Modern American politics has many problems. Building on my recent book, “Aligning Election Law,” I want to focus on one of these flaws: misalignment between what the government does and what people want it to do. This kind of misalignment is unfortunately pervasive. Consider many of the Trump administration’s flagship policies. By a margin of about ten percentage points, people oppose ICE raids on workplaces to find undocumented immigrants. By a slightly larger margin, people object to National Guard deployments to cities to fight crime. The administration’s tariffs are even more unpopular, incurring the disapproval of about three-fifths of Americans. Roughly that fraction of the public also rejects the administration’s main legislative achievement, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” about taxes and spending.

Nor is this pattern anything new. Martin Gilens compiled survey responses about federal policies from the 1980s to the 2000s. Over this period, the average level of support for federal measures was only 52 percent. Many federal actions were opposed by substantial majorities of respondents. Similarly, Devin Caughey and Christopher Warshaw tracked state-level policy and public opinion from 1935 to 2020. Over this swath of U.S. history—essentially the entire era of opinion polling—state policies matched the views of just 55 percent of respondents, on net. Countless state policies were disliked by most people subject to them.

Misalignment at this scale threatens American democracy. The crux of democracy—the meaning of the term—is that the people rule. But the people don’t genuinely rule if their policy preferences are systematically ignored. Then the true rulers are those whose policy views are heeded: above all, individuals at the extremes of the ideological distribution, proponents of the status quo, and the affluent. To be sure, democracy doesn’t require perfect alignment on every issue and at every instant. But it does demand, at least, rough alignment on most issues, most of the time. And in this respect, modern American democracy is often deficient.

Rampant misalignment is a legal as well as a democratic problem. The U.S. Constitution guarantees to every state a “Republican Form of Government.” This is a system rooted in popular sovereignty: government by and for the people, in whom all political power is vested. Popular sovereignty is hardly present, however, when popular opinion is persistently defied. The Supreme Court (especially the Warren Court) has also recognized alignment as a value of constitutional stature. Legislatures “should be … collectively responsive to”—that is, aligned with—“the popular will.” So when a litigant alleges that “the institutions of state government [don’t] represent fairly all the people”—in that these institutions are misaligned—“the general presumption of constitutionality” no longer applies.

The law could do a good deal to improve alignment. Sympathetic courts could authorize claims based directly on the misalignment caused by certain practices: for example, partisan gerrymandering and some voting restrictions. By the same token, courts could treat the effective advancement of alignment as a sound justification for policies (like campaign finance regulations) challenged on other grounds. True, the Roberts Court is highly unlikely to take this advice. But the Roberts Court won’t be around forever, and other Courts (like that led by Chief Justice Warren) have been much more receptive to the judicial promotion of alignment.

Courts are also far from the only potentially aligning actors. Congress could curb partisan gerrymandering, facilitate voting, provide generous public financing, and invigorate the Voting Rights Act. In fact, Congress almost did adopt these reforms in 2022. State legislatures could enact most of these policies, too. In recent years, some of these bodies have been surprisingly willing to take aligning steps, for instance by passing state voting rights acts. When politicians refuse to act, moreover, they can often be circumvented. Voter initiatives are available in about half the states and are how several independent redistricting commissions have been established. Even private individuals can further alignment without involving the government. To illustrate, I helped launch a website, TrueViews, that displays public opinion on dozens of issues at multiple geographic levels. Evidence shows that, when legislators learn what their constituents really think, more accurate representation ensues.

Misalignment, then, is a major problem caused by many forces. Advocates of alignment, though, also have many tools at their disposal. For the sake of American democracy, few tasks are as urgent as honing them—and putting them to use.