Democratic political icon James Carville and former White House Chief of Staff (2017) and Republican National Committee Chairman (2011-2017) Reince Priebus sat down with USC students prior to the event, 'Finding Common Ground on the State of our Democracy' to answer questions, and share insights.
Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Join a growing community committed to civic renewal.
Subscribe to The Fulcrum and be part of the conversation.
Top Stories
Latest news
Read More
Border patrol SUV at the Mexico / United States border in El Paso Texas
Getty Images
How Border Policies Are Reshaping South Texas Politics
Oct 24, 2026
Zapata County, a rural border region in South Texas, is one of the poorest counties in the state. Democratic presidential candidates carried the county for more than a century. In 2020, that all changed when Zapata, a county with a population that is 94 percent Latino, voted for Donald Trump. Trump won the county again in 2024.
Less than two years after Trump took office for a second time, the administration’s border policies are weighing on Zapata residents. The federal government began bulldozing land across the county in June. Landowners are beginning to fight back and some say their private property has been seized illegally to build the wall.
The federal government’s plan to build a “Smart Wall” includes the ongoing construction efforts and roughly 500 miles of giant river buoys being installed across the Rio Grande. These buoys are worsening conditions in a highly flood-prone region of Texas and could potentially disrupt billions in trade with Mexico
Experts say the Smart Wall efforts, combined with increased immigration enforcement, are causing the region to shift back towards becoming the Democratic stronghold it once was ahead of a a tight midterm race between Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar and his Republican opponent Tano Tijerina in Texas’ 28th Congressional District.
Freelance Reporters from the Medill School of Journalism traveled to Zapata and Webb County in recent months to speak with affected landowners, Zapata residents, activists, and Rep. Cuellar about these issues.
- YouTube youtu.be
This piece contains original music by Zak Allnutt.
Jamie Gareh and Wisdom Howell are graduate students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Keep ReadingShow less
Recommended
Georgia State Capitol in downtown Atlanta Georgia USA.
Getty Images
The Governor Count Will Miss the Biggest Statehouse Changes
Oct 24, 2026
A Democratic victory in Georgia and a Democratic victory in Nevada would add the same number to the party’s governor tally. If current legislative majorities survived, however, the results would change state government in opposite ways. Georgia would acquire an executive able to challenge Republican control. Nevada would acquire unified Democratic government. One result creates a new bargaining obstacle; the other removes one.
That difference should shape how Americans interpret the 36 governorships on the ballot this November. Election-night coverage will count partisan gains and losses. The more useful question for public managers and citizens is which combinations of authority those results create, and who will then possess enough power to be held responsible for delivery.
Governors propose budgets, appoint officials and direct administrations. Their capacity to change policy also depends on legislatures, override thresholds, courts and institutions constituted separately from the executive. Winning the mansion can give a party room to govern, a means to resist or responsibility for administering rules it cannot rewrite. Those outcomes need separate accounts.
A gain can create or remove a veto
The current distribution of party control makes Georgia and Nevada a useful comparison. Republicans hold Georgia’s governorship and both legislative chambers. Nevada pairs a Republican governor with Democratic legislative majorities. Assuming those legislative majorities remained, the same Democratic gain would interrupt unified government in Georgia and complete it in Nevada.
In Georgia, an opposing governor could advance a different budget agenda, make appointments within the office’s authority and use a veto subject to legislative override. The election would alter negotiation without enacting the new governor’s platform. In Nevada, aligned executive and legislative authority would give Democrats fewer opportunities to attribute an unresolved problem to the other party. Greater opportunity would come with clearer responsibility.
The logic applies to Republicans as well. Retaining an aligned state preserves an existing arrangement; winning a divided state can transform one. Legislative results remain essential. A governor’s party can win the executive contest while losing a chamber, and an opposing party can gain enough seats to overcome vetoes. The useful unit of analysis is the resulting governing arrangement, not the executive race by itself.
The office works differently across states
Wisconsin shows why formal powers matter. In 2023, Gov. Tony Evers used the partial veto to extend a school revenue-limit increase through 2425. The state Supreme Court upheld that exercise in 2025 against the challenges before it. The decision did not make the governor’s authority unlimited. It showed that the wording of budget legislation could give the executive unusually consequential leverage.
The office’s powers are themselves on the ballot. A proposed constitutional amendment would prohibit using the partial veto to create, increase or authorize increases in taxes or fees. Wisconsin voters will choose both a governor and whether to limit that instrument. The winner’s authority therefore depends on more than the candidate contest.
Ohio offers another test. Its constitution permits a veto override by three-fifths of each chamber’s elected membership. An opposing governor’s leverage would depend partly on whether the legislative majority reached that threshold and remained willing to act together. The office retains administrative and political authority when a veto can be overridden, but the credibility of one bargaining tool changes.
Michigan illustrates a limit of a different kind. Its independent citizens redistricting commission draws congressional and legislative districts. Electing a governor does not transfer that function to the executive. A 2026 result therefore should not be described as control of an election system whose responsibilities are distributed among multiple institutions.
Governing begins with inherited systems
New federal Medicaid requirements will test a less visible form of state authority. A June 2026 federal rule generally requires applicable states to implement community-engagement eligibility requirements by January 1, 2027, subject to exemptions and other provisions. Incoming governors will inherit systems prepared before they take office. They will then oversee administration within a federal framework they cannot simply rewrite.
That still leaves consequential work: issuing intelligible notices, using available records appropriately, supporting appeals and making it possible for eligible people to establish their status. An executive may lack authority to change the federal rule but possess substantial authority over how residents encounter it. Election coverage that focuses only on new statutes will miss this administrative responsibility.
The same distinction improves accountability. Under divided government, a problem may persist because participants cannot agree. Under unified government, that explanation becomes less persuasive. Alignment does not guarantee competence, and division does not guarantee paralysis. It changes the questions citizens can ask about who had an opportunity to act.
Report the authority behind the result
Election coverage can make the governor count more useful by adding four facts for each state: whether unified government was created or broken; whether legislative numbers make a veto effective; which independently constituted bodies retain authority; and which major administrative obligations await the winner.
Candidates can provide the same account. A promise to block an agenda should identify the available instrument and its limits. A promise to deliver a program should explain the necessary legislative cooperation and implementation capacity. Citizens can then assess a compromise against a recognizable commitment instead of discovering after the election that the campaign’s verbs exceeded the office’s powers.
The national tally measures a party’s reach. The governing arrangements behind it determine where an election opens room for action, creates a check or concentrates responsibility. That is the result state and local leaders will have to administer after the campaign map disappears.
Percy Yixuanchen Yu is the Inaugural Visiting Fellow at the School of International Studies, Nanjing University; a Visiting Scholar at the Huazhi Institute for Global Governance; and a Non-resident Fellow at the Institute of Campaign Finance. His research examines political institutions and public authority.
Keep ReadingShow less
assorted banknotes
Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash
America’s Political Whiplash Is the World’s Problem
Oct 24, 2026
The rest of the world is beginning to hedge against the United States.
The New York Times recently reported that global investors are balking at U.S. bonds and that foreign governments are pulling their gold out of American vaults. This month the Dutch central bank moved much of its North American gold out of the United States. In March the Bank of France took 129 tons out of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, plans to cut its holdings of Treasuries. Last year Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, said erratic policymaking in the United States was setting the stage for a “global euro moment.”
Erratic is the right word. Allies, investors and adversaries increasingly have to ask how long an American policy will last.
Americans tend to treat that as our own problem. It is not. The United States is too large economically, militarily and financially for instability in Washington to stay inside our borders.
Start with what our whiplash costs everyone else.
The pattern is familiar. Since 1984, the Mexico City Policy, which bars certain recipients of U.S. foreign aid from performing or promoting abortion, has been imposed and rescinded along party lines; it has been in effect for 23 of the past 42 years. The United States joined the Paris climate agreement in 2016, left in 2020, rejoined in 2021 and left again this past January. We spent more than five years negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 11 other nations, signed it in 2016 and walked away the next year. The other 11 went ahead without us.
Americans can disagree about every one of those policies. That is not the point. Other countries build factories, supply chains, alliances and aid programs around commitments they expect to endure. Increasingly, they must plan for the possibility that our commitments will not.
That uncertainty does measurable, significant damage. International Monetary Fund researchers found that economic-policy uncertainty reduces output, consumption and investment; that about two-thirds of that damage spills over from uncertainty abroad; and that shocks originating in the United States hit Europe and the Western Hemisphere hardest.
Germany shows where that leads. Germany’s central bank estimates that U.S. tariffs and the uncertainty surrounding them will cost the country about three-quarters of a percentage point of growth by the end of 2027. That damage lands on an economy that shrank in 2023 and 2024 and grew just 0.2 percent last year.
The damage is not just economic. A study of German regions published in The Economic Journal found that import competition pushed voters toward nationalist parties while rising exports pulled them back, and that the net effect later showed up as support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party. American tariffs are now another shock to the export side of that equation. This month the AfD won nearly 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, more than twice its 2021 share. Among other things, the AfD wants Germany, one of our most important NATO allies, to end its support for Ukraine and build closer ties with Russia.
The stakes become even higher when policy swings involve war and peace.
In 2015, the United States and five other powers reached a nuclear agreement with Iran that capped uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent. That agreement was a political commitment rather than a Senate-ratified treaty. In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew. By 2021, Iran was enriching uranium to 60 percent. In 2025, American bombers struck its nuclear sites. This year, the United States and Israel went to war with Iran, severely disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and driving energy prices sharply higher worldwide.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether the Iran deal was wise. But a nonproliferation framework that may disappear after the next election is a weak foundation for long-term planning. It gives an adversary an incentive to factor American elections into its strategy.
Yemen follows the same pattern. Washington backed the Saudi-led war against the Houthis, later restricted some of that support, restored parts of it and then ended U.S. support for Saudi offensive operations. It designated the Houthis a Foreign Terrorist Organization, revoked that designation within weeks and restored it four years later. Last year’s 52-day American bombing campaign cost well over $1 billion. This month the Houthis seized Yemen’s Red Sea coast and strategic positions near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, giving them new leverage over one of the world’s most important shipping routes.
Those costs come back to us.
Foreign investors commit capital for decades, not presidential terms. A company deciding whether to build a factory, pharmaceutical plant, energy project or data center in the United States needs confidence that the rules will hold long enough for the investment to pay off.
A Federal Reserve staff analysis published in June found that higher tariffs helped push trade and economic-policy uncertainty to record highs in 2025, and warned that elevated uncertainty could work against efforts to attract foreign direct investment because firms may delay investment when they cannot tell how long tariffs will last. Earlier Federal Reserve research found that the rise in trade-policy uncertainty in 2017 and 2018 predicted a 1 to 2 percent decline in aggregate U.S. investment.
Our chief global economic and military competitor, China, offers a sharp contrast in industrial policy. It made advanced manufacturing a national priority a decade ago and adopted a plan for new-energy vehicles running from 2021 through 2035. A staff report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission found that the technologies in which China met most of its targets benefited from consistent, long-term government support. In 2025, China produced 70 percent of the world’s electric cars and more than 80 percent of its battery cells, according to the International Energy Agency.
We go back and forth. In 2022, Congress expanded federal incentives for electric vehicles and battery production without a single Republican vote; the vice president broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate. In 2025, Congress ended the electric-vehicle purchase credits without a single Democratic vote; the vice president again broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate. Reuters has documented the layoffs, delays and cancellations that followed across America’s emerging “Battery Belt.”
The security costs come home too. In 2023 and 2024, a single American aircraft carrier group fired 290 Standard missiles and Tomahawks in self-defense and strikes against Houthi targets. Those operations put extraordinary pressure on American missile stocks: in 15 months, Navy ships expended more air-defense missiles against the Houthis than they had in the previous 30 years combined. American forces have now fought Iran directly. And allies uncertain about American commitments have reason to hedge. This month the European Union invited Canada, our closest neighbor and one of our two largest trading partners, to become an "associate member." Trust lost that way is hard to rebuild, even if the next administration changes course.
The common problem in all of these examples is not any particular policy. It is that one national government serves two political coalitions with fundamentally different views of trade, energy, climate, foreign aid and America’s role in the world. When control changes, policy changes with it — often dramatically.
That is the problem an American Union could address.
In prior essays, I have proposed reorganizing the United States into an American Union of two sovereign democratic republics, one predominantly red and one predominantly blue, that would retain a common defense, a common currency, an integrated market and freedom of movement.
Each republic in an American Union would likely govern a more politically cohesive electorate. Voters would still throw out incumbents. Policies would still evolve. But the changes should be narrower and more incremental, because the distance between each republic’s competing coalitions would be far smaller than the distance between Red and Blue America today. Over time, each republic should be able to hold its course longer.
Red and Blue America would not have to agree. Blue America could remain in the Paris Agreement. Red America could keep the Mexico City Policy. Each could set its own course on energy and industry. What would change is that the world would know where each republic stood, and could count on it not completely reversing itself from one election to the next.
That greater stability could pay off at home. Foreign companies could invest with greater confidence that the rules underlying long-term investments would not reverse after the next election. Allies could make plans around more durable commitments. And adversaries would have less reason to assume they could simply wait us out.
Political disagreement is inevitable and often manageable. Political whiplash on the scale of the United States is not. When we export uncertainty, the world absorbs it, and sends much of it back to us as lost investment, stronger competitors, weaker alliances and more dangerous conflicts.
An American Union could help break that cycle.
Jordan Karp is a lawyer and writer based in New York with a keen interest in American political culture, institutional reform, and civic life.
Keep ReadingShow less
A fire burns and destroys the city hall after a group of individuals forced entry into the building during ongoing protest action against the "high cost of living," in Limoges, central France on Oct. 17, 2026.
Pascal Lachenaud/AFP/Getty Images/Tribune
What Americans can learn from the French protests
Oct 24, 2026
On Monday, France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez admitted that police have “lost control” as some cities continue to see massive waves of looting and mayhem. Social media brims with images of stores being ransacked, cars burning, and mask-wearing goons running wild. In Limoges, the beautiful Hôtel de Ville was burnt to the ground.
But the chaos, as is so often the case, began peacefully. And many supporters and leaders of the protests have condemned the violence. I think that violence has more to do with France’s miserable record of assimilating immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East than with budget cuts. Call me cynical, but I don’t believe the goons pillaging Louis Vuitton stores are planning to resell the handbags to buy better school supplies or to bolster their teachers’ salaries.
The initial protests were about budget cuts, primarily in education. As allied groups joined in — socialist and communist parties, labor unions, etc. — the argument expanded to generalized complaints about France’s “austerity” policies. In short, they argued, as they have for generations, that the government should spend more on pensions and other entitlements.
The problem is that France can’t afford it. It’s borrowed money to pay for its lavish government sector for a very long time. It has run consecutive budget deficits — i.e., took in less than it spent — for more than half a century. In 1974, public debt was around 15% of GDP. Today it’s at 116%. Government spending now makes up 57% of the GDP (compared with 23% of GDP for the U.S.), and France spends three times as much on “social protection” — including pensions and family benefits — as does the United States, and more than any other country in Europe and the OECD.
Naturally, the blame for this sorry state of affairs, according to some supporters of the protests, falls on capitalism. Famous French economist Thomas Piketty says the country’s woes are the result of the state pursuing the “capitalist logic” of underinvesting in the public sector and undertaxing the wealthy. In terms of personal income taxes alone — France has massive payroll and consumption taxes as well — the top 10% of French taxpayers provide 74% of the revenue. The top 1% provide a third. France also has the highest corporate tax rates of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
I’m hard-pressed to see how just a bit more taxing and spending will solve France’s problems.
I have real sympathy for the nonviolent French youth. Their economy is moribund in large part because retirees have a stranglehold on the state’s finances, consuming 14% of GDP. (Social Security and Medicare account for 9.4% of U.S. GDP. One reason education spending is so tight: A third of the education budget goes toward Education Ministry pensions.
I don’t think retirees should be thrown to the wolves, but such a system is objectively unsustainable. Yet in 2023, when French President Emmanuel Macron introduced reforms to bump the retirement age from 62 to 64, the resulting protests paralyzed the country (that modest reform was suspended last month). France is now caught in what economists call the “dependency trap,” producing too few workers to pay for the lifestyles of its older generations.
When protesters talk about feeling “hopeless,” what they often mean is that the gravy train will run out before they get to partake in it. I don’t blame them for being resentful, but it’s difficult to see how this is a failure of capitalism or “neoliberalism.” As Margaret Thatcher famously said, socialist governments “always run out of other people’s money.”
The most obvious answer to France’s problems is economic growth — much easier said than done, of course. The reason that’s so hard for France isn’t because the government is “unresponsive” to the people and their concerns. It’s because it’s too responsive. For decades, the French have demanded the economic policies that got them into this mess, and the government appeased them.
France is an outlier in its poor economic performance and lavish social spending, but its problems are recognizable across the West, including in America. The U.S. economy has grown twice as fast as France’s over the last quarter-century, but the demands for less “capitalism” from young Americans echo those protesting in Paris.
France has the sort of universal health insurance many insist would solve everyone’s problems here. It hasn’t spared France from political turmoil. Our own Social Security and Medicare aren’t far from insolvency, but demands for higher benefits and “Medicare for All” only grow louder.
The French canary in the coal mine is a good reminder that the best solution to some crises is to avoid them in the first place.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast.
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More