How Democrats Can Win

Here are links to the information that was covered and/or referenced.

We started with a half-hour talk by Ezra Klein (originally recorded before last November’s election):

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/democrats-liberalism-elections-crick.html

We then moved to the state of democracy in the U.S. As I then mentioned, there are three organizations that rate the state of democracy in countries around the world: Freedom House in the US, a think-tank associated with the Economist magazine in England, and V-Dem in Stockholm. The 2026 V-Dem report was recently released. One quick note from the Executive Summary of the V-Dem report says it all: “The USA loses its long-term status as a liberal democracy – for the first time in over 50 years.” Here is a link to the full 2026 V-Dem Report on the 2025 State of Democracy across the world:

https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf

And then we talked about the need to do much more than just elect Democrats. Here is the link to the article noting that we cannot rely on the democracy we had to protect us! It failed us before and it can and will fail again! We must build the democracy that we were promised, but that was never fully delivered! (Thanks to Margaret Babcock for pointing me to this article!)

https://antiauthoritarianplaybook.substack.com/p/how-democracies-win

And here is a bonus: the 2026 state of democracy report from Freedom House (“The Growing Shadow of Autocracy”); although not quite as damning of American democracy as V-Dem, it notes the serious decline in the state of democracy in the U.S.: “Among countries rated Free, the United States, Bulgaria, and Italy have experienced the year’s largest declines. In the United States, an escalation in both legislative dysfunction and executive dominance, growing pressure on people’s ability to engage in free expression, and the new administration’s moves to undermine anticorruption safeguards all contributed to the negative score change. The United States lost 3 points on the report’s 100-point scale, bringing its net decline since 2005 to 12 points, more than any other country rated Free during the same period except for Nauru and Bulgaria.” Here is a link to the full report:

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2026/growing-shadow-autocracy#democracy-and-freedom-will-endure