On the latest episode of This Old Democracy, Micah Sifry sits down with Jeff Timmer—a veteran Republican strategist turned outspoken defender of democratic norms—for a conversation that is equal parts diagnosis, warning, and blueprint for reform.

Timmer spent three decades inside the Republican Party, serving as executive director of the Michigan GOP and advising major campaigns, before becoming a senior figure at the Lincoln Project and co-founder of Republicans and Independents for Biden. What makes this episode especially compelling is that Timmer is not just naming the problem of democratic backsliding—he's proposing a concrete structural response.

"I just want to save democracy."

Timmer embraces the label "Never Trumper," but he's clear that his break with today's GOP runs deeper than one individual. Trump, he argues, didn't invent the rot; he accelerated it. What was once a secular, chamber-of-commerce party drifted into a theologically driven and increasingly authoritarian force long before 2016. "The cancer has metastasized. There is no saving it," he said.

Looking toward 2026 and 2028, Timmer warns that the United States may not experience genuinely free and fair elections—not through ballot-box fraud, but through intimidation and suppression.

"We are not going to have free and fair elections in this country in 2026 or 2028."

At the heart of the episode is Timmer's argument for fusion voting—an old but powerful reform that allows multiple parties to nominate the same candidate and aggregate their votes. TImmer explains, "Fusion voting is a way people can cast a protest vote without throwing their vote away."

So what are Timmer and other like-minded patriots brewing up in Michigan? Timmer is helping build Michigan's Common Sense Party, a centrist party with a single plank: protect the Constitution, the rule of law, and democracy.

Michigan may be the testing ground, but the implications arenational. Litigation to overturn fusion voting bans is underway or imminent in several states.

Despite the gravity of his warnings, Timmer remains cautiously optimistic. "There are far more of us than there are of them—and we need to act like it."

The challenge now is ensuring that when the public is ready to assert democratic values, our electoral system is capable of reflecting that will.

RECOMMENDED LINKS:

Jeff Timmer's podcast: "A Republic If You Can Keep it"

https://a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it.blubrry.net/

This one should get people who care about philanthropy buzzing. In the latest episode of "This Old Democracy," host Micah Sifry and political scientist Daniel Stid have a provocative discussion about what philanthropy is getting right, and has gotten wrong, in the democracy space.

Stid is the former director of the Hewlett Foundation's U.S. Democracy Program and now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He offers a candid and critical assessment of the state of American democracy and the often-unintended consequences of philanthropic engagement in the political sphere.

Stid's view is that too much well-intentioned philanthropy has contributed to the hyper-polarization of American politics in the Trump era by funding advocacy for and against the administration. He argues that philanthropic funds have been (mis)used on both the right and the left: viz. Project 2025's governing agenda on one side, and the broad work to shape the electoral environment on the other.

Stid's most provocative argument is that the bulk of foundation spending—on highly visible issues like climate, criminal justice, or immigration—often funds advocates who "see no need to compromise and are pushing views that are really far outside the mainstream." This leads to a "tragedy of the commons," where actors doing what is "rational for them" (advancing their policy agenda) ultimately undermine the political system (the "commons") in which they operate.

Stid encourages philanthropies to develop a deeper, "more holistic conception of democracy," highlighting the Our Common Purpose report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund). In the OCP report, you'll find some innovative thinking on strengthening both civil society institutions and individual citizens in their communities, as well as an argument on why our nation needs both.

Advocates left and right will disagree with some of what Stid says. But for those who hold a simultaneous membership in Team Democracy, Stid gives you something to think about.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Daniel Stid's must-read Substack: The Art of Association

In the "This Old Democracy" episode featuring political scientist Daniel Schlozman, host Micah Sifry dives into the structural weaknesses plaguing American politics, a central theme in The Hollow Parties, which Schlozman co-authored with Sam Rosenfeld. The core argument they make is that modern political parties are "hollow shells"—top-heavy, poorly rooted, and disconnected from the everyday lives of citizens, leading to a profound crisis of democracy.

The conversation starts out with Schlozman and Sifry exploring the concept of movement anchors for political parties, and how that historically has worked for both major parties, albeit with different movement partners. For a long time, the Republican Party maintained a powerful alliance with the Christian Right and the Democratic Party had a robust anchor in organized labor. But Schlozman asserts that both movement anchors are much weaker now.

Amid this vacuum, Schlozman says that, "what Trump has done more effectively than Democrats is to take advantage of exactly the disorganization of civil society and figure out how to appeal to people who are not embedded in the same kinds of thick organizations, whereas Democrats have not done that."

Sifry underlines Schlozman's conclusion saying, Trump " has intuited how to be what I think Henry Timms referred to in his book on new power versus old power as the platform strongman."

The conversation ultimately steers toward solutions, directly addressing the push for systemic change. While Schlozman expresses skepticism that a multi-party system (like the kind advocated by Lee Drutman) is a silver bullet—citing the transnational nature of anti-establishment populism and hollow parties all over the world—he is more optimistic about institutional reform at the state and local levels. He sees these "laboratories of democracy" as fertile ground for experimenting with alternatives, which could include reforms like proportional representation or fusion voting, that might foster more responsive and civically-rooted parties.

The episode leaves listeners with a double-sided coin: Schlozman, who is first and foremost a political historian, argues that understanding history confirms that political actors can enact grand change for the better, but also that things can change for the worse. Ultimately, finding hope, he says, requires looking beyond the national "deep structural gloom" and embracing the hard, useful work of reforming our system from the ground up.

Give it a listen to hear some smart thinking and some healthy skepticism from one of America's most important scholars of contemporary and comparative politics.