What does a democracy veteran and former Secretary of the State of Connecticut make of this moment — and what comes next?

A new episode of This Old Democracy features Miles Rapoport, who has four decades of democracy reform to draw on — and a lot of reasons to stay optimistic In a moment when the democratic project feels genuinely imperiled, it helps to hear from someone who has been in the fight for four decades and still wakes up ready for more. The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Miles Rapoport — community organizer, state legislator, Connecticut Secretary of the State, former president of Demos, former national director of Common Cause, and current executive director of 100% Democracy, an initiative he co-founded to promote universal voting. Over the course of an expansive conversation with host Micah Sifry, Rapoport traces an arc from the antiwar movement to the ballot box to the boardrooms of national advocacy, and explains why — despite everything — he remains an optimist. Rapoport pulls no punches about where we are: "There are zero guardrails on what Donald Trump and the Trump administration and the movement behind him would like to do to restrict and take over our democracy. So that's the worst of times." But he balances that assessment with a characteristic refusal to despair: "[A]s the song goes, don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Because I do think that there are lots of ways in which people are working, as you are, Micah, to make democracy better. And I think that's a really important thing. I am an optimist on this question, because I think that the forces to preserve and improve democracy will ultimately prevail." Rapoport's path from Vietnam War protester to Connecticut state legislator was not a straight line, but it had an internal logic. After years of community organizing — working to empower people and make government more responsive — he watched the Reagan revolution demonstrate, with painful clarity, that electoral power could undo in months what organizing had won over years. The answer, for him and for many in the community organizing world at that moment, was to enter the arena directly. He ran for the Connecticut state legislature in 1984, won, and was assigned almost immediately to the elections committee — which he would eventually chair. Ten years of immersion in election law and voting rights policy followed. "It's not a super straight line, but there is definitely a through line... the idea that there is tremendous inequality economically and socially and racially in the country, and at the same time, our democratic institutions are failing to deal with it." Rapoport's run for Secretary of the State in 1994 offers one of the most compelling real-world demonstrations of what fusion voting actually does. Rapoport, a Democrat, was cross-endorsed by A Connecticut Party, the independent, centrist party that ex-Republican Lowell Weicker had created in 1990.  When the votes were counted, Rapoport had received 365,000 votes on the Democratic line — and 125,000 more on the "A Connecticut Party" line. He won the race by 2,237 votes. "Absent A Connecticut party, no way I would ever have been elected." That experience didn't just help him win. It shaped how he governed. One out of every four of his voters had come to him on a third-party line — moderate, old-line Republicans who crossed over based on shared values around the income tax fight and civic reform. He knew who they were and felt accountable to them. "I definitely was more bipartisan than I might have been — more conscious of making sure that the people who voted for me on the Connecticut Party line felt good about it." To critics who argue that fusion is too complicated for voters or too difficult to administer, Rapoport has a direct response: "It's not only not rocket science, it's not even algebra. It's just third grade math. You can vote for a candidate on one line and on another line, and at the end of the night you add the two votes together to get a total." He adds, with characteristic directness: "I'm u