A federal judge found probable cause the Trump administration willfully defied a court order on deportation flights to El Salvador. The contempt probe intensified this week as the judge presses for whistleblower and DOJ testimony on who ordered the flights and how the government responded.
That case, along with related questions about contempt referrals, DOJ follow-through, and the treatment of people sent to prisons abroad, are among the scenarios covered in Metaculus's U.S. Democracy Threat Index, a forecasting series we built with Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group. We just added a $10,000 prize pool to incentivize accurate forecasts.
What the index tracks
Bright Line Watch is a nonpartisan group of political scientists from Dartmouth and other institutions who have monitored democratic norms since 2017. They selected 39 indicators across six areas: electoral integrity, political rights, civil liberties, rule of law, institutional checks and balances, and information integrity.
Each question asks whether a specific, observable event will occur during a two-year period. Historical data has been backfilled for 2021–2024 to provide base rates. Current forecasting periods are 2025–26 and 2027–28.
Example questions
- Will executive officials defy federal court orders?
- Will the DOJ file criminal charges against journalists under the Espionage Act?
- Will 10+ presidential affiliates receive pardons?
- Will any U.S. authority refuse to recognize the citizenship of U.S.-born children of non-citizen parents for 90+ days?
- Will courts block election certification based on fraud claims?
- Will the sitting president's net worth reach 4x its pre-election value?
How the index works
The index value is the average probability across all 39 questions. Higher values indicate greater predicted threat to democratic institutions; lower values indicate greater predicted resilience. As news breaks and forecasters update, the index moves (or doesn't), providing signal about which events actually affect institutional health.
Prize structure
$7,500 will be awarded based on prediction accuracy from December 12, 2025 onward.
$2,500 will be awarded based on periodic snapshots timed to coincide with Bright Line Watch's surveys of political scientists and the American public. This enables direct comparison between Metaculus forecasters and expert opinion.
The first snapshot is January 1, 2026, so forecasts should be submitted before then.
Is this actually meaningfully the case? As far as I can see, this is basically a group of left-wing academics (some of whom literally worked for the Democrats!) who assembled a list of things they think the current administration might do and called them Threats to Democracy. They omitted any questions which might paint the current administration in a more favourable light, or the prior democrat administration in a negative light.
The scoring also seems pretty biased. For example, for the question about whether the DoJ would override normal procedures to protect the President's family, the Biden Administration is given a (positive) scoring of 'no', even though the DoJ tried to give the President's son a sweetheart plea deal that would protect him from charges of being a drug user in possession of a firearm (and potential lengthy prison sentence), and whistleblowers say the prosecution deliberately slow-walked the process and leaked information to the defense.
Even the data presentation seems biased. For example, on this question, the Biden administration is scored as 'yes' (i.e. 100%) for 2023-2024. Yet for some reason the bar for 100% is shorter than Trump's bar for 40%?