Forget the Swing States. Watch the Tipping Point States.

These are the places where citizens are fighting to open primaries, end gerrymanders, and depolarize our democracy.

Who among us doesn’t know America’s swing states? Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Every election season, organizers swarm them, and the mainstream media covers countless diners, state fairs, and person-on-the-street conversations throughout them. We appear to believe that the direction of America is appropriately decided by a quadrennial choice made by people living in these states. And who can deny it? The electoral math is inescapable. There are real stakes in how the swing states go.

But I’d argue that the real action deciding the future of America is happening in a different set of states. Call them the tipping-point states. These are the states where what is being contested is not who is elected but how they are elected — whether in gerrymandered districts or fair districts, for instance, or with or without party primaries, or with or without ranked-choice voting. These states matter so much because how we elect our leaders has an impact on who those leaders are likely to be and how they are incentivized to act.

We currently live in a world where we are whipsawed by the contrasting policies of the people elected to the presidency. President Biden could reorganize the whole of government around equity. President Trump can reorganize it around anti-wokeness. The next president will organize it around something else, and we’ll be whipsawed again. We are less and less governed by the smoothing, synthesizing and durable processes of congressional legislation. The stakes of our presidential choices are growing larger but are increasingly short-term, with the exception of the impact on Supreme Court policies.

I’ve come to believe that what really matters in our politics is this fact of being whipsawed and its origins in executive dominance over the legislative branch. This dynamic reduces the viability of our mode of government over the long term. The whipsawing destroys the stability that businesses and civil society organizations need for planning. It erodes the strength that derives from stability. It threatens freedom as constitutional boundaries are less and less respected.

Changing this dynamic depends not on the short-term matter of who we elect but on the long-term one of whether we can change how we elect them. Can we get rid of party primaries, depolarize our selection processes, and ensure that elected officials understand themselves to be accountable to the whole population in their district, not an activist subgroup?

This is where the tipping-point states come in. In states across the land, people are contesting the structural facts that deliver the polarized, back-and-forth dynamics of our politics. The states where people are most actively attempting to make changes to election mechanisms are ones with (a) a one-party governing trifecta and (b) a ballot-initiative process. They are:

Democratic trifectas:
California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Oregon and Washington.

Republican trifectas:
Florida, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.

Add one more state to this list: Alaska. In 2020, when the state had a Republican trifecta and a ballot-initiative process, the people won passage of a new system, called Top 4, that has inspired Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature to work in coalition, breaking through partisan gridlock.

If we want to change the unfolding fate of America — if we want to tip our democracy onto a better path — we should spend at least as much of our attention on tipping-point states as we do on swing states. Across this list of states, citizens are organizing to get rid of party primaries. Alaska succeeded. Montana came close in 2024. Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and Oregon are making the attempt in 2026. If a critical mass of them succeed, Alaska’s more positive, less polarized, pragmatic politics would begin to go national. In other tipping-point states, such as South Dakota and North Dakota, there are MAGA GOP efforts pushing in the other direction, to reject open primaries or tighten party registration requirements. This is a true battle for the heart of America.

Why are one-party rule and ballot initiative processes the necessary features of tipping-point states? In states with trifectas, election reforms won’t change the balance of partisan power in the state. Consequently, change is less threatening than it would be in a swing state, and broader coalitions for change can be built.

But why is the ballot initiative process necessary? Because incumbents are rarely willing to change election systems by which they got elected. That’s like asking someone to rewrite their own job description, when they owe their role to the existing rules. Who is likely to do that? We, the people, have to take the work of driving change into our own hands.

While the media may not pay much attention to the tipping-point states, the Republican party certainly is. The MAGA GOP — knowing that these states have the power to change the dynamics of our politics — is fighting to preserve its control of our political institutions, for instance by using legislative control in trifecta states to try to close Republican primaries, and to reduce participation in nominee selection to those who are registered as Republicans. Texas has a lawsuit to close GOP primaries; Arkansas Republicans attempted to limit their primary to registered Republicans by lawsuit. South Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Alabama have seen or are seeing legislative efforts to require party registration and/or closed primaries. Louisiana has passed legislation to end the all-party primary for some of its offices. Texas has also, of course, launched a mid-decade redistricting. This has led tipping-point-state California to retreat from its own anti-gerrymandering reforms.

The battle underway in tipping-point states could be where the future of America will be decided. Right now, this battle is playing out away from the limelight, while most people’s time, talent, treasure, and energy are given to the frothy, frenzied shadow-puppet play of our biennial elections. It’s a crying shame. A tipping-point state is a terrible thing to overlook.

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