In the midst of the increasing terror that engulfs our world, between wars in the Middle East and Ukraine and the threats to democracy in the western hemisphere, there was one thing that gave me unexpected comfort and hope in the past week: The Artemis II.

Apparently, I am not alone. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 80% of Americans have favorable views regarding the first crewed mission to the moon since the 1970s. This comes at a time when most Americans, and Europeans for that matter, feel good about very little in this world. So why is this international effort of mankind to return to our moon appealing to so many people in this time of geopolitical uncertainty, and what benefits could the story of Artemis II have for our political world?

The Best of Us

Anyone who did not closely follow the news of the Artemis program might ask themselves why we are going back to the moon in the first place. After all, it’s been more than 50 years since Neil Armstrong took his “giant leap for mankind”. Subsequent Apollo missions have landed on the moon five more times until the program was scrapped as the space race with the Soviets was over. This time, however, mankind is going back to the moon for a different reason: To stay.

After Artemis II’s successful moon orbit, NASA aims to land Astronauts on the moon in 2028. These missions have a purpose that goes beyond returning to a place we’ve been before. The Artemis Astronauts will be tasked with building a moon base, effectively colonizing the moon. While the space race of the 60s may be over, there is some competition, as China is also eying their own moon base. In the long run, a primary goal of the Artemis program is to get to a point where we can land on Mars. A planet no human has ever walked on.

That goalpost is still far away, but Artemis II’s mission is bringing it a bit closer. There are a few reasons I can think of that might explain why the current Artemis mission is finding so many admirers, not only in America, but around the globe.

While the four Astronauts of Artemis II didn’t land on the moon, they set a historic record last Monday. With a maximum distance of 406,770.34 km (252,756 miles) to Earth, they traveled further into space and away from home than any other human being before them, breaking a record set by Apollo 13 55 years ago. So far, the 2020s have been seen by many as a decade that has taken humanity not forward, but backwards. After years that saw the first African American US President and unprecedented international cooperation to solve the climate crisis, progress in the 2020s stalled and even reversed. The COVID-19 crisis happened, the war in Ukraine brought Western relations with Russia to a historic low point, and the far right in Europe has risen to heights not seen since the era of fascism in the 1930s. In America, Trump is reverting years of civil rights progress and attacking the sciences and diversity. The bright minds of our Earth are so occupied with putting out the fires that are spreading around the world that there is no more time left for progress. And now, six years into this challenging decade, humanity is pushing the bounds of what’s possible again.

A Crew from a Better Time

The other major reason why this mission gives me hope in these times is the crew.

Our current state of global affairs is as tense as ever before in this century, and the world order is being torn out of balance by Mr. Trump. The friendship and cooperation between European Nations, Canada, and the US, and their aim to build a better world, was baked into my consciousness growing up in the early 2010s. In 2026, all that has changed: opinions of European countries and Canada towards the US have dropped sharply as the Trump government goes after its allies with unprecedented rhetoric. And not only is our understanding of international cooperation struggling under Trump, but the president has undone years of progress intended to promote equal treatment of women and minority groups. In a way, the Artemis mission is the antidote to Trump (which is funny for a different reason, but more on that later).

With Artemis II, the first woman, mission specialist Christina Koch, the first African American, pilot Victor Glover, and the first Canadian, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, have orbited the moon. The fourth Astronaut is American commander Reid Wiseman. Canada’s inclusion in the mission is no accident, because the Artemis Program is not purely an American program. It’s a collaboration between numerous countries with NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). I will particularly look forward to the upcoming missions, when the first German might fly to the moon. At the same time, Europeans are growing wary of the US as a partner, with the large majority of Germans classifying the US as untrustworthy. So while our worldview of collaboration is deteriorating here on Earth, it seems to be doing well in space. While Trump rails against Canada, Europe, science, and diversity, these issues seem to be unaffected in space. Now comes the funny part: The Artemis Program was initiated by Mr. Trump during his first term. His executive order directed NASA to return to the moon and aim for Mars. Apart from that, Trump, of course, had little involvement in the planning of the program, but it’s a good reminder of how different Trump’s second term is from his first.

Most of the attacks on allies, the sciences, or diversity have happened in Trump’s second term. In fact, most of his actions that affect our world happened in the past 15 months. While Trump 1.0 - often ranked by scholars as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history - backed NASA, Trump 2.0 is suggesting deep budget cuts that could imperil the Artemis program he himself initiated. A move he might consider unwise, if he remembers that he initiated it.

Among all of this chaos, there was something deeply inspiring and hopeful about following the journey of the Artemis crew. After their successful splashdown, Astronaut Jeremy Hansen stood arm in arm with his fellow space-travelers and said that they were merely a mirror of our world. Indeed, they are a mirror of our world, but they also are, and very much so, the polar opposite of its leader. Four Astronauts, diverse as our world is, in international cooperation, and backed by an equally diverse team of dedicated scientists, show us that humans are capable of doing great things if we set our minds to it. Right now, our minds and our capital are set on seeking progress in a different area: Building machines for war. As Trump proposes budget cuts, he pours billions into rockets for his war with Iran. While some defense spending may be inevitable for Western nations, like Ukrainian defenses against an aggressor that threatens their democracy, the war in Iran is a war of choice.

Perhaps, one day, when voters and leaders come to their senses, we will spend this money on science that improves our world and takes us to new heights. To places we have never been before. To make future generations doubt the limits of what humanity can do. Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, and the international team behind them have certainly shown us one thing: Yes, we can.

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You’ll probably also remember the media frenzy that followed these events: hours of media coverage, hundreds of articles, and countless interviews. Attacks quickly became political, with the far-right seeking to take advantage with anti-muslim rhetoric. In a world so polarized by tragedies, it makes sense to take a step back and look at the actual data.

The Global Terrorism Database (GTD)1 kept record of every - yes, every - single known terrorist attack from 1970-2020. The immense dataset of over 200,000 attacks tells many stories. For this article, I want to focus on the data on terrorist attacks in Europe over the last two decades, from 2000 to 2020. When creating the visualization you see below, I was a bit stunned myself, because the large majority of terrorist attacks took place in areas I did not guess from my subjective experience over the years. Once one thinks about the most affected regions in the map, the data quickly makes sense.

A quick disclaimer: This map only depicts attacks were at least one person was killed. 80% of terrorist attacks in Europe/Russia (2000-2020) actually had no deaths.

The two most affected areas in this map are almost impossible to miss. First, there’s the Donbas region, which became the center of geopolitical conflict in Europe as the war against Russian-backed Separatists started in 2014 (You can hover over the map to reveal details for each attack). The second region is the Chechen Republic, which remains a part of Russia after a series of wars. It is also in that region, where the deadliest terrorist attack on our map took place: In 2004, in Beslan, Chechen separatists took an entire school hostage, resulting in the death of 344 people. In both these regions, geopolitical conflict spurred unparalleled periods of terrorism. Another region in the eastern half of Europe where geopolitical conflict fed terrorism is Kosovo. Taken together, about 85% of attacks in Europe happened in Eastern Europe (which includes Russia, according to the Global Terrorism Database).

While Western Europe represents a much smaller slice of total attacks, it is worth looking at the patterns there, because they have been different, and yet also similar to Eastern Europe. According to the data, Terrorism in Western Europe had two causes over the past two decades: Geopolitical conflict and ideological radicalism.

The terrorist attacks resulting from geopolitical conflict in Western Europe are less visible on the map, as they often resulted in fewer casualties. The two primary regions where geopolitical terrorism thrived are northern Spain (the Basques) and the UK (Northern Ireland). In both cases, separatists carried out numerous, but often targeted, attacks. While attacks in the Basques primarily happened in the early 2000s, attacks in Northern Ireland were more spread out across the two decades. The conflict in Northern Ireland, and the attacks there, reached their peak before the turn of the century and are therefore not included in our dataset.

The largest spikes in the western half of our map are the results of ideological extremism. The blue spikes (also quite present in Russia) represent Islamic terrorism, which mostly occurred as ISIS reached the peak of its power between 2014 and 2016. These include the infamous attacks in Paris (2015) and Nice (2016). As ISIS was diminished in the Middle East, the number of attacks declined sharply. Separately, there was another spike of Islamic terrorism in Spain in 2004, which was triggered by Al-Qaida.

While far-right parties tend to blame mass migration for this kind of ideological extremism in Europe, geopolitical reasons make more sense when trying to explain the attacks. France was hit the hardest by ISIS and other jihadist-inspired attacks, yet its refugee intake in 2015 and 2016 was similar to that of other countries in Europe that weren’t hit nearly as hard, or not at all. France was one of the most active Western military forces in the Middle East, making the country a target for ISIS. Additionally, ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups had the goal of provoking backlash against muslims in their target countries, so they could better spread their extremism.

Germany, the country that had the largest intake of refugees in all of Western Europe in the 2010s, has seen a comparatively small number of attacks. The country also serves as a good case to show the mix of Islamic terrorism with the other major ideological kind of terrorism we saw, and still see, in Western Europe: Far-right terrorism.

Far-right terrorism has been a consistent factor throughout the two decades. Although the number of attacks remains at a lower level than other forms of terrorism, the victim count leads to large red-colored spikes on our map. Norway, which has seen almost no terrorist attacks from 2000 to 2020, suffered a string of horrific acts of terrorism by neo-nazi Anders Breivik, who bombed government quarters in Oslo, killing eight, and proceeded to kill 69 children and teenagers attending a social-democratic youth camp on the island of Utøya. In Germany, far-right attacks in Hanau and Munich, as well as the targeted assassination of Walter Luebke, upset the nation. In all these cases, in Norway and in Germany, the attackers either directly attacked migrants or were motivated by a hatred of migrants and/or minority groups.

Unfortunately, the data ends in 2020. We can only hope that we get more well-structured data in the coming years. If you enjoyed this story, feel free to subscribe to receive new posts in your email inbox. It’s completely free!

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All Data was provided by the Global Terrorism Database

NOTE: Just before the publication of this post, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon is asking for $200 Billion dollars to fund the war. Since this money has not been approved by congress yet, we are sticking with the $24 billion already spent.

The most striking and most hypocritical revelation is that, in just 19 days, Trump managed to spend more in Iran than USAID spent across the world in an entire year. Why is that hypocritical? Because we all remember Elon Musk and his promise to slash unnecessary government spending as a driving force behind Trump’s 2024 campaign. In the end, Musk didn’t reduce spending meaningfully. What he managed to do was shutter USAID, an organization fighting starvation and diseases across the world. Over 800,000 people have died as a result of Musk’s shutdown of USAID, many of them children. All to save the roughly $20 billion in expenditures the institution had listed for 2024. Not even a year later, Trump has found a way to spend that sum and more within weeks, making one wonder if it was really ever about the money.

SNAP benefits have also been in the spotlight in 2025, as Trump threatened to cut them during the shutdown fight with Democrats. The food stamp benefits cost the US $102 Billion Dollars a year. That is a lot of money, but it’s also just 1.4% of the total US budget. 19 days of Trump’s war with Iran could have paid the United States’ entire SNAP program for three months.

The National School Lunch Program, which provides low-cost or free lunches to children in American schools and child care institutions, costs the American taxpayer $17.7 Billion every year. Had Trump not attacked Iran, the US would have had enough money to fund the program for one year and four months.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, costs the US $130 Billion per year. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the ACA actually saves the US money, and repealing it would increase the deficit. Republicans have nevertheless been persistent in their attempts to gut and repeal the ACA, but 19 days of Trump’s war could have funded it for 2,2 months. In the end, providing more Americans with better healthcare coverage is cheaper than bombing the Middle East.

Perhaps the most stunning example in this little project is Mayor Mamdani’s proposal to make NYC’s buses free for everyone. The project was often criticized for being too costly to be attainable. Well, with the money that Trump has spent in Iran, a sum growing by at least $1 Billion each day, Mamdani could make NYC’s buses free for over three decades (34 years and 3 months, to be precise).

With the midterms and the 2028 presidential campaigns approaching, it is important to remember those facts. Because it is an absolute certainty that Republicans (& and their friends on Fox News) will call a lot of proposals for healthcare, social security, or transport “too expensive” while gladly pouring the money into a war of choice.

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I’m skeptical that you can explain Trump’s rise to power just by pointing to America’s education system, because countless factors contributed to his rise: A broken media landscape dominated by Fox News, a celebrity cult, the Republican Party’s missing spine, and so on. I do, however, believe that education and literacy are important factors, but what does the data say. There are two sides to this. We can look at the people who actually voted for Trump, and we can look at those who stayed home. We will start with the latter.

Half of Americans never voted for Trump. He only managed to get between 45-50% in his three presidential elections. But considering turnout, his performance becomes even less impressive. In 2024, only 31% of adult American citizens voted for Donald Trump. Who are the people who didn’t vote? For a long time, less reliable voters were considered more Democratic (young voters, minority voters). This changed with Trump’s appeal to less-informed and spontaneous voters, and in 2024, those who stayed home might even have broken for Trump on Election Day, because they belonged to the one decisive group that backed Trump by a large margin (more on this later).

America’s election turnout is low compared to most European nations and it fluctuates drastically depending on which US state or county we are talking about. There are a few reasons that collide and accumulate to create “turnout deserts” in America and literacy is one of them. A look at county-level data from 2024 shows a clear picture: US counties with a higher adult literacy score had higher turnout rates.

The R² value of 0.34 shows that literacy played an important role in determining turnout in 2024. Literacy explains about a third of the variance in county-level turnout. A decent result, considering that other variables like education or race likely also affected turnout. (Counties from Alaska and Connecticut are missing due to data collection problems).

Researchers have found that these turnout deserts are most prominent in southern areas with a large African American population, like parts of the deep south - a result of decades of structural racism that has led literacy rates in these counties to be among the lowest in the nation. To increase turnout in these turnout deserts, the states would first have to overcome these decades-old structures so that literacy rates and political education can catch up.

I did not run the same analysis for the 2016 and 2020 elections, but my educated guess is that the effect was even more prominent in 2016, a low-turnout presidential election. 2024 was a high-turnout presidential election, though turnout slightly underperformed the 2020 record-breaking race. So now we know that turnout deserts are linked to literacy rates. In presidential races with record turnout rates and a candidate like Trump who brings low-propensity voters to the polls, another question comes to mind: What about the people who did vote?

First of all, I couldn’t find any meaningful correlation between Trump’s vote share in a county and that county’s literacy rate, at least not on the national level. The reason is pretty simple: While Trump did perform better in rural counties and states with low literacy, Harris performed better in low-literacy, majority-black counties in the deep south that, as mentioned before, have been suffering from decades of structural racism. So, in the end, we get a pretty even picture.

But if we extend our horizon and look at political literacy, a striking difference emerges. G Elliot Morris found that voters who were unable to identify which party controls Congress voted for Trump by a margin of 11 pts. Those who correctly identified the parties voted for Harris by a slim margin. Similarly, polls found that those who do not follow political news “at all” voted for Trump by an overwhelming margin.

Trump’s victory was powered by people who consumed no political news at all and had little knowledge about political matters. That is why higher turnout might even have benefited him, or at least it might not have hurt him, because non-voters tend to be low-information voters as well and therefore would have been more likely to vote for Trump. This is also where basic literacy skills come into play again. I often hear the phrase that regretful Trump voters failed an open-book test, as it was fairly easy to demask Trump’s lies. For example, it would have taken just one quick Google search to learn that Trump is lying about tariffs. So, yes, it was an open-book test, but it’s difficult to pass an open-book test if you can’t read properly. That may sound harsh, but with one-fifth of American adults unable to read and comprehend basic political information, it sadly is the reality we all live in.

So what drives low-information voters’ choices at the ballot box? Popularity could be one factor, but in 2024, high prices are the one thing that almost all Americans felt in their everyday lives, so they punished the incumbent party. With prices remaining high, it is exactly this group of low-information voters who have soured on Trump. Skyrocketing oil prices in the wake of Trump’s war against Iran certainly won’t be helping the President.

For the future, raising literacy levels might give American Democracy a quality boost. Turnout deserts would become increasingly rare, and the outcome of elections would be more information- than vibes-based. After all, consuming news only becomes possible when one can comprehend it. And, as of today, every fifth American adult can’t.

This article was updated on March 12th to fix two errors.

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I’ve so far avoided writing about the heated Democratic Senate race in Texas. With the primary date on March 2nd approaching, I want to offer my thoughts on a battle that centers around one big question: What kind of Democratic campaign can win Texas : One that energizes the core base, or one that works on a broad appeal and persuasion?

For a while, the race stayed civil. Crockett was a presumed favorite for the primary, given that she has a national profile, but as Talarico gained traction through his viral campaign, the debate around the race is becoming increasingly heated. There is a simple reason for that: Electability. Most Democrats in the US want Democrats to nominate the candidate who has the best odds of winning in November. It’s an argument often brought forth by Talarico supporters as they seem certain that Talarico is more electable than Crockett, upsetting supporters on her side. But before we look at who is actually more electable (both have their own arguments), let’s consider why electability matters so much in this race.

Electability matters because both Democrats represent somewhat similar values and have few policy differences. They are both the polar opposite of Paxton. They could also tip the Senate balance. So Democrats care about choosing a winner, even if that winner doesn’t align with them on all issues. It’s what propelled Biden to victory over Sanders in 2020. Exit polls show that voters who chose a candidate based on issues supported Sanders, voters who wanted to defeat Trump chose Biden, even if he didn’t represent their issues as well as Sanders did. No matter who Democrats support, a debate about electability is rarely a distraction, especially with candidates who have so few policy differences.

What the Polls are saying

Any general election polls for November should be taken with a grain of salt this early in the cycle. Nevertheless, it’s a decent starting point to look at the candidates’ head-to-head performance.

Both candidates do equally well against Paxton, who underperforms Cornyn. Where Talarico outshines Crockett, at least according to these way-too-early polls, is against the incumbent Senator Cornyn.

The Electability Argument for Both Candidates

Both candidates have talked about electability and why they think they can win in Texas. Their approach is starkly different, but it can be categorized. A helpful tool is the debate between the two candidates. I went through the transcript to get better insights.

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Talarico - Winning through broad appeal

According to TIME, Talarico is “a head-down pragmatist who speaks about his Christian faith fluently, and has drawn an impressive national following of his own”.

Talarico has built a national profile from scratch in a very short time. He was initially propelled into national politics by the fight against Texas’s new Gerrymander and has since appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The 36-year-old is a progressive by most standards, and his populist anti-billionaire message is reminiscent of Bernie Sanders, but he communicates it with an appeal to Texas’s Christian voter base. In the debate, Talarico focused on Billionaires and Texas, as he had done in his entire campaign. He also mentioned the word “win” in all its altercation more often than Crockett, at times highlighting his ability to win in Trump country. Talarico, using the electability argument in his presentation to Democratic primary voters, puts the focus on Crockett. The congresswoman has her own view of electability.

Crockett - Winning through record Democratic Turnout

Crockett entered the race as a well-known candidate. She delivered a speech at the 2024 DNC and is a frequent target of Trump’s attacks. Unsurprisingly, she mentioned Trump more often than Talarico did and used variations of the word “fight” eleven times. This goes hand in hand with her campaign, in which she presents herself as a fighter against Trump: Her announcement video showed her silently staring at the camera to the sound of Trump’s insults.

Talarico supporters were quick to criticize her approach, arguing that it’s difficult to win in a Trump +14 state that way. How could Crockett persuade swing voters and moderate Republicans, when the core of your campaign is fighting Trump? Crockett has an answer for that. She doesn’t intend to win through persuasion and broad appeal, but through turnout.

Texas has had comparatively low turnout in past elections (57% of adult citizens voted in 2024), so Crockett sees a lot of room for growth. She even hinted at the idea that she could win without persuading any Trump voters. While the 2026 electorate will be much bluer than the 2024 electorate, winning Texas without persuasion seems like a steep task.

What both candidates need to win

Crockett’s chances in the primary and the general rely on turnout and support from one of the most crucial Democratic voter groups: African Americans. Her strength with that group might win her the primary, but it gets more difficult in the general, where she will need the support of white Texans and also Latinos, who might feel insulted by her comments about Latino “slave mentality”.

For Talarico, turnout plays a significant role in the primary. He has to hope for strong turnout rates in rural areas and needs to persuade a decent share of African American Democrats to defeat Crockett. In the general elections, things could look better for him. African Americans, if they turn out, historically support the Democratic nominee. Talarico could then try to use his broad appeal approach to get across the finish line.

To sum it up, Crockett’s fighter campaign that counts on energizing the base is a decent strategy to win a primary, because that’s where the base decides. Talarico’s approach is much more suited for a general election battle in Texas. He will have to overcome the obstacle of his low name ID in the primary, but if he does, he might be in a pristine position against Paxton. After all, 2024 has taught us that being a “generic Democrat” without baggage can have its advantages.

Who will it be?

The result next week will be relatively close. While polls show a slight lead for Crockett, prediction markets are betting on Talarico. Whoever wins will have to look ahead to November and face the truth: Electability matters.

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While the national environment in US politics is polarized to a point where large swings in elections are incredibly rare, a handful of states are seeing sustained shifts in their political alignment that could upend Senate maps and the Electoral College in the near future.

In recent years, this discussion has been dominated by Florida. The growing state was considered the biggest prize among the Swing States in 2016 and 2020, but its rightward shift - Republicans won here by over 10 pts in 2022 and 2024 - has made it a long shot for Democrats. The driving force behind this shift: Conservatives moved to Florida in droves after the 2020 pandemic, and Hispanics in Miami swung to the right in extraordinary numbers during the past 8 years.

On the other side, Democrats have been shining in Georgia. The new swing state has been moving towards the Democrats as the Atlanta metro area keeps getting bluer at an astonishing pace. Overall, Democratic gains are more evenly spread out across the map and are often overlooked because they are happening in states that aren’t on many people’s radars. One of these states is Alaska.

Alaska was long considered deep-reed territory. The state has not voted for a Democratic President since Lyndon B. Johnson carried it in his 1964 landslide victory. The state has had a Republican Governor since the 2000s and has only voted for a Democratic Senator once in the past 45 years (Democrat Mark Begich won it in 2008).

But in recent years, Democrats have been making gains in the state that relies heavily on oil production. First, let’s take a look at how the state shifted on the presidential level in the 21st century.

Democrats hit rock bottom in Alaska in 2000, when George W. Bush carried the state by a margin of 30.9 points. Since then, Alaska has trended towards the Democrats, particularly when compared to the national environment. When Trump won it in 2024, Alaska was just 11 points to the right of the national popular vote. So, unless Alaska shifts further left or right, Democrats would need a +11-point victory nationally to win in Alaska. That puts the state into the likely Republican column. It’s a long shot for Democrats, but you can win states within that reach if you run a phenomenal candidate.

That’s what happened in 2022, when Mary Peltola narrowly won Alaska’s single House seat in a difficult environment for Democrats. Peltola, the first native American representative from Alaska, became the first Democrat to win the seat since 1973. Despite her narrow re-election loss in 2024, she put on an impressive performance: While Kamala Harris lost the state by 13.1 points, she only lost it by 2.4 points on the same ballot, making for an impressive 10.7 point overperformance.

As Democrats look to retake the Senate, they need to flip four Republican-held seats. Two pickups in Maine and North Carolina seem likely, but the remaining two wins must come from states that Trump won by over 10 points. When Mary Peltola announced her candidacy for the Senate, Democrats’ odds for flipping the Senate improved significantly. Early polls suggest a tied race in Alaska, and prediction markets seem to agree with calling the race a dead heat.

Check Out Our 2026 Election Forecast

Peltola’s strong favourability rating and popularity among Alaska’s electorate are certainly a big factor in the race, but there are signs that Alaska is moving even further towards becoming a swing state.

Alaska: Approval of Alaska Republicans & Trump Plummets

Recent polls have shown a drop in approval for Republicans in Alaska. The approval rating of Peltola’s senate opponent, incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan, has plummeted eleven points to 39% (47% disapprove) and turned net-negative for the first time since 2020.

Perhaps even more interesting is the shift in approval of Alaska’s Republican Governor. For those who don’t know: American Governors are notoriously popular with their state’s electorate. Only two out of America’s 50 Governors have net-negative approval ratings. One is Governor Reynolds in Iowa (-6, not running for re-election). The other is Gov. Dunleavy of Alaska with a net-negative approval rating of -11 points, making him the most unpopular Governor of the entire nation.

What’s even more astonishing is that Dunleavy used to be a popular incumbent. His net-approval rating remained positive since he became Governor in 2018. Just last year, Dunleavy approval rating fluctuated between +10 and +20. While some candidate-level issues can explain his recent dip in popularity, like Dunleavy’s failed fiscal plan, it does link to the broader dynamics in the state.

And what about President Trump? According to G. Elliot Morris’ incredibly detailed map of Trump’s approval rating, the President is underwater in Alaska after winning the state by 13.1 points just 15 months ago. His approval rating sits at just 44.3% with registered voters. There is only one other state he carried with +10 points that gives him a worse approval rating (Iowa). Yes, the entire nation is souring on Trump as his nationwide approval rating is hitting record lows, but why might Alaska turn into favorable territory for Democrats in 2026 and perhaps even 2028?

70% of Alaska’s economic revenue comes from the oil industry. The state is therefore heavily dependent on oil prices. In 2025, crude oil prices hit the lowest point since 2021, straining an already struggling economy in Alaska. In fact, CNBC ranked Alaska’s economy as “America’s worst state economy”.

With the persistence of high prices, Alaska’s economic troubles could boost Democrats in 2026. If Democrats enjoy a generic ballot advantage similar to their 8-point victory in 2018, Republicans’ Senate seat and their hold on the Governor’s mansion might be in serious trouble.

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Two weeks ago, we analyzed the Gender divide in political giving to United States Senators. Today, let’s take a look at the perhaps most important revelation that one can find in fundraising data: The divide between small contributions and PAC money.

Recent elections have seen fundraising records for both Democrats and Republicans. The question is: are these records fueled by scores of donations from regular voters, or are they propelled by big interest groups, so-called Political Action Committees (PACs)?

The role of PACs in politics has been a target of frequent criticism. Interest groups, like AIPAC (American-Israel PAC), Beer brewers, realtors, or even AT&T, can donate limited amounts to political candidates. Many Senators, especially from the progressive side of the aisle, have promised not to accept any PAC money for their campaigns to showcase their independence from profit-driven interest groups.

While all U.S. senators need donations to win elections, there are stark differences as to where that money comes from. OpenSecrets collected fundraising data from 2019 to 2024 and differentiated between five fundraising sources: Small individual contributions (less than $200), large individual contributions (>$200), PAC contributions, self-financing, and “Other”.

For the sake of this article, I want to visualize what percentage 1) small individual contributions and 2) PAC contributions make up in each Senator’s total fundraising haul. Below you can find the data on 97 of 100 US Senators. The chart is interactive, so you can hover over the dots to reveal names & details.

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The obvious revelation is that there are Republicans and Democrats on both sides of the chart, meaning that each party has Senators who rely heavily on PAC money and Senators who rely mostly on small contributions. Some Senators rely on large individual contributions, which didn’t fit into the chart.

There is an unsurprising divide between Democrats and Republicans. The highlighted dots “Average Democrat” and “Average Republican” reveal a significant difference. The average Democratic Senator received 12.1% of their funds from PACs and 25.5% from small contributions, while the average Republican received 21.4% from PACs and 17.8% from small contributions. On average, Republicans relied more on PACs for their campaign funds, and Democrats relied more on regular, individual donors.

Looking back at our scattered visualization, which shows Democrats and Republicans being present on both sides of the chart, we should ask ourselves: What other predictor is there for a Senator’s share of PAC and small contributions?

The most apparent predictor would be national profile. Almost all Senators at the top left of the chart (high % of small contributions) are national figures. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) ran for the Democratic presidential nomination before and are icons of the progressive movement. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Tim Scott (R-SC) were more or less promising candidates for the Republican nomination once. Also to be found in the upper left sections are former Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), as well as Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led Trump’s first impeachment trial. The rest of the group almost entirely consists of popular Democratic swing state senators like Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), or Ruben Gallego (D-AZ). Having a national profile or being a swing state senator, who needs every buck to get across the line, arguably puts a candidate into the viewfinder of ordinary voters donating small sums.

This “national-profile” reasoning also works for the other side of the chart. The Senators with the highest share of PAC contributions have names that are unknown to most Americans. Even I have to admit that I had never heard of Mike Rounds (R-SD, 45.8% of funds from PACs) before. These Senators can’t rely on popularity, so they are largely financed by PACs. These PACs include Leadership PACs, which are Committees from other senators that support their colleagues.

Take your time with the visualisation above, look for your Senator and patterns that I have missed. An interesting observation to end this article on: Only three Senators have a small-contributions-share of over 40% while accepting virtually no PAC-money (<1%): Bernie Sanders (0.3% PAC-funded), Elizabeth Warren (0.3%), and Jon Ossoff (0.6%).

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For those who don’t know, the first primary contests are held in a few states on separate dates. In the last cycles, Iowa traditionally kicked off the primary season, but the DNC seems poised to consider an alternative (South Carolina went first in '24). The first state does matter, as the winner of the first contest enjoys momentum and a boost in the polls for the states to come. That’s why choosing the first state of a primary is so delicate. You want to analyze all demographic implications carefully. For example, a state with a high share of Black voters might help Kamala Harris, while a predominantly white state like Iowa could help the chances of Gavin Newsom.  

For 2028, the five applicants are: Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Iowa.

These five states offer a vastly different Democratic primary electorate, which becomes evident in the following charts. To get the full picture, I’m going to compare the states’ Democratic voter profile from 2020 exit poll data regarding race, education, geography (rural/urban), and age. I’m aware that the demographics of these states may have changed a bit since 2020, something I will consider in my analysis.

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Let’s start our analysis with Iowa and New Hampshire. The biggest argument against these two states that started off the 2020 cycle is that they aren’t diverse. Their electorate is around 90% white. Latino and Black Voters, who make up a big chunk of the Democratic electorate, aren’t represented at all. In 2020, Pete Buttigieg got off to a fantastic start in Iowa and New Hampshire, which both had a mostly white electorate, but he fell behind once more diverse states came into play. While New Hampshire has gotten more diverse over the past six years, it still lags behind its competitors.

Looking at density, Iowa provides one of the most rural electorates, but with a nice slice of urban and suburban voters, while 61% of New Hampshire’s 2020 primary electorate lived in the suburbs.

Where they offer a more evenly balanced electorate is education - they have the highest share of college-educated voters among the five, and age. The three other states may be drastically different from each other regarding race, but they all have an older electorate. Iowa and NH both had a decent share of voters ages 17-44 (45%), giving young voters a voice.

Next up is South Carolina. The state was the fourth and last contest before Super Tuesday in 2020, and it gave Biden his first win. South Carolina’s electorate has the largest share of Black Voters amongst the five (57%), who powered Joe Biden to a decisive win that paved the way for him to beat Bernie Sanders. A large part of that success was due to Rep. Clyburn’s late endorsement. The high-ranking congressman still wields a lot of influence over SC’s African-American electorate.

What is easily overlooked is that South Carolina, not Iowa, had the largest share of rural voters (41%) in the 2020 primary. The state is growing in population, so the strong suburban number (39%) and the relatively small urban share (20%) might have grown. Where the state fell out of line with its competitors is in education. 60% of primary voters there didn’t have a college degree, far higher than the Democratic average for a state and the four other applicants. While giving South Carolina the first slot would thereby empower an underrepresented group amongst Democrats (non-college graduates), the state might not be representative of the national electorate come election day. Its 2020 electorate was also the oldest among the five applicants - 71% of voters were over 45 years old.

Now let’s get to the two states that, according to my poll, are the favorites of the American online election community.

Nevada offers a racially diverse electorate. While 65% of its voters in the 2020 Democratic primary were white, the remaining third is somewhat evenly split. Latinos would get a voice at the start of the primary as they made up 17% of the state, but black and asian voters also get to weigh in more strongly than they would in Iowa or New Hampshire. Geographically, the state is very unique. 2020 exit poll data only differentiated between voters from Clark County (Las Vegas), who made up 70% of the electorate, and voters from the rest of the state. Given its swing state nature, the decent geographical balance with urban + rural voters, and a diverse electorate with a high share of Latino voters, Nevada might be a strong pick. But there’s one more.

North Carolina has perhaps the most appealing profile of these five states. Black voters make up a third of the electorate there, a share not as astronomically high as in South Carolina, but strong enough to make an impact. At the same time, other minorities don’t get diluted, as only Nevada was able to post stronger numbers for the Latino and Asian/Other voter groups. Additionally, the growing state had a nice divide of suburban (46%) and urban voters (40%), two absolutely crucial groups for Democrats in recent years. The education divide is pretty balanced, and the electorate is not problematically old. The only caveat is that rural voters, a bleak spot for Democrats, would not be at the center of attention.

North Carolina would be my pick. It’s a growing swing state that has been trending left ever so slightly. It’s diverse, but it doesn’t give one group disproportionate voting power. That seemed to be what most poll respondents thought as well.

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Note: The chart only contains the results from respondents from the United States (n = 113). The complete sample (n = 165) chose Iowa over Nevada for 2nd place. North Carolina remained in first place with both groups. Overall, the sample is young (95% are younger than 45 years old), liberal (78% liberal), and disproportionately male (73% male).

A look at public data from 2019 to 2024, provided by Open Secrets, shows there are drastic differences in each Senator’s fundraising profile, especially between the two major parties. There’s a lot to analyze, and in the following weeks, we will take a closer look at which industries fund who, which Senator takes in the most PAC money, and which Party has the biggest share of small contributors. For today, however, we will analyze one of the most overlooked factors in fundraising: Gender.

There will be an interactive table with all Senators at the end of this article.

The Gender Divide

Anyone who has ever followed US politics is familiar with the gender divide. In 2024, Harris won women by 7 points while losing men by 12 points, a 19-point gap. So it’s not surprising that we see a similar divide in fundraising data:

The divide is most evident when we take a look at the profile of contributors to an average Senator from each party. The average Democratic Senator (including two Independent Senators who caucus with Democrats) has 8% more female contributors, while men outnumber women by 17% when it comes to Republicans. A gap of 25 points.

I chose this approach of analyzing the average Senator, because if we would simply look at the makeup of a party’s total contributors by gender, big fundraisers, like Senators Warren & Sanders, could distort the results, though only slightly. The chart also doesn’t consider how much each contributor spends, because that number is heavily influenced by the fact that men continue to outspend women. Below, you can see how the data changes when we look at the money itself.

You can immediately spot the vast difference from the previous chart. Men drastically outspend women when donating to Republican Senators, but even regarding donations to Democrats, men outspend women by a staggering 16 points. There are only two Senators, Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MS), who received a majority of their funds from women.

The question of why men outspend women so drastically in politics has been the subject of past research. In early 2025, Shauna L. James and her colleagues concluded that donations are the only form of political participation where the gender gap persists and “in some respects, has grown”. While women may be equally likely to donate money to a candidate, James et al. write, the “super-contributors,” who donate the highest amounts, remain disproportionally male.

Now, let’s get to the most interesting questions and find out: Which Senator has the most male/female contributors? Which Senator has the highest, which one the lowest, share of male donors?

When it comes to the gender divide of total contributors, the picture couldn’t be any clearer. When ranking the Senators by their share of female contributors, Democrats take the first 42 spots. Yes, you heard that right, 42! They are led by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM). The first Republican to show up is Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) with a share 48% female donors.

While Republicans unsurprisingly dominate the charts regarding the share of male contributors, the picture is less one-sided. In fact, we can find three Democratic challengers in the top 15.

Sanders, Warren, Ossoff: The People’s Senators?

Apart from the world of percentages, there’s some truth to be found in raw numbers. According to data from 2019-2024, one Senator outperformed the pack: Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the progressive icon and candidate for the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 2016 and 2020, collected funds from over two million different contributors (1.1M men & 900k women). This also put him at the top of the money list, with a haul of over 200 million US dollars.

Notably, he is joined by two other Senators, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA). Both fell short of Sanders’ impressive performance, but their 1.1 million contributors each still put them well ahead of fourth place.

You can explore the data in the table at the bottom of this article. The table is interactive. You can sort it by the different data groups and search for your Senator.

Why do I mention this trio? Because there’s something interesting to be found there for 2026 and 2028. That Sanders and Warren show up at the top is not really a surprise. Both are national figures of the progressive movement, and both had promising campaigns for President in 2020 - finishing in 2nd and 3rd place behind Joe Biden in the primary. During that campaign, both, but particularly Sanders, impressed with their fundraising totals. Their strong 2019-2024 haul is therefore not a surprise at all. But what about Jon Ossoff?

Ossoff became a Senator only recently, in 2020, after unseating a Republican incumbent in Georgia. As a swing-state Senator, Ossoff is known to all who follow the political circuit, but his national profile remains low, especially compared to the likes of Warren and Sanders. Naturally, it is astonishing to see him hold up with these two when it comes to campaign contributors. His Senate colleague from Georgia, Raphael Warnock, “only” had 330k contributors, and Warnock already had another election cycle to fundraise for in 2022.

Ossoff’s strong financial backing by 1.1 million Americans (55% women / 45% men) might help him in the future. He will likely defend his vulnerable seat in the 2026 midterms, further cementing his status as a potential 2028 candidate.

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I’ve often estimated that between thirty and forty percent of voters in America would always vote for Trump or any other Republican candidate, no matter the circumstances. By that logic, about a third of the American Electorate could not be won by any Democratic candidate, unless there are seismic changes to America’s political divide. I arrived at that number by following my intuition, but the 2024 Gubernatorial Election in North Carolina provided me with some real data to back it up.

North Carolina, a swing state, was won by Trump with a margin of about three points in 2024. At the same time, North Carolina voters also chose a new governor. It was an open seat, since the incumbent Democratic Governor Roy Cooper could not seek re-election due to term limits. In a swing state like North Carolina, it should’ve been a close race. However, Democratic candidate Josh Stein won the vote handily as his Republican challenger Mark Robinson received a meager 40.08%. Trump carried the state with a vote share of 51% on the same ballot. Such a result may seem surprising to someone unfamiliar with the election, but those who followed the news closely know that the real surprise is that Robinson somehow managed to get even 40% of the vote.

Here’s why: Robinson was a frequent visitor to porn-booths, called himself a “Black Nazi” on a porn platform, called homosexuals “filth,” and, because that wasn’t enough, denies the Holocaust. He was so scandal-ridden that even Trump, who previously called Robinson Martin Luther King Jr. “on steroids,” had to cancel rallies with him. When Interviewers asked die-hard Trump fans at his rallies about whether they would vote for Robinson, many seemed skeptical. Yet, in the end, Robinson still received 40% of the vote (over two million votes) in a state that almost perfectly mirrored the national environment.

We can perhaps subtract 5 to 10 points from that tally as there are always voters who are unaware of even the most news-dominating scandals, particularly in presidential elections. These voters simply look at the partisanship of the candidate on the ballot and vote accordingly. Still, that leaves us about 30% of Americans who are perfectly fine with voting for a self-described Nazi. A staggering number.

Jan 6th Poll Shows Similar Results

In December, a poll about the January 6th insurrection arrived at a similar number.

The poll asked respondents who they believed was involved in the insurrection. An insurrection that produced hundreds of videos and photos documenting the attack. While most (70%) correctly named Trump supporters as the attackers, a third of Americans (27%) said that they believe that ANTIFA & Trump’s opponents were behind the attack, a prominent conspiracy that, of course, is backed up by no evidence at all.

So, about a third of Americans would willfully vote for a self-described Nazi and choose to believe one of the laziest conspiracy in history. While you can certainly win Presidential elections without these voters, they do have a great influence, especially in the Senate, and could deny Democrats any shot at a Supermajority if they keep turning out to vote even after Trump’s gone. As a result, any meaningful change will prove difficult, as most bills require 60 votes to pass the Senate.

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Do you think any Democrat could ever win these voters? Let me know in the comments :)

1. The US Economy will Crack Further

Don’t let the 4,3% Q3 GDP growth fool you. Small Businesses are already under severe pressure and have been laying off people. Job Growth, which is already scarce, is powered by larger firms, creating a dependency on these companies to succeed.

It may also be a reason why the stock market has continued to rally. The small businesses are the ones feeling the pain already. Something that won’t affect the broad stock market, as these companies are naturally not listed there.

For the economy, I predict rising unemployment to persist as job growth will remain scarce, but the US will avoid a recession if current consumer trends hold and the AI bubble doesn’t pop. The big blockbuster will be the appointment of a new FED chair as Jerome Powell’s term ends in the summer. Trump will likely nominate a loyal candidate, but he has to get approval from the Senate. An appointment of a questionable candidate could scare investors.

2. Stock Market: Modest Growth with Fear

The slump for small businesses should be enough to worry lawmakers ahead of the 2026 midterms, but the AI Boom continues to sweeten economic headlines, especially in the stock market. Once this boom falters, or once AI starts to replace the workforce, the economic trouble might also infect larger firms, and by that, the stock market.

While we might still be in the early stages for a bubble, Investors will have to navigate an increasingly risky environment. For 2026, Analysts predict the S&P 500 to grow by around 9% on average. However, any exogenous influence, from tariffs, to an AI crash, to data center issues could quickly deteriorate the market.

3. Midterms: Democrats Sweep the House, Senate Becomes Toss-Up

My forecast model currently estimates that Democrats win the House of Representatives with a stunning 236 seats (expected seats). A result that would exceed the Blue Wave of 2018. It will prove that Redistricting efforts yielded no advantage to Republicans and may, in fact, even hurt them.

The Senate – biased towards Republicans as they do better in small, rural states – will be much closer. Democrats need an astounding result to gain four seats and win the majority. They would have to pull off wins in states like Alaska, Ohio, or Texas. My forecast for the Senate is still in the works, but as of now, I believe that it will be a close race for the majority. Democrats will likely flip Seats in Maine and North Carolina and defend Michigan and Georgia, putting them to 49 seats.

If Democrats run their best candidates in Ohio (Brown), Alaska (Peltolta), and Texas (Talarico), they might be able to win two of these three races and clinch the majority.

4. Far Right AFD will win in Eastern Germany and Face More Legal Trouble

Germany faces a crucial election year as five states (including Berlin) will hold elections for state parliament. The most closely-watched elections will take place in Eastern Germany, where the far-right AFD could is polling around 40%. Such a result could bring them close to an outright, one-party majority. Building a coalition without them would become exceedingly difficult. Given that all other major parties have ruled out working with the AFD, these elections could create highly complicated scenarios.

In the meantime, calls to ban the AFD will grow louder. The State of Schleswig Holstein has already taken the first steps to consider if such a ban is legally possible. 2026 will also bring clarity on wether or not the ruling that the AFD is an extremist organization will stand - a critical fact in the determination if the party can be banned.

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5. AI will Face Growing Headwinds

Deepfakes, resource-intensive data centers, and a threat to the workforce.

An increasing number of politicians are warning about the impact Artificial Intelligence could have on our society. Given that voters worry about these issues and tend to be skeptical of AI, the 2026 US Midterm Elections could become a first test of the political headwinds the AI industry might face.

6. Viktor Orbán will Lose Re-Election in Hungary

This is perhaps the boldest prediction in here. The Hungarian Election in Spring 2026 is forecasted to be very close, but with Péter Magyar as his opponent, Orbán faces the toughest re-election bid of his career.

Orbán has eroded Hungary’s democratic institutions for years, and the public backlash has never been louder. A loss for Orbán would also be a relief for Hungary’s European Partners, as Orbáns many blockades of EU policies, such as his reluctance to sanction Russia, have been a thorn in the eyes of the Union.

7. New Democratic Candidates for 2028 will Emerge

Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, AOC (Ocasio-Cortez).

These are a few of the names that have been thrown around in the debate about who will be the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2028.

My prediction is that, after the midterms, some new names will enter the debate. It may be very likely that the Democratic Nominee in 2028 is someone the media isn’t talking about at the moment. In 2005, Democrats faced a similar situation. Well-known names were being considered and polled, but in the end, it was someone with a low national profile who clinched the nomination: The junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama.

After the midterms, other candidates will emerge. I will have my eye fixed on Georgia, where Senator Jon Ossoff might think about going for White House if he wins re-election comfortably.

8. Impeachment: Back on the Table

Democrats have been reluctant to even mention impeachment in Trump’s 2nd term after impeaching Trump twice in his first term. Nevertheless, as Trump continues to break the law on a fairly regular basis, Democrats might have no option but to prosecute Trump’s illegal activities. And then there’s the Epstein Scandal, with AG Pam Bondi clearly violating the standards of the recently passed Epstein Files Transparency Act.

I predict that we will see impeachment hearings and proceedings in 2026, either for Pam Bondi, another Trump official, or Trump himself. While Democrats may be wary about impeaching Trump again, in fear that it could look political, they will have to do their job and hold the president accountable.

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9. Putin’s War in Ukraine Will Rage On

Donald Trump is still after a Nobel Peace Prize, which will motivate him to pursue peace in Ukraine, but the year 2025 has shown that the situation remains difficult.

This is not a conflict that is already resolving, where Trump can simply fly in and do a photo-op. While Ukraine is feeling growing pressure with each passing day, Russian forces are only advancing slowly. The big question will be if the US will keep supporting Ukraine’s war effort, but with Democrats retaking Congress, a total abandonment of Ukraine seems unlikely.

10. Culture: A Great Year for Movies

Beyond the world of politics, there is some joy to be found. 2026 will likely be a great year for movies at the box office. In the Spring, “The Drama” with Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, as well as “Project Hail Mary,” a book adaptation starring Gosling as an astronaut, will fill the theaters.

But it will be the Summer, when moviegoers will truly get spoiled. In June, Steven Spielberg’s new Alien movie “Disclosure Day” hits theaters, and in July, Christopher Nolan’s (Oppenheimer, Inception) new epic “The Odyssey” will be released. The latter could well gross up to one billion dollars. The newest Hunger Games prequel, “Sunrise on the Reaping,” and the last part of the Dune trilogy, “Dune: MESSIAH,” starring Timothée Chalamet, could complete a year that might prove moviegoing is alive and well, even as Netflix’s takeover of Warner Bros. looms over the industry.

Happy New Year!

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Welcome to Frontline Democracy’s 2026 Election Forecast Model.

Below, you’ll find the forecast for the 2026 House of Representatives Election, including a map of all districts. I used a mix of fundamentals (district baselines, incumbency effects) and national environment data (Generic Ballot, Special Elections) to create the model. District-level polls will be included once most candidates have been chosen and sufficient polls arrive. The forecast will be updated daily.

You will also find information on which redistricted maps the model uses.

This forecast will be updated every two days!

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The model uses newly drawn maps in California, Texas, Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, and Utah (Some of these maps are still being challenged).

Take a look at the distribution of the 40,000 simulations our model calculated for this forecast:

In this article, I’ll:

• Discuss states’ shift from 2016 to 2024 with two maps

• Explain why those shifts might favor Democrats in 2028

The 2024 Election provided little to no good news for Democrats. They lost the Presidency, the Senate, and failed to retake the House. If you take a look at the 2020 to 2024 swing map, you’ll find that almost the entire country shifted to the right. Naturally, there was a lot of what I call doom-talking among Democrats and political commentators. Granted, the 2024 results fell short of Democrats’ expectations. A closer look at the election results on the statewide level and an examination of broader trends, however, reveal signs of a development that can help Democrats in 2028 and propel their Electoral College chances in the future. That is because it’s exactly those parts of the US that broke that trend and didn’t shift right that might matter.

In 2024, as almost the entire nation shifted right (6 points in total), it was the Atlanta Suburbs that broke with the nation’s movement most notably, moving left in an unfavorable environment for Democrats. It was a sign that Georgia, one of the closest swing states, might be an easy pick-up for Democrats in the future. That is perhaps the one trend from the 2020-2024 cycle that I would pay close attention to. Most other notable swings, like Trump’s gains with Hispanics, could likely revert in the coming years.

To understand the trend of all 50 states, we should look at the swing from 2016 to 2024. Those 8 years provide a good basis for examining the swing of each state. First of all, these years mark the first and last election of the Trump cycle. Any realignment of rural or suburban voters that began in 2016 likely maxed out in 2024. Additionally, both years are quite similar. The popular vote was close in both - Clinton won it in ‘16 by 2.1 points and Trump in ‘24 by 1.5 points, a swing of R+3.6 points - so a state’s shift can be more meaningful. Why? Because if the entire nation shifts six points or let’s even ten points, to the right, it becomes likely that even left-leaning states shift rightwards for one election. The smaller difference of the popular vote helps diminish that effect, but to fully grasp a state’s trend, we have to look at how that state moved relative to the national environment.

First, let’s take a look at how states shifted from 2016 to 2024.

As you can see, Democrats made gains in quite a few states despite losing 3.6 points nationally. Trump’s most monumental gains are concentrated in areas that won’t help Republicans in 2028, but more on that later, because the map above doesn’t consider the national environment shift.

To accurately represent the states’ movement relative to the national swing from ‘16 to ‘24 (R+3.6 points), we have to subtract the national swing from the state’s swing. For example, Tennessee shifted 3.7 to the right during the last 8 years, but when we consider the national shift of R+3.6 points, that statewide shift drops to R+0.1, relative to the national movement. Meaning that Tennessee as a state didn’t move right of the nation; it moved with the nation.

Below, you’ll find a map with the relative shift of all 50 states. It is perhaps one of the best maps for Democrats looking ahead to the 2028 election, because when we start considering which states moved the most, a Democratic advantage emerges.

The most evident finding is that Trump’s gains can mostly be attributed to three states that moved to the right relative to the nation: Florida, California, and New York.

Anyone who knows the Electoral College knows why that doesn’t help Republicans at all in 2028. Florida has been a safe Republican state since 2022, with conservatives moving there in droves and Hispanics shifting right. On the other side, New York and California have shifted right of the nation by 6 to 7 points each, but both are Democratic strongholds, and Republicans would need another 10 to 20 years of these shifts to make the two states even competitive. In other words, Trump drove exactly the states right of the nation that won’t help Republicans in the Electoral College in 2028. Now, Trump’s gains with urban and minority voters may snap back in the coming years as he grows more unpopular, possibly reversing his gains in New York or California. That would grant Democrats the little-needed popular vote advantage they enjoyed in 2016 and 2020, but it would do little to hurt them.

On the contrary, Democrats must really like the selection of states that moved left compared to the nation. As you’ve probably detected, Swing states are shaded with a pattern in the map above. 6 of these 7 states (all except for Nevada) drifted left relative to the US. Let’s take a closer look at the movements from ‘16 to ‘24:

• Georgia swung 6.5 points left of the nation, further cementing what we saw in 2024: Joe Biden might have been the only Democratic Presidential Candidate to win here since Bill Clinton, but it may soon be Republicans who’ll find winning in the state to become more difficult.

• North Carolina swung 4 points left of the nation. The state has long been known for wasting Democratic Presidential hopes and cash (Obama last won it in 08). But Harris performed similarly to Clinton (both lost by 3 points) in a national environment that was redder. North Carolina’s urban areas are seeing an influx of educated voters that might already be making the state more Democratic.

• The Midwest moved around two points left. A small movement, but an important one. The end of the Obama coalition was the big development of the 2016 election, with rural areas in the midwestern swing states shifting right by huge margins. The muted movement in the last 8 years may hint at the fact that Trump’s and Republicans’ potential there is exhausted. That is, unless they find a candidate who can win back suburban and educated voters.

The Democrats’ record shifts can be found in other, less important states. Colorado moved the furthest left over the past 8 years. The leftward shifts in Alaska and Kansas (5.1 and 8.2 points) shouldn’t go unnoticed either, as Democrats are eyeing wins in statewide races there in 2026. Kansas’ neighboring state, Nebraska, swung 7.6 points left relative to the national environment. A swing that has moved the state’s 2nd congressional district into the Democratic Presidential column.

An interesting side-note: The Washington State Primaries were seen as a reliable predictor of the national popular vote in US House Elections since 2010. In 2024, they predicted a similar environment to 2020, and were wrong for the first time. The reason for that miss is evident in the map above, because as the nation shifted to the right, Washington stood its ground and barely moved compared to 2020.

Feel free to share this article and its visualizations with your friends.

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When politicians and scholars argue about the dangers the far-right AFD poses to German Democracy and discuss how the party’s rise to power could be stopped, they quite often focus on the AFD’s strength in Eastern Germany. Granted, there is some merit to that: The AFD is polling at around 40% in most of East Germany, and they could win an outright majority in upcoming elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt, a horror scenario for all other parties. However, the unyielding debate about the AFD’s strength in the East is likely distorting the bigger picture.

Many German voters have the impression that the AFD is largely a problem in Eastern Germany, even in Federal Elections. After all, this is how the parties performed in each state in the 2025 election:

This is an image most Germans are familiar with. It shows that the AFD achieved monumental results in Eastern Germany (32% to 38%) while struggling to get half that vote share in the West (10.9 to 21.6%). It could just as well be a depiction of German borders before reunification in 1990. Most importantly, it’s the map that has misled many Germans to believe that the AFD draws most of its strength from the East. Why? Because of something German voters don’t usually have to think about: Population density.

While population density is ever-present in American Elections - with the Electoral College awarding votes based on a state’s population - Germany’s electoral system is proportional, so voters don’t have to think about population all that often. The consequence is that some believe that the AFD’s federal results are powered by the East. Former East Germany’s land mass makes up about a third of modern Germany, while accounting for just above 15% of the total population. So in reality, the AFD’s 20,8% vote share in 2025 wasn’t powered by the East, it was powered by the West. Here’s a map showing you where the AFD’s 10,3 million votes came from.

Yes, this looks very similar to a map of population totals in each state. Most AFD votes (1.77 million) came out of North-Rhine Westfalia, the most populous German state, the 2nd most (1,52 million) came out of Bavaria, the 2nd most populous state. The fact that a political party gets the most votes out of the most populous state isn’t particularly newsworthy, but it is key to understanding an important aspect of stopping the AFD.

The AFD’s election results in 2025 had the following composition: Of the 20,8% that the Party won federally, only 5,8% came from Eastern Germany, and 15% came from the West. Meaning, even if other parties found a miracle recipe against the AFD’s success in the East and were able to obliterate them from existence there, the AFD would still stand at 15% nationally, just six points down from their record result. Focusing your resources to battle the AFD on their home turf for just a few points federally seems like an uneven balance of needed effort compared to netted results, and that’s not even taking Germany’s structural divides into account.

Re-unified Germany is a young nation, 35 years to be exact. The East is still suffering from structural setbacks. People who live in Eastern Germany get paid lower wages and lower pensions. They are more likely to drop out of school or become unemployed, and they have much less urbanization than the West. In other words, it’s the perfect environment for parties from the edges of the political spectrum, and this has been the case long before the AFD became popular. The structural difficulties and the feeling of being left behind that many East Germans have make it incredibly difficult for other parties to make inroads. There have also been many reports about hostility and violence against politicians of the Greens, the SPD, and the Left. It’s, of course, important that these parties keep fighting for votes in the East and do not abandon the states to the AFD, which would only deepen the polarization already existing between East and West. But they could consider what the most effective path to limiting the AFD’s success actually looks like.

Any movement in the populous Western States - states that provide less favorable territory for the AFD - is much more significant than movement in the East. As I’ve just shown, the AFD would still end up with 15% nationally even if they were magically erased from their strongholds in East Germany, a highly unlikely scenario. Meanwhile, the same result could easily be achieved by decreasing the AFD’s vote share in West Germany from 18% (2025) to 12%. This modest and realistic drop of 6 points would put the AFD just below 16%, while their record results in the East remain untouched.

Another development offers a reason to focus our attention on the West. As you might have heard, there’s a big debate about whether Germany should ban the AFD (there’s a procedure for that; I’ve covered the topic in length in this article). While a national ban currently seems unlikely, as some politicians have stated that they don’t want to ask the courts to consider such a procedure, the situation looks different in some Western States. Schleswig-Holstein is the first state to investigate a possible ban for the AFD’s state party. If such bans come into effect in Western states, the AFD’s performance in the East might not matter that much on the national level, as it barely made them pass the 5% national threshold to get into parliament.

We know that such procedures and developments could take a while. In the meantime, it might be wiser to focus on diminishing AFD support in the West rather than the East. I’ll leave you with an example from US politics: If you were a Democrat trying to defeat Trump in the Swing State of Georgia, would you focus on the countless of rural Trump strongholds to try and convince a minuscule percentage of voters in every county of the deeply conservative, Fox-News-watching electorate to vote for you to gain a few points statewide - or would you focus on one city, Atlanta, where much less work might yield you the same, if not better results?

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Even if you are an election nerd like me, you probably never heard about Tennessee’s 7th congressional district before the Summer of 2025. It’s a conservative district that was labelled as a safe Republican seat in the last elections. In 2024, Republican congressman Mark Green won it with 60% of the vote and a margin of +22 points. Democrats would have to outperform their 2024 results by almost 25 points to win the district, putting them in uncharted territory. To put this into context: If Democrats were to improve their results in the 2028 presidential election by 25 points compared to 2024, they would win over 450 electoral votes, carrying states like Kansas, Texas, and Missouri. In other words, winning Tennessee’s 7th congressional district sounds like a far-fetched dream for Democrats. Nevertheless, next Tuesday, on December 2nd, that dream may become reality, and if it does, Republicans and Trump are in a lot of trouble. Not only because it would sound the alarm for next year’s midterm elections, but because Republicans could even end up losing control of the House before that.

Congressional elections aren’t until next year, when the 2026 midterms take place, and the entire House of Representatives and a third of the US Senate will be up for re-election. However, in case a member of the House dies or resigns, special elections can be held. This is what will happen in Tennessee’s 7th congressional district next Tuesday, because Republican Mark Green resigned from his seat this summer after voting against Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”. Normally, this wouldn’t be an election Republicans should have to worry about. It’s an R+22 district and, as explained, Democrats would need a performance not seen in decades to make the election competitive. It’s a long shot, but with Trump’s dwindling approval rating and soaring unpopularity, they might have a unique opening.

Democrats already registered some impressive electoral performances in 2025. They won big in the governor’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia, improving Harris’ margins by about 10 points, and outperformed their 2024 results in this year’s special elections by an average of 15 points. Next week, they might finally be able to use this momentum to flip a deep-red seat. A victory in Tennessee’s 7th district, which should usually be safely Republican, could be the snowflake that triggers the avalanche that could become Trump’s worst nightmare.

Before we dive into the consequences that a loss in Tennessee could have for Trump, let’s take a look at the election. Can Democrats actually win?

Poll Shows Dead Heat in Tennessee

It is almost certain that Democrats will outperform their 2024 results by a stunning margin. My guess is that they do at least 10-15 points better, and that is my most modest prediction. According to betting markets, there’s a 90% chance that Republicans will not win by more than 10% which would already be a strong underperformance compared to the 22% of victory in 2024. But as this is a heavily gerrymandered and deeply conservative district with large rural areas, Democrats need more than just a 15-point swing in their direction. They need to win over dissatisfied Independents and drive up turnout in their own strongholds. Special elections have lower turnout rates than Presidential elections and even midterms. In the Trump era, Democrats have done very well with college-educated voters who vote regularly, while Trump & Republicans do better with uninformed and sporadic voters. This puts Democrats in a decent position for special elections. If Trump voters stay home, and more informed Democratic voters turn out in great numbers, the Democratic Candidate Aftyn Behn might just pull off the unimaginable. So far, turnout in Democratic strongholds looks promising, and the first real poll gives Democrats even more reasons to hope.

According to the newest poll from Emerson College, Republican Van Epps and Democrat Aftyn Behn are essentially tied, with Van Epps leading Behn 48% to 46%. If that were the final results, Democrats would fall short of winning the seat, but their impressive performance would send shivers down the ranks of the Republican Party.

Republicans Are Getting Nervous

There have already been reports about low morale among congressional Republicans. Their majority is slim, holding just 219 over the Democrats’ 213 seats, with three vacancies: The mentioned Mark Greene from Tennessee, Democrat Sylvester Turner from Texas, who passed away this year, and Democrat Mike Sherill, who left Congress to become New Jersey’s new Governor. Both Democratic vacancies are expected to be easily won by Democratic candidates in the coming months, which cuts Republicans’ majority to just 4 seats (219-215), meaning they can’t allow themselves even two defections when voting on a bill. Such a slim margin is reason for discomfort among Republicans, who are not blind to Trump’s low approval ratings and Democrats’ electoral performances. All these members of the House are up for re-election and have to face angry voters in 2026, who could topple their political careers. This dire outlook (Democrats are already heavily favored to win the House in the 2026 Midterms) has led some Representatives to consider resigning to avoid a very public electoral loss. If Democrats pull off a fantastic performance in Tennessee next Tuesday, even more Republicans might ask themselves: Am I willing to risk my political career in defense of a deeply unpopular president who can never appear on the ballot again? As a result, even more of them might throw in the towel, gifting Democrats a unique opportunity to win the House before the midterms even take place. Just last week, Marjorie Taylor Greene (referred to as MTG), a longtime Trump ally and conspiracy theorist, announced that she would resign from Congress this January, creating another vacancy for Republicans. If Democrats were to win in Tennessee on Tuesday, the House would then have 218 Republicans to 216 Democrats, with one vacancy, the seat of MTG. In this scenario, Republicans couldn’t allow themselves a single defection, as any vote that is tied in the House “shall be lost”.

That is the political implication the election in Tennessee might have for lawmakers in Washington. The avalanche that a Democratic upset would trigger might have even more consequences.

Will Republicans Abandon Trump?

The New York Times wrote that some Republicans are starting to look beyond the Trump era, and recently, Trump has struggled to affirm his iron grip on the party, notably losing the fight to not release the Epstein files. Trump has long wielded his electoral power like a sword that strikes down any Republican who defies him. One endorsement from him was always enough to even sink the prominent critics from his own party, like Liz Cheney, in a Republican primary election. If Trump’s approval numbers keep dropping and Democrats continue to stun with their electoral victories, Republicans will be forced to ask themselves if they are still willing to bend the knee to Trump. A first test will come in West Virginia’s Republican primary, where Trump has endorsed a challenger to Representative Thomas Massie, a vitriolic Trump critic and Republican who pushed for the release of the Epstein files. If Trump’s chosen challenger should fail to unseat Massie, it could be a sign that his power over the party is fading.

The 2026 midterms might then deliver the final blow. Winning the House and the Senate, Democrats could block most of Trump’s policies, except for his executive orders, but these may not save Trump in the end. Calls among Republicans for a future after Trump’s reign will grow louder, and Trump could risk becoming a lame-duck President. He could also face fresh impeachment charges. His last two impeachments died in the Senate, mostly because Republican Senators did not want to offend their leader and his droves of devoted followers. In Trump’s first impeachment trial, it is said that around 30 Republican Senators believed that Trump had done something illegal, but they weren’t willing to take the risk of publicly voting to remove Trump from office. If Trump’s grip on the party continues to fade in the coming year, these Senators might think differently about removing Trump from office.

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It doesn’t matter which European country you poll. Far-right parties seem to be on the rise everywhere. In Germany, the far-right AFD surged into first place in the polls. In France, Rassemblement National has been the frontrunner for a while, and in the Netherlands’ most recent election, Geert Wilders’ PVV finished a close second in the recent election.

These parties share a few positions. One of them is their disdain for the European Union. They may have mostly abolished earlier plans of a full DEXIT (Germany), FREXIT (France), or NEXIT (Netherlands) after the world watched Britain’s BREXIT-remorse unfold in real time, but they still plan to opt out of the European project. Rassemblement National advocates for a FREXIT in “all but name,” and the AFD party platform advocates for Germany to leave the Union for a “better” replacement (which doesn’t yet exist).

If we examine these parties, their strong anti-EU sentiment, as well as their fabulous poll numbers, we might get the idea that Europeans dislike the European Union. Funnily enough, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Citizens in All Member Countries Say EU Has a “Positive Impact”

The Spring 2025 Eurobarometer asked residents in all 27 member states whether they believe the EU has a positive or a negative effect on their lives. The result was quite stunning. A plurality of residents in every single member state said that the EU has a positive impact on their lives. Not a single country showed a net-negative result. Meaning all across the map, including in countries where EU skeptics are leading the polls, residents seem to be very fond of the EU and its impact on their personal lives.

While the “positive impact” response outweighed the “negative impact” response in all nations, there were still strong differences in the magnitude of the favorability.

View as a table:

There is a broad consensus of approval with the EU, with no country on the map being in the red. On average, residents choose to say the EU had a “positive impact” instead of a “negative impact” with a margin of +34 percentage points.

The magnitude of the net positive rating, however, varies greatly depending on where you live in Europe. The first thing that is very clear is that there is no geographical consistency.

There are a few countries that do align with what we know about the EU. Poland, for example, posts the highest approval of the EU, which makes sense as the country is the number one financial profiteer in the Union. The clashes and disputes between the Presidents of Poland and the EU, which center around the erosion of Poland’s independent justice system, don’t seem to weigh on the rating. A similar trend can be seen in Hungary, another country that is led by a President who is a frequent critic of the Union himself: Viktor Orbán. Orbán’s citizens view the EU favorably by a margin of 32% as Orbán’s government faces growing backlash from EU partners over its authoritarian practices. That discrepancy might put Orbán in a tough spot in the upcoming 2026 election in Hungary, where Péter Magyar is looking to unseat him.

The Far-Right’s Unpopular EU Position

In other countries, such as Germany or the Netherlands, the European Union seldom becomes a campaign topic, even as citizens in both countries have very favorable views of the Union. The one country where the rise of an anti-EU party somewhat coincides with low public opinion of the EU is the Czech Republic. Andrej Babiš, a vitriolic EU-critic, won the 2025 parliamentary election there and is poised to become the country’s prime minister while approval of the EU sits at +1%, the lowest value among all members.

France is another country with a surging far-right and a relatively low approval of the EU when compared to its peers. Taken at face value, however, the country’s positive, +7% approval of the EU can hardly be classified as anti-European sentiment. That, in fact, is something we can’t find in any of the 27 member states.

It seems evident that the European far-right parties have a problem that hasn’t been fully exploited by their political opponents. EU citizens love the EU. Yet many of them support far-right parties, likely because their anti-EU positions are rarely the center of the debate. Parties from the center and the left could capitalize on these issues and push the far-right’s unpopular anti-European positions into the spotlight. Voters might then realize how out of line the AFD, the PVV, or Rassemblement National are with their own high regard for the European Union.

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Opinion

Democrats had a great night last Tuesday. Not only did California’s Redistricting Proposition pass with groundbreaking support, but Democratic Candidates also won crucial gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, both with strong margins. Mikie Sherrill won by 13 points in New Jersey, outperforming the polls that predicted a close race, and Abigail Spanberger ran 15 points ahead of her Republican opponent in Virginia, flipping the Governor’s mansion back to Democrats. Even in light of these successes, the star of the night was someone else: Zohran Mamdani. The 34-year-old won the race to become the new mayor of NYC after a long fight against the former Democratic Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani, a self-described socialist, is the new star for many on the Left.

Naturally, the election results sparked a discussion among Democrats. Some argued that Mandani’s successful outsider campaign against a well-known Governor of the Democratic establishment proves that left-wing ideas are appealing to voters, and that Democrats should adopt them nationally. Others point to New Jersey and Virginia, where moderate Democratic candidates exceeded all expectations, while Mamdani slightly underperformed the polls against a candidate with sexual assault allegations. This is also the argument that I find to be a tad stronger. Moderate Democrats had a great night, but I would nevertheless argue that they are also in desperate need of someone like Zohran Mamdani if they want to win big again. Why? Because of the most famous window of the Trump era: The Overton Window.

Trump Moved the Overton Window to his Side

The Overton window is a political construct used to analyze the political discourse. It describes the range of opinions and subjects that society views as acceptable. It usually includes opinions of the center, the left, and the right, but is limited at the window’s edges on the left and the right side. The opinions outside the window may range from just radical to extreme. When Donald Trump entered the political stage, the Overton window moved to the right.

Donald Trump almost consistently says outrageous and unthinkable things. From calling immigrants “vermin” to bragging about sexual assault. Many of his remarks can be placed in the “unthinkable” category on the right-wing edge of the graph. But Donald Trump was not some outside lunatic when he first voiced his unthinkable ideas to the entire nation; he was the Republican nominee for President, and as the political debate in the US shifted to the right-wing edge - towards Trump’s unthinkable remarks and ideas - the Overton window shifted as well.

Today, we are used to Trump, his MAGA colleagues in Congress, and their remarks that were once considered unimaginable. They still are vile in the eyes of a large share of the US electorate, but they have helped shift the narrative towards the conservative side. Calling Immigrants “vermin” may go too far, but it makes ideas like “mass deportations” sound more reasonable to voters. It becomes evident every time voters are confronted with a candidate who is not a MAGA conspiracy theorist.

When Haley gave Trump a run for his money in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary, she was viewed as the moderate choice compared to Trump. She led Biden by double digits in hypothetical polls. In a matchup with Kamala Harris, voters would have very likely viewed Haley as the more moderate or centrist candidate. That couldn’t be further from the truth, because before Trump shifted the Overton window towards Republicans, Nikki Haley was considered a conservative hardliner.

She supported anti-gay laws, wanted to bust unions, hike taxes for green companies while slashing them for the wealthy, cut social security, and much more. Enough to easily classify her as what she is, a conservative hardliner. Nikki Haley used to sit at the right-wing edge of the Overton window with her statements, one of which included a proposal to invade Mexico, but then came Trump. The President presents all Americans with such unthinkable ideas that Haley’s positions seem more moderate. Yes, she may want to attack worker’s rights and cut Medicare, but at least she doesn’t steal elections.

On the other side, Democrats suffer the opposite effect of the shift in the Overton window, and so do moderate Republicans.

Real moderate public figures, like President Joe Biden or fmr. Republican Gov. Chris Christie used to be near the center of the window, where most Americans see themselves. Now the window has moved, and it has led Americans to label these politicians as “too liberal.” Democrats tried to adapt in 2024 by moving their policy platform even further to the center. They courted the support of conservatives like Dick Cheney and even quoted Ronald Reagan, something that used to be unthinkable for a Democratic candidate. Both these men are, in fact, extreme conservatives, but in Trump’s era, they are just an old guard of moderates to the Republican base.

So what can the Democrats do, except move further to the right? The obvious solution would be to move the Overton window back to the center, but as explained before, it was the unthinkable and radical ideas that moved the window to the right in the first place. So, Democrats would need to enter extreme ideas from the left into the public debate to shift the window back to the center. That’s where Mr. Mamdani comes in.

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Mamdani: A Blessing for Moderate Democrats?

First of all, I want to unequivocally say that I don’t believe Mr. Mamdani is an extremist. Fox News anchors and Republicans may label him a radical communist, but his platform clearly shows he’s not. He is a socialist, and in Europe, he might even be considered a social Democrat. Someone who wants to raise taxes on the rich, make buses free, and build housing. He’s on the left, but that’s where it ends. Most of Mamdani’s proposals are not, by any standards, extreme or unthinkable, and comparing him to Trump in that matter would be wrong. In America, however, someone like Mamdani is easily considered an extreme leftist by many voters, just because Trump shifted the Overton Window so far to the right.

While I believe that would make Mamdani, or any candidate with his platform, an unviable candidate for the national level, I do think that his ideas will become extremely valuable for Democrats. Not because they will necessarily adopt all his ideas - Polling showed that his ideas are popular with voters across the US. -, but because his ideas help shift the narrative back to the center and away from the far-right.

Be it Medicare for all, or taxing the rich. Americans like the ideas of Mamdani or Bernie Sanders, but they will remain ideas only if they stay out of the public debate. So Mamdani might be able to do what Bernie Sanders, a close ally of Mamdani, did ahead of the 2024 election. Sanders may have lost the primary to Biden, but his relentless push for his ideas that critics labeled as radical helped move the needle to the left. After winning the primary, Joe Biden ended up adopting many of Sanders’ ideas to different extents. He worked to erase college debt for millions of Americans, invested record sums in green energy, and worked with Sanders to cap exploding health care costs.

Someone like Mayor-elect Mamdani might not be the solution for Democrats on the national level, but the Democratic Party needs strong fighters on the left. Because if they don’t counter the Republicans’ increasingly radical platform, they risk having to battle an Overton Window of public perception that moves further and further to the right.

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The Death Penalty & Democracy

Last year, I wrote an extensive report about how the United States still uses the Death Penalty in all its cruelty and injustice.

In that report, I also noted that the US is a bit of an outlier, as most other Western nations have long abolished capital punishment, and the leading executioners in the world are usually authoritarian regimes. Nevertheless, other developed Democracies, like Japan, retain the Death penalty. So, I wondered, does a well-functioning democracy have an impact on whether or not a nation uses the death penalty?

The following chart is my attempt to answer this question. It shows all 167 countries on the Economist’s Democracy Index, ranked from a perfect Democracy (score of 10) to a total dictatorship (score of 0), as well as each nation’s use of the death penalty. Countries, which are colored red, retain the death penalty, though the number of actual executions can vary greatly. Blue dots mark countries that have either completely or de facto abolished it.

Note: Keep in mind that the Democracy Index is from 2024. As a result, events like Donald Trump’s attacks on the institutions of democracy or regime changes in places like Nepal are not yet reflected in the chart.

As you can see, most countries that still use the death penalty are located in the lowest quartile of the Democracy Index and are classified as “authoritarian regimes”. Nations like China, Iran, or Saudi Arabia use the death penalty as a tool of brutal enforcement that keeps the opposition in check. They also frequently lead Amnesty’s yearly list of nations with the highest number of executions.

The middle and the top of the Democracy Index are dominated by countries that have abolished the death penalty. Nevertheless, there are still high-scoring Democracies that retain it. Almost all of these nations - Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, or Singapore - are located in Asia, where the public still views the death penalty more favorably. There is only a single Western nation where that is the case, only one, where a majority of the people still believe in the death penalty: The United States.

No other Western nation, no other NATO or EU member, still uses or approves of capital punishment. Most of them have abolished it long ago, citing systemic injustice, the finality of imperfect verdicts, and moral issues. The abolishment of the death penalty has even become a binding requirement for new EU member states. In the United States, however, the method is still used every year, often under cruel and scandalous circumstances.

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A Significant Difference

While some democracies hold on to the death penalty and some authoritarian regimes like Venezuela or Niger have abolished it, a clear trend becomes visible when we calculate the average Democracy-Index Score of a) nations that have abolished the death penalty and b) nations that retain it.

Abolitionist countries achieve an average Democracy Index score of 5.5, compared to 3.6 for Retentionist countries. In other words, Abolitionists have a 54% higher democracy rating.

High-ranking democracies may lead the charge in the abandonment of the most unjust form of justice in the world, but holdouts remain. In recent years, it was mostly countries from the African continent with authoritarian or hybrid regimes that have moved to abolish the death penalty, but the 2020s have been stagnant.

As nations continue to drift into authoritarianism, progress towards a world that is liberated from the death penalty will remain scarce. The people who fight against this injustice, from the activists of Amnesty International to the Pope, will face an uphill battle, perhaps for years to come.

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The Labor Government of PM Keir Starmer is rapidly losing support. Starmer’s unpopularity and low trust in Britain’s other traditional party, the conservative Tories, have given other parties room to grow, but the current electoral system in the UK may be unfit for such a moment. The debate for electoral reform is already underway.

For a while, it looked like the far-right UK Reform party was the only political party that could benefit from the decline in trust British voters have in their traditional parties. Reform overtook both the Tories and the Labor Party and is now comfortably ahead, polling at 29%. This is where the UK’s electoral system plays a crucial role. In a system with a proportional vote, where each party gets the percentage of votes it won in the election as seats in parliament, Reform would still be well short of a majority and would have to seek a coalition partner. But in the UK’s current First-past-the-post (FPTP) system, where each constituency votes for a member to send to parliament, some parties get a significantly lower share of seats than their nationwide result would grant them, just by not being concentrated in a certain geographical area. The winner of the election, on the other hand, tends to overperform its vote share. In 2024, the Labor Party won a clear and outright majority of seats, despite winning “just” 35% of the vote. This system is similar to the one used in the elections for the US House of Representatives, although it works better in the US, as there are only two major parties. For a long time, this might have been true for the UK as well, with the Conservatives and Labor dominating the political landscape, but as polls show a closer race between multiple parties, the current electoral landscape is at risk of becoming unrepresentative of the will of the people. This already rang true in 2024, an election that produced the least proportional result in British history.

The public debate on electoral reform is picking up steam. A recent poll showed that 49% of Britons support switching to a proportional system, while only 26% want to keep the current FPTP system. A majority of voters from the Greens, New Democrats, Reform, and Labor all support the switch.

Labor currently holds governing power, and while the pressure on Starmer to pass electoral reform - his own party supports it - has been building, the Prime Minister has so far not weighed in on the issue. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that the system greatly favored Labor in the 2024 election, but now Reform is leading the polls and might win a single-party majority due to FPTP.

You can switch between the pie charts below to get a grasp of how starkly different the results of a general election would look if the UK were to move to a proportional electoral system (results are based on current polls).

As you can see, Reform UK gets a comfortable majority with 54% of all seats with 30% of the vote under the current electoral system. That majority fades away when looking at the proportional distribution.

Under this system, no single party would currently reach a majority, and a coalition would have to be formed, something many Brits are wary about, as about half of them still prefer single-party rule. But the stability that this system promised voters has not materialized in recent years. While coalitions between two or more parties can create a lot of headaches, they also offer chances to compromise and find solutions that a broad majority of voters support. Under the current electoral system, a party with 30% of support can govern without having to make concessions to the other parties and their voters.

As you can see in the election chart above, there are two probable coalitions that currently fall just short of a slim majority under the proportional system. The Reform + Conservative coalition would get around 48% of the seats (27% of British voters say they support such a coalition, while 59% oppose it).

The alternative on the opposite side, with the center-left coalition of Labor, New Democrats, and the Green Party, could be the other viable option. Based on current polls, the three parties also fall short of a majority with 47% of the seats threshold. Nevertheless, British Voters have a more favorable view of this center-left coalition (38% support it, 46% oppose it). Both coalitions are probable and could have a good chance of winning a majority in a proportional election. Based on the current polls, however, both would need the Scottish National Party as a kingmaker.

These almost evenly balanced coalitions in the proportional scenario show that the UK has not drifted that far to the right, as the seat projections of the FPTP system might suggest. Britons are evenly split between parties of the right and parties of the left.

Starmer has the political power to trigger electoral reform and move the UK towards a fairer and proportional system. The “First Past The Post” system always greatly favors the party that’s ahead in the polls, which often leads to that party winning an outright majority. Then you have a party in power that doesn’t want to change the electoral system that brought them there in the first place, but Starmer’s and Labor’s electoral chances look dire, so they have no political gain in keeping the FPTP system. On the contrary, they have all the reasons to scrap it.

Local Representation

The current FPTP electoral system in the UK, while flawed, also has an important perk. The constituency-based system ensures that every local constituency has an elected member in parliament. A representative they can contact or talk to. Someone who has to face the same local voters for re-election, creating a sense of community and, by that, a more participatory political culture. So, should the British therefore forget about any proportional election systems? Not quite, because there are ways to combine the perks of both systems.

The German electoral system is proportional. Each party receives its share of seats based on the percentage it won nationwide. Yet, Germany also has electoral districts with local representatives that are elected simultaneously with a FPTP system. How does this work?

Voters can make two crosses when electing a new parliament in Germany. With the first cross, they elect a representative for their district to parliament, just like under the UK’s FPTP system. The seat allocation of that first vote would be disproportionate to the actual nationwide result of the election, which is determined by the 2nd cross voters make on their ballot. To ensure that both votes fulfill their purpose, parliament is first filled with almost all candidates who won the direct mandate in their district. Then the seats are filled up with listed members of the parties until the final seat allocation matches the proportional result of the election. I say almost all candidates who won their district get a seat, because there was a rule change. The “adding up” of seats until the seat allocation was proportional to the election results caused the German parliament to grow in size until it became the 2nd largest parliament in the world. The last SPD-led Government of Olaf Scholz passed an electoral reform that capped the maximum seats in parliament to 630 to stop this costly trend.

In Germany, parties also need to surpass the 5% threshold to gain representation in parliament. A rule that mainly exists to avoid a splintering political landscape with dozens of parties in parliament. There is, however, a rule that allows a party to secure its percentage of seats, even if it fails to meet the 5%-threshold, as long as its local candidates win three or more constituencies in the FPTP vote. Such a rule would protect regional parties in the UK, like the SNP or the PLC (Party of Wales).

In the current era, after Labor Conservatives ’ long dominance, the UK is rapidly evolving towards the multi-party landscape we know from Germany. To ensure fair elections that represent the will of the people, it might be time to move to a similar system of proportionality. One that reflects the national vote while also maintaining local representation.

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