Year in Review, 2020

Reflecting back on 2020, the “doom loop” description of American politics that Senior Fellow Lee Drutman introduced in his new book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, proved prophetic. This year had more than its fair share of doom loops: a presidential impeachment, once-in-a-century pandemic and massive government failure, a reckoning with race and policing, negative partisanship, and a defeated candidate's refusal to accept the results of a fair election.

The Political Reform program’s work focused on many of those issues in 2020, from the clashes of our two-party system to the ways that preemption law constrained a coherent public health response to the pandemic. We wrote about political violence, misinformation, congressional failures, systemic racism, and our shifting national security. But at the same time, we also saw many reasons for optimism in our field and our work: Incremental reforms, such as ranked-choice voting and small-donor matching systems, are still taking place at the state and local levelS. We followed the expansion of early voting and vote-by-mail, as well as the execution of what election officials called “the most secure [election] in American history.” And across the country, we studied the remarkable resurgence of engagement, local organizing, political participation, and civic tech.

Our annual year in review report, which you can read here, summarizes the work we’ve done in each of these areas, as well as our current thinking on all things political reform for 2021.