When Americans first elected Donald Trump president in 2016, there were nearly 4 billion people living in nations where they could vote in fair and competitive elections.
Last year, when Trump took office again, this estimate had fallen by half, to barely above 2 billion.
In the intervening years, the number of people barred from voting within conventional dictatorships (or “closed autocracies”) increased from an estimated 1.74 billion to 2.27 billion. But most of the decline in people who can vote in fair and competitive elections can be attributed to the global rise of what I call electoral dictatorships, also known as “electoral autocracies.”
While elections are banned in conventional dictatorships, elections are regularly held in electoral dictatorships. But to ensure their continuous grip on power, the electoral dictators—who identify as presidents and prime ministers—hold uncompetitive and unfair elections after aggressively suppressing political opponents.
In 2016, an estimated 1.94 billion people lived in electoral dictatorships.
In 2025, 3.77 billion people did.
If Republicans retain control of Congress in the midterms, then an electoral dictatorship is likely to emerge in the United States.
Republicans and a few Democrats will likely move to pass the SAVE Act in 2027 as part of a budget reconciliation package or after eliminating the filibuster. Its requirements—like photo IDs and proof of citizenship—put greater barriers in the way of voting. Republicans are likely to also pursue the more draconian Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, which bans universal mail-in voting, requires proof of residency, and mandates states purge voter rolls every 30 days.
Republican-led Southern states have already adopted versions of the SAVE and MEGA Acts. Alongside gerrymandering and mass incarceration, this is the latest voter suppression effort to enshrine Republican electoral dictatorships in states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida that should be competitive with their relatively large Black, Brown, Asian, and progressive White populations.
White Americans, who witnessed or participated in this racist assault on Black democratic rights over the last decade, are now facing a resurgent assault on their own democratic rights. Assaults on Black rights have historically enlarged into assaults against the rights of White people by the very politicians claiming to be defending the rights of White people.
If Republicans keep control of Congress, Trump will remain totally unrestrained in 2027 and beyond. Electoral dictators usually command and unleash the country’s armed forces to sow fear among their political opponents. The Trump administration could send more federal troops and agents into U.S. streets, falsely claiming political opponents are breaking the law to justify harming and confining these citizens as they did immigrants of color.
Trump and his allies could continue to defund and censor independent media outlets while buying up more media companies, now that they control Fox News, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, CBS News, Meta, TikTok, X, and soon CNN.
Controlling the media is critical for electoral dictators who usually seek to build popular support to legitimize their rule. They build support through firehoses of propaganda in the media, particularly the great replacement theory that immigrants, Muslims, Black people, Jews, minoritized ethnic groups, queer people, and women are taking lives, livelihoods, elections, and nations. So, electoral dictators can present their suppression of everyone’s voting, civil, economic, and constitutional rights as defending majority and privileged groups, as securing the nation, as saving the nation, as making it great again.
By retaining control of Congress and increasing control of the media, Trump officials are likely to be less worried about damaging coverage of congressional investigations into their secret efforts to erect an electoral dictatorship. Take, as an example, the regime’s efforts over the last year to break into state voter databases and steal sensitive voter data on the pretext they are searching for “unlawful voters.”
An electoral dictatorship is the most sophisticated system of political domination: a dictatorship wrapped in a veneer of freedom.
Electoral dictators aim to dominate people who believe they are free.
Free since they can vote.
Free since their bigotry has been freed.
Free since they are not Black or a woman or an immigrant or queer or Native or Muslim or Jewish or a minoritized ethnic group.
Free since they have privileges.
Free since they live on the higher end of disparities.
Free since the electoral dictatorship is exacerbating these disparities and expanding their privileges.
Electoral dictators offer privileges in exchange for power. Their supporters take it, feeling free in their subjugation, believing in a secular demigod to protect their freedom.
Free since they do not bind their freedom to their power. The power to elect representatives of their interests. The power over their economic lives, over the means of production. They seemingly care more about the electoral dictator defending their privileges over others than about joining with those others to amass power over themselves. Perhaps because for the longest time in the United States, what made many White people feel free was that they had the privilege of not being enslaved.
Generations of Americans have emotionally bound their freedom to their privileges. Making their privileges their primary interests. The more privileges, the freer they feel. The fewer privileges, the less free they feel. Which is why the regime makes them feel free. Which is why they see equitable policy, diversity, civil rights, antiracism, multiculturalism, feminism, marriage equality, equal opportunity, democratic socialism, religious freedom, and especially repairing historic inequities—as attacks on their freedom.
Privilege is a relational concept. An administration can make it harder for men and White people overall to vote while making it easier for them to vote than women and Black people. The policies of an administration can increase socioeconomic racial disparities between White and Black people while both White and Black people find life becoming more unaffordable.
When a man or White person’s prime interest is privilege, whether they are doing better now matters less than whether they are doing better than that woman or Black person. Increased privileges can be a salve for diminished livelihoods.
On the midterm campaign trail, propagandists are continuing to cast U.S. elections as rigged by falsely claiming that Democrats are enabling immigrants, Black people, and Muslims to illegally vote or illegitimately run for office. These propagandists are setting the stage for a nationwide electoral dictatorship that delivers Trump’s unconstitutional reelection to a third term in 2028. To understand this possibility, Americans need only look at the global landscape of how electoral dictatorships emerged over the last decade.
The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits Trump from running for a third term. Well, the 1993 Russian Constitution prohibited a president from serving more than two consecutive four-year terms. But Vladimir Putin has been in power since 1999 through rigging elections, installing puppets, and orchestrating the amending of Russia’s constitution in 2008 and 2020. Putin’s ally, Alexander Lukashenko, has presided over Belarus since 1994, all the while driving out political opponents and rigging elections.
After a growing number of heads of African nations adhered to term limits between 2000 and 2015, there’s been a reversal. Fourteen heads of states in Africa dodged term limits and stayed in power for more than two terms over the last decade. In Central Asia, heads of state in Tajikistan (2016), Uzbekistan (2023), and Kazakhstan (2026) remained in office after changing constitutions and/or courts ignored constitutions.
President Sadyr Japarov of Kyrgyzstan tried it, but he was blocked this year by the nation’s Constitutional Court. Earlier this year Hungarians ousted one of Europe’s longest-standing electoral dictators, Viktor Orbán, who had ruled Hungary for sixteen years.
Article 152 of the 1983 El Salvador Constitution banned presidents from running for consecutive terms. After Nayib Bukele’s New Ideas party won a huge majority in legislative elections in 2021, his party replaced all 11 judges of the nation’s highest court. Months later, those judges ignored the clear text of the constitution and ruled Bukele could run again for president.
It is possible the U.S. Supreme Court could ignore the clear text of the U.S. Constitution and allow Trump to run for a third presidential term. After all, this is the same court that allowed him to run in 2024 after inciting an insurrection on January 6, 2021 when the 14th Amendment bars insurrectionists from running for president. After all, these are the same Republican justices who know they could lose their majority if Trump is not reelected and Democrats reform the court.
Trump supporters have floated him running for vice president in 2028. The U.S. Supreme Court could find a way to bless this move, even as the 12th Amendment clearly states vice presidents must be eligible to be president. He could install a puppet on the top of the ticket and rule the U.S. over the next four to eight years. Putin maintained his grip on power in Russia from 2008 to 2012 through his puppet, President Dmitry Medvedev.
But Republicans would likely need to maintain control of Congress to nonviolently keep Trump in power after 2028. Control over national legislatures and highest courts has been key to authoritarians erecting electoral dictatorships over the last decade. Which is to say, if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterm elections, then it could very well mean Trump won’t become an electoral dictator.
Trump is not on the ballot in November. The U.S. becoming an electoral dictatorship is.
