A Shocking Third Report Gives U.S. Democracy Another Terrible Score

That’s the bad, and really horrendous, news. There is some good news, though. V-Dem says in 70 percent of the cases where a country was becoming more autocratic, that process has been reversed. The recipe for renewing democracy usually involves: other institutions checking the executive, particularly courts; an organized civil society mobilizing people against the regime; and aggressively contesting the autocrat in the first election after he takes power. All of that is happening here. Lower-level federal judges have long been issuing rulings against the administration. The U.S. Supreme Court is finally showing some signs it will no longer be a lapdog for Trump, although it remains very conservative and partisan. I see more hope in the robust grassroots resistance, such as the anti–Immigration and Customs Agency mobilization in Minnesota and the upcoming next round of No Kings protests on March 28. And Democrats seem likely to do very well in this fall’s elections, as they did in November 2025.

Freedom House too emphasized that the U.S still has competitive elections. And Bright Line argues that things are already getting slightly better. While Freedom House and V-Dem assess democracy yearly, Bright Light does surveys a few times a year. In April 2025, when universities and law firms were capitulating to the president every day and Elon Musk was single-handedly dismantling government agencies, the scholars ranked U.S. democracy at a 53. The increase to 57 from Bright Line isn’t because Trump has become less radical. Instead, “experts see improvements in judicial checks on the executive and not using the military for political purposes, which may reflect the Supreme Court tariff decision, and the end of domestic deployments of the National Guard.”

So all is not lost. America can restore its democracy. But we should not downplay what these reports show. Bright Line shows months of democratic decline, V-Dem a year, Freedom House two decades. All are correct. Trump is the immediate cause of this decline, but we had to have voters and a political system that empowered him. Black people, women, and other groups had nowhere near full democratic rights in the United States in 1965. They do now. But Trump has destroyed so many other parts of our democracy that a serious organization can say American democracy is as weak as it was in the civil rights era. It’s ugly, and time is running out. If JD Vance succeeds Trump, we might be headed down one more rung to electoral autocracy.