So far, the biggest successes against President Donald Trump’s second-term assault on democracy have come not from Congress and the Supreme Court, but more unusual sources: lower-court judges, “No Kings” protests, a Disney subscriber boycott, and Trump’s own indiscipline and incompetence.

After the 2025 elections, we can add the states to the list. And in some ways, this avenue of resistance may prove to be the most consequential one (at least until the 2026 midterms).

Tuesday’s election results have, specifically, created a major barrier to one of Trump’s most dangerous authoritarian ambitions — an attempted one-sided national gerrymander. But this major development should also be an opportunity for most people, who focus on national politics, to evaluate the power of state governments. The United States is unusual among backsliding democracies in the strength of its federal system, and that creates some major opportunities for institutional pushback that may not have been possible elsewhere.

This is somewhat ironic: For most of American history, states (most notably in the South) have been places where pockets of authoritarianism could exist in a nationally democratic society.

Yet today, as the national government moves in an authoritarian direction, the comparatively major powers invested in states — like control over election administration — are now creating opportunities for small-d democratic to resist a national authoritarian power grab.

The biggest tangible election consequence of the 2025 elections for democracy

For much of his second term, Trump has been preoccupied with the threat of losing the midterm elections. Convinced that such a defeat would spell disaster for his presidency, he has pushed state-level Republicans to engage in a highly unusual round of mid-cycle redistricting: basically, a nationwide attempt to rig the maps in the GOP’s favor.

Of all the many anti-democratic things Trump has been doing, from illegally taking Congress’s power of the purse to abusing regulatory powers to try to silence late-night comedy hosts, this was probably the greatest immediate-term threat to the integrity of the electoral system itself.

Because election administration is almost entirely devolved to the states........

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