Trusting state governments now vs trust in a multi party system

State governments hold a lot of the political power in the American political system. It's a principle that most Americans hold dear, and not without reason. You just try to create a system that will give most people the decision they want for 330 million people. Not so simple. It's a lot easier to do this with a couple million people, sometimes with a couple tens of millions but even California is only 12.5% of the population of the US and decentralizes a lot of the power to their counties.

But state governments aren't that great at being politically inclusive systems. Most of them are under a trifecta giving one party or another majorities in the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. Most have very poorly contested elections, thousands of the legislative positions go uncontested every year, some state executive positions like auditor do too. Judgeships, particularly in the South and Appalachian areas like Pennsylvania are openly partisan elections, despite the raison d'etre of a judge providing impartial judgement to all. 

But that isn't an inevitability, and changing that could bring a mountain of much needed trust in states, where most people have become either apathetic or so polarized they can't think straight. It would also give people a reason to trust more of the powers into the states which currently vested in the federal government which make the latter often a very controversial officer and it's officers the subject of so much criticism with few institutional constitutional checks on their powers that aren't partisan (such as an auditor general).

If you think of your state as corrupt and malfunctioning but you still need things like a supplement to your pension, you are likely to try to get the feds to do it for you. If your governor has just sold off Barack Obama's senate seat, you want the FBI to charge them. If you think of people shifting around money to avoid taxes which provide things that most people agree should be had but the hodgepodge of taxes in convoluted manners and rates and exceptions makes it impossible to collect on them, then you may try to get the feds to create the tax themselves. 

Decentralizing this function into states needs a multi party system. But thankfully, that's often easier to do well than it is to do it for the federal government. Take for example the district magnitude of a legislature. Take North Dakota, recently the subject of a big oil boom, with 762 thousand people, and 94 members of their state legislature. It's easy to divide it up into say 18 districts with 42 thousand people each on average. 

The median state doesn't exist because the US has 50 states, resulting in a tie, but on either side of that tie lies Louisiana and Kentucky, so substituting them as a more representative sample gives a fairly decent size for a state as a diverse unit. Louisiana with 105 legislators and 4.65 million people, divided into 21 districts of 5 members each, provides 221 thousand people per legislator. 

Most states have some form of direct democracy. All states but Delaware for some reason have a requirement that the state constitution be amended through the approval of a vote in a referendum, and most regularly put questions for the voters. The people can directly propose these laws or constitutional amendments in about half the states. Some more allow a veto referendum to nullify a state law. 

About half allow recall, and importantly for this, recall of the executive. Recall is supposed to be the means by which you rid yourself of a person you dislike for political or policy reasons but who haven't done anything wrong by the law or by the basic concepts of good morals and competence, which most of what you dislike about a politician is a political question not a criminal question or even one that could or should be one to get you impeached for. Parliamentary systems have recall easily for a prime minister as they are the ones who elected the prime minister but the governor (or other state executives) are elected directly and so to motion them out by a no confidence motion would be like a coup d'état against the people who elected them if it was allowed for just any reason by any standard. A political system mostly focused on the states with vibrant multi party democracy means that the proper means to remove a political officer will affect the most influential people in a government, not needing to extend against a president who can't be recalled, but has much more mitigated powers in a multi party system and so can be much lower profile. 

The governor's power of the veto also becomes even more limited by this. They have to constantly stay on the side of the people, potentially nullified by a recall election, and must calculate that their veto will help them, and not just protect their department or policies over the heads of the state legislature. And the people might vote to create the law themselves or on proposal of a legislative referal. 

What could happen to the feds in all this? It's not always so clear, but if the federal government didn't have to keep these powers for fear that a state government won't implement it themselves, they could decentralize a lot of the money, tax revenue, projects, and admin to states. Even the military could to a degree, the US becoming mostly dependent on calling up a few hundred state national guardsmen at a time for a peacekeeping mission or for training or as advisors to the Kurds or similar projects. The European Union has a budget of about 150 billion euro, which is close to the exchange rate of the US at the moment I write this, and over 85% of that is either a farm subsidy or a payment to help build say a freeway in Romania or other infrastructure projects. The US might not necessarily have this, they may just leave it to states to do this, perhaps setting up more compacts under the compact clause to help organize this among regions or allowing for the states to coordinate something that would likely be affected by a race to the bottom like environmental regulations. 

150 billion euro for 500 million people is about 99 billion for 330 million people, and leaving 15% of that generously for the remainder of the admin federally would be just under 15 billion dollars, overseeing a civil service that proportional to the population would be about 22 thousand 440 people. The American president appoints 1200 people by Senate consent, which would be about one appointee for every 20 employees. About 6000 people are appointed politically according to the Plum Book, leaving about two appointees for every 7 employees. I drive on single roads that in a day can have that many people driving on it. Imagine if that few could competently manage an entire country nine times the population of Canada and the fourth largest by area.

The Congressional parties too would have trouble being so openly partisan and can focus more so on negotiating an agreement, knowing they basically never would have a majority on their own nor the majorities to elect a president unilaterally ever again. 

Say what you will about Commissioners like Ursula von der Leyen, but if you have a political system where few people remember her and will not ultimately make the history books for most subject areas, and no policies would be named after her, or inspire protests around the world like George Bush did, that would be a testament to power sharing and how the will of a single individual doesn't have to shape history despite basically being the President of Europe and almost half a billion people. A multi party system that allows for people to not think about gaining sole power for their faction is a huge help with this, and allows for the trust to remain local and most controllable by the people.