Possible Futures for American Democracy (2023-2040)

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to forecast what American democracy might look like between now and 2040. 

How?

Futurists sometimes generate forecasts by identifying the major relevant trends at play for a topic or issue and then taking its two most critical variables – the forks in the road ahead or the unmade decisions – intersecting them, and treating the resulting quadrants as plausible futures.

This method – scenario planning – is meant to help readers avoid catastrophic surprise and to plan for as many potential futures as possible. 

Scenarios are written as broad, general forecasts to make them easier to remember and discuss. They are meant to treat most of an issue, not its entirety, and are meant as thematic rather than precise predictions. They’re meant to be largely or mostly true most of the time rather than precisely true all of the time in every place. Further, while all of the following futures will emerge to limited degrees, one will emerge dominant – most of the issue’s “eggs” will wind up in that scenario’s “basket.”

What is American democracy?

How will we know if it “wins” or “loses” in each possible future?

For American democracy to survive or remain viable most or all of the following claims must be true – or held to be true – by most people domestically and abroad. These are the success or victory conditions for American democracy for these scenarios.

If more than a few of these have been fundamentally brought into question by the end of a scenario, American democracy will functionally cease to exist, become a partial democracy, or become a democracy in name only. 

Voice

• All United States citizens can vote. 

• All votes will be counted. 

• Who wins the majority of votes wins an election.

• Political change can be made nonviolently; the peaceful transfer of power is guaranteed. 

Opportunity and Fairness

• Anyone from anywhere can become a United States citizen.

• Anyone from anywhere can make their fortune in the United States. Anyone from anywhere can rise beyond the station, class, caste, and constraints of their origins. 

• Anyone from anywhere will be treated fairly and equitably by the American government, system, and people. 

Nature of Government

• American governance is of, by, and for the people rather than its elites and powerful.

• The legislative process in the United States hears and is responsive to the will of its people. The legislative process functions and can work. Change can be made through legislation. 

Freedoms and Rights

• Americans’ freedoms and rights will be protected – from majority rule, minority rule, the powerful, and even from the United States Government. 

• The only exception to this is that one’s free exercise of one’s freedoms and rights must not unduly impinge on or jeopardize other Americans’ free exercise of theirs.

Trends in the United States of the past 40 years — and the next 20.

Three major trends – and responses to them – have driven and will drive much of the change in the American electorate from 1980 to 2040. 

First, demographic trends in the American electorate including urban migration, interstate migration, and general displacement will grant Democrats large advantages in presidential and many other elections by 2040. 

• Big Sort: The “Big Sort” of Democrats out of rural areas, making urban and suburban areas mostly blue-voting and rural areas mostly red-voting, began in earnest in the 1990s and will continue through at least 2040. The same phenomenon at the state level – an interstate “Big Sort” that made some states bluer, some redder, and flipped some states blue or red – is also apt to continue through 2040. 

• Pigs through the Python: The most red-voting generations – the Builder, Silent, and Baby Boom generations – aged through their voting years from the 1980s to the late 2010s, helping usher in the Reagan era and Republican advantages in the Senate and ultimately creating a degree of minority rule in the United States as the GOP exploited its structural advantages in the Senate and Electoral College. Those generations, however, will be displaced by more blue-voting generations – Generation X, the Millennial Generation, and Generation Z – who cumulatively will represent 55+% of the electorate by 2024, a percentage that will increase every four years through at least 2040. The GOP of 2023 is not behind a demographic 8-ball; it’s in the path of a demographic boulder.

By the 2030s these trends cumulatively will provide the Democrats unbeatable majorities in the Electoral College and also probably the Senate. The white-knuckle nature of presidential elections of the 2000-2020 era and 50-50 tit-for-tat splits in the Senate will become a thing of the past by the end of the 2020s. This emerging Democratic majority began around 2000 but has been masked by structural advantages Republicans have held in the Senate and Electoral College. In terms of the popular vote in presidential elections, Republicans have only elected one president since 1992 (George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004). If these trends persist, by the 2032 presidential election NC, GA, AZ, NV, TX, and perhaps OH will be purple or safely blue states. The same states will probably then begin electing Democrats to the Senate, breaking its partisan deadlock. (Material in this section is a paraphrase of findings from the bibliography in the endnotes section below.)

Above is a broad estimate of the leanings of each of the United States in the Electoral College by the beginning of the 2032 presidential election cycle. I offer it to illustrate relative political advantage rather than as point-predictions. 270 votes in the Electoral College are needed for a candidate to win. (I generated this map from the tool offered at 270toWin.)

Second, by the mid-2000s the GOP recognized the threat these trends presented. Rather than reforming the party, its platform, and its associated media to appeal to these emerging majorities the GOP began attempting delaying actions to preserve their ability to win elections. These delaying actions including exploiting GOP structural advantages in the Senate and Electoral College, use of the filibuster in the Senate, gerrymandering voting districts, suppressing voting for Democratic candidates, attempting to sabotage the 2020 Census and mail-in voting during the 2020 elections, and attempting legal maneuvers that would allow GOP-held state legislatures to ignore or overturn the popular vote in their states to pass failed GOP-favored legislation, install failed Republican candidates, and send slates of electors to the Electoral College to vote for failed Republican presidential candidates. 

During the same era conservative media outpaced GOP leadership for opinion control of the Republican base, creating a three-legged stool – GOP leadership, the Republican base, and conservative media – in which conservative media became the most powerful and GOP leadership the least. (President Trump and, separately, conservative Christian churches are best understood as aspects of conservative media – purveyors of conservative messages – rather than of the GOP or its base. 

Conservative media, in an effort to shore up, radicalize, and energize the GOP’s base, began employing a nearly-complete extremist argument to claim that conservatives face an existential threat from liberals. This extremist argument was compounded and hardened through conservative media’s and conservative churches’ conflation of Christianity with Republican positions, casting the GOP as “God’s Own Party” or “the party of God.” Further, the GOP changed its primary system in ways that routinely permitted its extreme candidates to outflank its moderates. These three factors constrained the GOP’s internal decision making and ability to change its platform, positions, and tone without causing support from the Republican base to implode. 

While these tactics succeeded as a delaying action, they drove the party farther toward an illiberal right and rendered it disinterested in and less skilled at governance, crisis prevention or crisis management, and in investing in infrastructure or platforms for growth. These results undermined the ability of local, state, and the federal government to reckon with large problems including repeated economic recessions, the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 Texas winter blackout, the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot, and an ongoing threat from domestic terrorists. 

Third, between 1980 and 2020 the Republicans – and later the Democrats – prioritized enabling the economic engines of the United States more than its workers in an effort to outcompete the Soviet Union, then later to establish American global economic hegemony in the post-Cold War era, and to interconnect the economies of the world by lowering borders, encouraging the offshoring of finance, and globalizing trade, manufacturing, transit, and markets.

These were done in an effort to raise more world workers out of abject poverty and – through creating interdependent financial and consumer markets and a global supply chain – reduce the likelihood of interstate war.

This enabling without constraints however hollowed out the American middle class, weakened its working class, relocated the industrial base overseas, encouraged predatory capitalism, and supercharged corporate power and the emergence of a super-powerful oligarchy of corporations, wealthy elites, and Big Tech.

It also inadvertently empowered rather than subverted some totalitarian powers by making them integral, indispensable parts of the global supply chain. 

At the time of this writing (mid-2023):

All of this collectively caused many Americans to conclude the federal government works for American oligarchs, major companies, and Big Tech, and allows them to prey upon and control ordinary Americans’ lives, livelihoods, and security, and that the federal government will not hold them accountable for their abuses and power to control and manipulate.

Many Republicans believe Democrats “face” wealthy elites and the ethnic and sexual minorities who Republicans believe threaten their ways of life and look down on them.

Many Democrats believe Republicans “face” wealthy elites, sexists, and bigots who seek to abuse and repress them and who prevent needed political, economic, and cultural change. 

The Republican Party continues to behave as if a push toward small government and market solutions will aggregate to create a critical mass that will solve large problems and prevent government from interfering with Americans’ free exercise of their rights.

By contrast, the Democratic Party continues to behave as if large government solutions are the best mechanism to solve large problems and guarantee Americans’ free exercise of their rights. 

If both parties and their associated media continue their current themes and course…

… the story of the 2020s and early 2030s will be of a race between whether the demographic wave can arrive to hand Democrats decisive majorities before the GOP can secure minority rule for itself.

The story of the late 2030s and – once the demographic wave fully arrives – 2040s is one of Democratic majorities, rule, and full redefinition of the party into ‘the party of governance’ within which all mainstream approaches to government, liberal and conservative, are debated and the Republican Party becomes a rump faction in American politics at the federal level and in many states. 

… but demography is not destiny…

That future, however, is not predetermined nor inevitable. The two most critical variables for the future of American democracy between now and 2040 are whether either party – or both – and their associated media will reorient to appeal to the majority (the “Big Middle”) of the American electorate or whether they narrow their appeal through extremism or myopia enough to sabotage their abilities to capture that “Big Middle.” Reorientation for both parties means successfully recasting themselves and their policies – in word and deed – as fair, fully democratic, and beneficial for all Americans rather than beneficial primarily to American companies and oligarchs, and fair to all Americans rather than preferential to their party’s base. This also means redirecting government relief and benefits toward ordinary Americans rather than corporations, oligarchs, and the military establishment… and protecting the former from predation by the latter. 

What might American democracy look like by 2040?

The intersection of these two variables provide us with the following four scenarios for the near future of American democracy.

Two caveats, especially for those reading scenario-based forecasts for the first time:

• A reminder to politically-minded readers here: my main goal with this project is to forecast the health of American democracy rather than which party holds political advantage. Think back to the ‘victory conditions’ I laid out early on: what’s bolded in each scenario below is the outcome for American democracy in each case. So when I depict one future or another as containing a “healthy, functioning democracy” I simply mean that in that future the democratic processes are intact and working well.

• Each scenario depicts a mix of good and bad news, even for those who consider themselves the “victors” in each case. (A mark of bad scenario tradecraft is if one or two scenarios are completely utopian and one or two completely dystopian; realistic forecasts should be mixed-bag.) The parties and people in each scenario continue to behave in each future generally consistently with the patterns and tendencies they’ve shown and stated in recent years and decades — for good or ill.

Some endnotes and additional thoughts…

Aren’t you just being politically biased here?

Perhaps… but not as a futurist. I hewed as closely as objective depictions of trends – and reactions to those trends. The Democratic and Republican parties have had particular tendencies and trajectories in recent years and openly say they plan to continue on those courses — very little interpretation was needed sometimes.

All scenario projects on large, overarching topics, however, must use paradigms and framing narratives as heuristics to simplify and interpret massive amounts of information and to produce forecasts. Political futures can only be forecast through lenses that sometimes yield political bias. The best a futurist can do is attempt to be as fair as possible to all parties involved. As such I chose lenses that most Democrats and most moderate Republicans would probably agree with. 

As a self-test I tried to do this same project again through a Trump-leaning Republican’s lens and ran into two problems:

1. I have no credible information that suggests an emerging Republican majority in federal elections, and

2. Trump-leaning Republicans only seem to see two possible futures ahead — one in which they lose, thus America loses, Democrats jail and exterminate Republicans (or at least Christians) and antifa hordes roam the streets like Nazi Brownshirts, and another in which they win… and yet somehow Democrats try to exterminate Republicans (or at least Christians) and antifa hordes still roam the streets like Nazi Brownshirts. That sort of lens — for a range of methodological reasons —doesn’t allow for nuanced, realistic forecasting.

For more on analytic bias, please see my 2009 e-book The Knight and The Gardener: Worldviews Make Worlds.

How valid is this “emerging Democratic majority” thesis anyway?

Early in this project I introduced a version of what’s known as “the emerging Democratic majority” theory. This theory posits that demographic and other changes will hand Democrats unbeatable majorities in the Electoral College and eventually the Senate within another decade or two.

This theory has been borne out over the past two decades: that demographic advantage did emerge, has largely arrived, and most likely by the end of this decade will pass the tipping point necessary to provide Democrats those advantages.

Democrats could bungle this opportunity, though. And while voting patterns tend to remain constant, what underlies those patterns may be poorly understood.

Below I’ve included some studies and discussions of the merits and limitations of this theory and the data that underpins or belies it.

Badger, Emily, Quealy, Kevin, and Katz, Josh, “A Close-Up Picture of Partisan Segregation, Among 180 Million Voters,” New York Times, 17 March 2021.

Byler, David. “Joe Biden is the first and last ‘Emerging Democratic Majority’ candidate,” Washington Post, 1 Nov 2020.

Enten, Harry, “Why neither party has a sustainable political majority,” CNN, 18 Oct 2021.

Geruso, Michael, Spears, Dan, and Talesara, Ishaana, “Inversions in US Presidential Elections: 1836-2016,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 26247, Sept 2019, revised Oct 2020.

Homans, Charles, “Where Does American Democracy Go From Here?: Six experts discuss how worried we should be about its future,” New York Times Magazine, 17 March 2022.

Hounshell, Blake and Askarinam, Leah, “Confessions of a Liberal Heretic,” New York Times, 25 Jan 2022.

Judis, John, “The Emerging Democratic Majority Revisited,” Talking Points Memo, 17 Aug 2020.

Martin, G., & Webster, S. (2020). Does residential sorting explain geographic polarization? Political Science Research and Methods, 8(2), 215-231. doi:10.1017/psrm.2018.44 

Mounk, Yascha, “The Coming Democratic Majority? Not So Fast,” Slate, 6 March 2017.

Park, Kim, et al. “Urban, suburban and rural residents’ views on key social and political issues,” Pew Research Center, 22 May 2018.

Pew Research Center, “Trump leads among White voters, trails by wide margins among Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters,” 8 Oct 2020.

Teixeira, Ruy, “Demography Is Not Destiny, “ Persuasion, 16 July 2020.

Thompson, Derek, “American Migration Patterns Should Terrify the GOP,” The Atlantic, 17 Sept 2019.

Why didn’t I just stick to those forecasts rather than create your own?

Overall I found the corpus of forecasts for American democracy to be disjointed, incomplete, disorganized, oftentimes brilliant, and sometimes hyperbolic. This is my attempt to simplify, clarify, and integrate some others’ thinking and add my own.

Will we have a Second Civil War in any of these scenarios?

No, but a very low-grade insurgency from one side against the United States Government — or from liberals and conservatives against each other as people — is possible in several scenarios.

If religio-political violence breaks out in the United States, read Combat Theology: How to Weaponize and De-Weaponize a Religion (2021), my follow-on to my The Knight and The Gardener: Worldviews Make Worlds (2009), then read the National Counterterrorism Center’s (NCTC) The 2021 U.S. Violent Extremist Mobilization Indicators resource and request NCTC’s “The Structure of Violent Extremist Ideologies,” an Unclassified one-page deconstruction of extremist arguments and reasoning.

What will happen if former President Trump runs for reelection in 2024 and wins?

The Patchwork Democracy scenario will begin immediately.