate B receives YES votes from 33%. Under ordinary plurality, A wins.
Now suppose that making a NO vote available brings an additional 5% of eligible voters into the election. If 4% vote NO on A and 1% vote NO on B, A’s net support falls to 30% and B’s to 32%. B wins.
That outcome would not establish that B enjoys a majority mandate: B’s 32% net support would still fall short of a majority of the 72% who voted. But it would reflect a larger electorate’s combined judgment of support and rejection. In a close contest, that distinction can matter.
This is the essential difference between ranked-choice voting and Negative Vote. RCV gives voters more ways to express preference among candidates. Negative Vote expands the range of voters who can participate and gives every voter a way to express rejection.
Democracy is not only about choosing whom we want to govern us. It is also about deciding whom we do not want to govern us.
Today, a voter who dislikes every candidate but particularly opposes one faces unsatisfying choices: support the lesser evil, vote for a candidate with little prospect of winning, or abstain. Negative Vote adds a fourth option: vote against the candidate most unacceptable to you.
That option could also change candidates’ incentives. Under ordinary elections, candidates can prosper by mobilizing a loyal base even when their positions alienate many other voters. Under a one-vote YES-or-NO system, alienating voters carries an explicit electoral cost. Candidates and parties would have greater reason to seek broad acceptability, not merely intense support from their most committed followers.
Critics may reasonably worry that a NO option would reward negative campaigning or invite voters to oppose every candidate. The design matters. Each voter must have only one decisive vote—either YES for one candidate or NO against one candidate—not an unlimited opportunity to cast NO votes against the entire field. That constraint preserves the expressive benefit without turning the ballot into a vehicle for indiscriminate negativity.
The available evidence is preliminary but promising. This author’s peer-reviewed paper in Constitutional Political Economy presents survey evidence that the NO option may increase turnout by 4-10%.
The Balanced Ballot requires no ranking, no transfer rounds, and no complicated counting. It asks one question:
YES or NO?
It works in elections with one candidate, two candidates, or many candidates. It does not replace the right to choose. It completes it.
Universal suffrage gave citizens the right to vote. The secret ballot protected voters from coercion. Direct elections gave citizens greater control over who governs them.
The next democratic reform should give citizens a meaningful right to reject.
Tienshang "Sam" Chang is the principal financial supporter of the Negative Vote Association, which funded some surveys discussed in related research. Chang has published peer-reviewed research on Negative Vote and takes responsibility for the views expressed here.
Pro-Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC.
Who would have guessed that conspiracy mongering and civil unrest could be good for us.
(I did, kind of, at least the part about civil unrest unexpectedly serving a greater public good. But until Donald Trump flooded the airways and choked our politics with one made-up conspiracy after another, I didn’t see the connection between these fake crises and the few real conspiracies that had led to public unrest in the past. I also didn’t imagine that conspiracies, like civil unrest, might reinforce the legitimacy of conventional political practices and values rather than undermine them.)
But here we were, on the cusp of important mid-term elections, making big deals out of differences among ourselves that are smaller than we have been led to believe and picking cultural fights we could have ignored without doing ourselves any harm.
Had we paid more attention to our history, we might have figured this out before now. But we didn’t.
I was certain that we wouldn’t take the time right now to think about the good that conspiracies do. All the signs of a resurgence in conventional political activity, legislative initiatives, and judicial pushbacks were already out there. We just weren’t ready to see how Donald Trump’s conspiracy foolishness, his supporters’ willingness to jump off another cultural cliff just because he told them to, and our renewed commitment to conventional politics and political values were connected.
What we were paying attention to instead was how difficult it had become to find signs of Americans getting along and speaking well of each other in public. Wondering aloud and unkindly about who should be an American, whose rules we had to follow, and how accountable we need to be to people who aren’t like us had become something of a national pass time. In some communities, disagreements about such matters had taken troubling and dangerous turns.
No small blame for this situation has been laid at the feet of Donald Trump. He’s enjoyed great success politicizing our fears about immigrants and finding cultural issues that make our differences look bigger and worse than they really are. Mean-spiritedness and conspiracy mongering had become crucial pieces of his governing strategy.
The tales Trump has spun, especially those involving the “Epstein files” and alleged voting irregularities, energized his supporters, polarized our politics, overwhelmed our courts, and made it difficult for elected officials to legislate. But the time people spent pushing conspiracies also inspired many of us to use those allegedly tainted elections, legislatures, and courts to clean up the messes conspiracy junkies had made.
I’ll grant you that looking at conspiracies more positively, much less presenting them as an important tool for civic renewal and comity, would seem counter intuitive at best and politically, perhaps even morally, suspect.
But conspiracies contain the very seeds of their own undoing and our political salvation. They accomplish this by encouraging the rest of us to renew our commitment to use politics, the courts, and legislative bodies for the purpose they were designed to serve: to slow us down and take the time to make and amend laws that pull us away from the far left and far right ends of our political spectrum to someplace closer to its center.
Had we taken our own history more seriously, we would have seen that the threat conspiracies pose to conventional politics and governance is wildly overstated. The conspiracy around Jeffrey Epstein’s pimping of young women to celebrated men, to take one notable example, has shown that unresolved questions about who’s behind a conspiracy and benefitting from it can be turned against the very people who tried most to exploit it. This would include a president of the United States.
Other kinds of social discontent – the kinds associated with the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War – had an equally unimpressive track record in forcing leaders to make fundamental changes to how politics and governments usually work.
Our conspiratorial age and its reactionary impulses turn out to be the flipside of the reform-minded projects and progressive ideas celebrated by Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s and 1970s. The reason both failed to satisfy aggrieved Americans is that people ensconced in “The System” back then or today in the “Deep State” swallowed and temporized challenges to their legitimacy.
Notable among the actions that defused and swallowed the anti-war movement was the draft lottery. Young men with a high lottery number were peeled from the ranks of protesters. Mass demonstrations against the war fizzled. The war continued for several more years, but unchosen draft-eligible men were able to get on with their lives. I was one of them.
Civil rights reforms, on the other hand, made it possible for better educated minority men and women to move into the middle class by acquiring positions in government programs, non-profit organizations, and businesses that saw real advantages to hiring them.
In both cases, federal officials figured out how to buy their way out of trouble. They secured a measure of domestic peace and quiet by improving the life chances of some young men and women. The reforms that made this possible, however, also left many more people no better off and in the case of draftees demonstrably less well-off than they already were.
Tentative steps to address public calls for more dramatic and far-reaching changes had officials amending but not fully reversing courses of action that they had long followed and showed great reluctance to change.
At the same time, the changes federal officials did make inspired people who didn’t like these reforms or the people benefitting from them to mount challenges to progressive politicians and government programs. Decades later, Donald Trump’s political ascent would be energized by these displeased people. Their grievances and fears fueled all the conspiracies he created for their consumption.
That was the bad news.
The good news was that the backstory to the failure of Trump’s conspiracies to make permanent changes to our politics and government was written two hundred years ago in slave insurrections that were much feared in the ante-bellum South. Slave insurrection panics were more likely when slave masters were away from their plantation and the few times during the year when slaves were allowed moments of “free time.” Actual slave insurrections rarely happened, and ones that did come to pass were quickly suppressed.
The vote-cheating panic President Trump created in 2020 provoked an “armed” insurrection on January 6, 2021, and this country’s first attempted presidential coup d’état. Whether one believed the claims made by President Trump or discounted them is irrelevant. What matters is that the conspiratorial shots Trump took then and more recently have not sewn the chaos he predicted and needed to turn our constitutional republic into a popularly elected monarchy.
Violent acts by individuals who are provoked by conspiratorially-inspired rhetoric and campaigns are ugly but comparatively rare. Rarer yet are violent demonstrations initiated by large groups of people who buy into whatever conspiracy is currently being waved in their faces. The January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol was a notable exception. It lasted only a few hours, however, and had no impact on the electoral college vote that certified Joe Biden’s victory other than delaying it.
Donald Trump’s failure to secure an electoral college recount by provoking his supporters reaffirmed what historians have long understood about turning upset people into lethal political weapons. You’re as likely to hurt your friends as your foes when you shoot off more than your mouth.
Donald Trump’s most dedicated insurrectionists understood this. Most left their guns outside of the Capitol, and no one who carried their gun inside the Capitol discharged their weapon. The clubs and spears they used were reminiscent of the pitchforks and torches peasants once carried to protest the price of grain, not weapons anyone would rely on to overthrow a national government with a large standing army.
The aspirations of the governed coincide with the interests of their leaders more than the public fights they pick suggest. Discontented people settle for shows of contrition by their leaders and amendments to the way they are governed. Aggrieved people want their concerns acknowledged and their interests taken seriously more than they aspire to overhaul the way that politics is played and their government runs.
Donald Trump’s presidencies provide good examples of how pairing institutional corruption with conspiracies provoke more convention-affirming pushbacks than revolutionary upheaval. The run-up to the mid-term elections in 2026 demonstrated Americans’ confidence in conventional political and legal means to challenge and repulse many of the president’s worst excesses. So too would the results of the election.
Conspiracies and popular unrest enable leaders to push a potential crisis off to the side and avoid a serious review of what went wrong, who was responsible, and how to restore faith in their rule. They postpone more immediate and serious reckonings over the customs and values that underlie the work of conventional institutions.
Donald Trump’s conspiracy followers had reactionary goals in mind. They wanted to restore practices and priorities that elites used to take for granted and their supporters liked. At the top of that list was restricting the number and variety of newcomers and outsiders who can exercise rights and privileges that comparatively few of them were allowed to practice in the past.
People who protested and took advantage of popular unrest to secure minority people’s civil rights and end the war in Vietnam had more progressive goals in mind. They wanted to give less esteemed people a greater chance to throw their collective weight around and push for a more inclusive brand of politics and governance.
Our history shows that popular unrest and conspiracies compel Americans to take a hard look at the contradictions built into their society. It also shows that even outrageous public fights nearly always end with modest changes being made and the government left intact.
This probably won’t make progressive-minded reformers happy.
It should, however, send a shiver down the spines of aspiring autocrats whose principal goal in stirring up trouble is to keep themselves in power.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.
70% of U.S. elections go uncontested. Meet the candidate challenging a 38-year incumbent — and learn why silent elections erode democracy.
The prevalence of uncontested elections in America—70% of all races in 2024—receives little attention. That’s partly because these races are often for local offices in small districts, but it’s also because many people don’t see these silent elections as a big problem. Some argue the absence of a challenger signals satisfaction with government or that the winner is a forgone conclusion and so it doesn’t matter if there is no challenger. This is misguided.
Unchecked silent elections stifle democratic dialogue and depress turnout. No challenger also means no campaign and no candidate debate, which limits opportunities for citizens to engage with multiple viewpoints and develop a habit of political engagement. When citizens are robbed of this, democratic culture erodes.
Nadia Milleron, an independent running for Congress in Massachusetts’ 1st district, agrees. “What kind of democracy is that if you don't have anyone running against someone who at the time had been in 36 years, earlier than the Berlin Wall falling”, she told me in reference to her 2024 and 2026 opponent, Congressman Richard Neal, first elected in 1988.
Milleron’s decision to challenge Neal was partially motivated by the knowledge that he would otherwise face no opponent. However, Milleron was also motivated by her experience dealing with Neal’s office. In 2019, Milleron’s daughter, Samya Stumo, was aboard a Boeing 737-MAX that crashed killing all on board. Milleron soon discovered that Boeing had hidden the plane’s deadly flaws and that the Federal Aviation Administration had allowed it to happen. Milleron felt she had to act. Her advocacy eventually helped pass the 2020 Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act (ACSAA) overhauling aircraft certification.
While advocating for ACSAA, Milleron became exasperated by Neal’s refusal to meet with her despite her being a member of his district. Evidence suggests Milleron’s experience is common. Officials elected without competition skip more votes and sponsor less legislation than their peers who have won competitive elections. The more often a legislator goes unchallenged, the truer this becomes. These politicians also tend to be less responsive to constituent inquiries and requests. I experienced that too, as Neal’s office repeatedly ignored my requests for comment.
In addition to his lack of accessibility, Milleron grew to resent Neal’s extensive use of PAC funding, which she believes makes him beholden to corporate donors, not his constituents. PACs funded 75% of Neal’s 2024 campaign, the most of anyone in Congress.
To Milleron the solution is simple, “No corporate money should be in any election process. No corporate money at all.” Many share a form of this view, including Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden. However, corporate money does have its defenders. Some political scientists argue that money has little impact on election outcomes because money flows to candidates already likely to win. They argue that well-funded candidates win because they are good candidates, not because they have more money.
Even if money in politics doesn’t change who wins, it changes who runs. Studies have shown that potential candidates without access to fundraising sources, like tradesmen, are less likely to run than candidates with access to fundraising sources, like lawyers. That means that money, not political debate, is filtering potential candidates. Sometimes this filtering process leaves just one candidate as would-be candidates abandon their campaigns in the face of massive funding disadvantages.
Something is lost when passionate candidates don’t run, even if they were unlikely to win. To run for Congress, Nadia Milleron collected the required signatures herself by talking to people outside a local grocery store. Milleron says of the experience, “You're able to talk with and show your sign to every single person. So I thought that was really good.” An aspiring politician speaking face-to-face with would-be constituents represents the best of American elections, an institution Alexis De Tocqueville praised for bringing “a multitude of citizens permanently together”. In silent elections, that is lost.
Milleron never considered challenging Neal in the democratic primary instead of the general election because she believes the two-party system obstructs action. When I ask Milleron how she sees herself ideologically, she rejects the question. “I really disagree with those categories. Moderate, liberal, left, right,” she says. “You're just in a club and you're not like actually dealing with actual problems.” She knew she was unlikely to win a personally draining independent campaign. Friends told her not to run, but something urged her on. “I don't think it was a very carefully assessed decision,” she recalls. “It was more of an instinctive decision.”
Through friends, community outreach, and her personal funds, Milleron ended up raising a total of 350k for her campaign. Those funds let her buy political ads that raised her name recognition. “I know my district; I know what the people are like,” she recalls. “I just knew that I had to do that.” Congressman Neal ultimately outspent her 8-1.
Politics can be unforgiving to longshot candidates, but optimists can find reasons for hope. In 2024, Milleron won 37.5% of the vote in Massachusetts’ 1st district. Describing the outcome, Milleron’s tone mixes pride with resignation. “One hundred and thirty-three thousand, five hundred votes,” she recalls. “I got enough that I could win the midterm election.”
This fall Milleron will face Neal again. Of the 20+ candidates to have challenged Neal in the primary or general election over the course of his 38-year congressional career, she is the first to do so twice. Unfortunately, candidates like Milleron—competent individuals with passion, time, and resources—are rare.
The inherent challenges of running for office mean that candidates need to be competent, determined, and committed. Unfortunately, the barriers to running for office mean candidates must also be well-off and have abundant free time. Most people don’t meet those criteria, but they are governed primarily by those that do. This disconnect is bad for democracy. To address this gap we need more people to run for office, especially from unconventional backgrounds, and especially in districts with histories of uncontested elections.
Some people resist efforts to encourage more candidates to run, fearing that more candidate quantity means less candidate quality. When electoral fields become overly crowded, as was arguably the case with the 2016 Republican and the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries, discussion of individual attributes crowds out policy discourse. This concern is legitimate, but currently far more races suffer from a dearth of candidates than suffer from an onslaught of them.
Silent elections in America are a symptom of a political culture which makes it very difficult for people from less privileged backgrounds to enter politics. They are also inherently harmful to a democracy because of how they bypass the community-building and public debate aspects of an election.
Rafael Gonzalez is an MPP student at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Before graduate school, he worked for Boston Consulting Group, the World Food Programme, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has previously been published by Public Seminar for an article on industrial agriculture.
man walks near the Punta Cardon refinery, on Jan. 23, 2026. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world with an estimated 303 billion barrels.
So, it was a war for oil after all.
On social media Friday, President Trump announced that the United States and Venezuela have struck an agreement for “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY.”
The whole thing is appalling, starting with the all-caps.
I have no love for the Venezuelan regime, run by, in Trump’s words, “the Highly Respected Interim President” Delcy Rodriguez. But this is a “deal” that Rodriguez couldn’t refuse. We invaded her country, abducted her criminal-dictator boss, Nicolás Maduro, and made her our satrap.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Venezuela and the U.S. will work through two intermediaries to get the oil flowing. The Venezuelan partner is Alejandro Betancourt, head of North American Blue Energy Partners. He’s been investigated, though not charged, for money laundering in Spain and Switzerland. He’s also one of the most famous “Bolichicos,” a nickname for the young businessmen who’ve gotten rich from their ties to the socialist, murderous, criminal dictatorship (it’s a portmanteau of “Bolivarian” and “Bourgeois”).
And who is the American partner? Well, the Pentagon, of course. Trump couldn’t get American oil companies to invest billions in Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry. (At a White House meeting in January, Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil infuriated the president by describing Venezuela as “un-investable.”) So, the commander in chief tapped the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, securing the right to buy 20% of all production “at cost.” Created in 2022, the OSC was intended to use loans and loan guarantees to help develop vital industries. Now, it’s the primary backer of the “history’s biggest oil deal.”
We’ll see how legal this is. You can be sure someone will be going to court over it. After all, the U.S. government will be working with a criminal regime, under implausible statutory authority, to buy oil at below-market rates while undermining our own oil producers.
I won’t shed many tears for the oil companies, even if the administration pulls this off. Then again, I don’t think they will, at least not any time soon. Trump boasts that this will help lower gas prices. Maybe. Someday. But even this scheme’s biggest boosters acknowledge that if it all goes swell, it will still take years to get the relevant oil fields producing, and years to retrofit American refineries to take Venezuela’s subpar oil. So, if Trump thinks prices at the pump are coming down before the midterms, or even during his presidency, he should think again.
But my primary objections to this imperial smash-and-grab are constitutional and moral. The constitutional problem is pretty straightforward. Trump lied to Congress and to the public about this scheme from the get-go. He claimed Operation Absolute Resolve was a mission by law enforcement to capture Nicolás Maduro. The same indictment for Maduro and his wife included members of the regime. We left them in place, because law enforcement was a pretext.
Roughly 11 hours after apprehending Maduro, Trump boasted that the U.S. was going to “run the country” by working with the criminal regime. Did Congress authorize that? Congress definitely didn’t authorize the Pentagon to get into the oil business.
Trump has a long, long history of claiming that America should “take the oil” from countries we go to war with. And months before this deal, he bragged that oil revenue from Venezuela has “paid for the attack many times over…. I always used to say, ‘To the victor belong the spoils.’ ”
Ironically, this phrase comes from a defense of the corrupt spoils system in U.S. politics, not some time-(dis)honored rule of war.
The Constitution does not empower the president to unilaterally launch wars, even brief ones, for the purpose of seizing or extorting a nation’s wealth. It’s worth noting that although the fighting in Venezuela was brief, the Iran war is dragging on. And that was his plan for Iran too.
“If I had my choice, what would I like to do? Take the oil. Because it’s there for the taking,” Trump told reporters in April. He also posted on social media: “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE.”
Then there’s the whole democracy thing. The administration vowed to restore Venezuelan democracy, eventually. We were supposed to be liberators bringing Venezuela freedom, according to the White House. Now, we’ve signed a “century-long” agreement with a corrupt, unelected, murderous regime. Do you think Trump is going to be in any kind of hurry to bring democracy to Venezuela now?
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
