Democracy reform in 2025 and beyond

The results of the 2024 election — from Donald Trump's victory to the failure of democracy reform efforts like ranked-choice voting and citizen-led redistricting — took some in the pro-democracy movement by surprise. How could voters make decisions up and down the ballot that would weaken democracy? Scott Warren argues that it's because "democracy" has become too closely associated with the Democratic Party. He laid out the case in a Stanford Social Innovation Review article published shortly after the election and joins us on the show to talk about it.

Warren is a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently leading an initiative focused on exploring, researching, and convening a pro-democracy conservative agenda in the US, with a short-term focus on election trust. He founded the civics education organization Generation Citizen and led the organization from 2009-2020.

In the interview, Warren discusses how Generation Citizen's funding change after Donald Trump won the 2016 election and how he and his colleagues at SNF Agora are traveling across the country to bring conservatives into the democracy reform movement. Finally, we discuss how to talk about democracy in a way that resonates across the political spectrum — the subject of a Democracy Takes piece Warren wrote with Lilia Dashevsky.