Jennifer Jones was sitting in Montrose Municipal Court in early January when she noticed something that didn’t seem right.
She witnessed a man in his 60s with multiple trespassing and camping charges receive a 10-day jail sentence. This individual, though, did not have an attorney — a right afforded under the Constitution to anyone facing jail time.
If Jones, a volunteer court-watcher, hadn’t been observing proceedings that day, nobody outside of the people involved with the case would have known what happened.
That’s because Montrose Municipal Court is not a “court of record” — meaning it keeps no written, audio or visual recording of court proceedings. The public, civil rights organizations and members of the media cannot watch court hearings virtually, or access video after the fact, and cannot request any transcripts or audio of the day’s docket.
It’s not clear how many municipal courts in Colorado are not courts of record. But court watchers say they believe Montrose to be the only court in the state that sentences people to jail and isn’t a court of record.
It’s examples like these that spurred Colorado lawmakers this month to introduce a bill that would bar municipal courts that are not courts of record from sending people to jail. House Bill 26-1134, titled “Fairness and Transparency in Municipal Court,” also clarifies that municipal court defendants have a right to counsel and that in-custody proceedings must be livestreamed for the public to view.
The legislation marks a second stab at codifying protections for municipal defendants after Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a similar bill last year. The governor, though, took issue with the part of the bill that sought to address sentencing disparities between municipal and state courts. A Colorado Supreme Court ruling settled that issue in December, leading bill sponsors this year to focus on the transparency elements from last year’s legislation.
“Justice dies in the dark,” said Rebecca Wallace, policy director for the Colorado Freedom Fund, an organization that helps people pay bail. “Montrose Municipal Court needs a light on it — this bill provides some of that light.”
If municipal courts have the same power to put people in jail as state courts, they must provide the same due process protections, said Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat and one of the bill’s sponsors.
Access to counsel is already a right for municipal defendants facing jail time — but that doesn’t mean it always happens.
In October 2024, The Denver Post reported that poor and unhoused individuals in custody in Grand Junction Municipal Court were frequently appearing in court without attorneys. This came to light because the Colorado Freedom Fund obtained hours of recordings of court proceedings. If Grand Junction hadn’t been a court of record, that would not have been possible.
Alida Soileau, a defense attorney who practices in Montrose, said she’s never heard the municipal court say that someone’s case qualifies for court-appointed counsel. She said she’s witnessed one occasion in which a defendant facing jail did not have an attorney.
“It’s the wild west,” she said in an interview.
Without recordings or transcripts, Wallace said it’s impossible for watchdog organizations like hers — or members of the media — to confirm such accounts and investigate further.
Chris Dowsey, Montrose’s city attorney, said the municipal court directs people to a written advisement on the right to an attorney when a case involves a possible jail sentence, and follows that up with an oral advisement.
“For each case, the judge confirms that the defendant has received one of those advisements of rights,” he said in a statement. “If they have not received such an advisement, the judge would give another oral advisement to that individual.”
Montrose city officials say they’re working on becoming a court of record.
Municipal Judge Thomas LeClaire told the City Council during a January meeting that he recommended the court make the change. Councilmembers supported the idea, saying the pending state legislation made it a good time to get ahead of the curve. Officials estimated it could happen as soon as this spring.
Montrose Municipal Court needs only minimal investment to make itself a court of record, including some staff time and equipment modifications, Dowsey said in a statement.
As to why the city waited so long to make this happen?
“At the time, there was no business reason to do so, there was no mandate to do so, and there was no push by the state legislature or the courts to do so,” Dowsey said.
The Post, over the past two years, has detailed numerous examples of municipal courts around the state not following the law. The reporting showcased how Colorado’s more than 200 municipal courts operate with little oversight and scrutiny, since they run independently from the state judicial department.
Meanwhile, municipal courts around the state are adjusting to a new normal after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in December that cities cannot punish lawbreakers beyond what state statute would allow for the same offenses. This decision has led city councils to adopt new ordinances, judges to adjust their advisements for defendants and prosecutors and defense attorneys to negotiate plea deals under new guidelines.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is set to deliver his final State of the State address as the state’s governor this Thursday.Newsom will host the address at the state Capitol in front of a joint session of the Legislature, the first time he has done so since 2020. In recent years, he has opted for writing letters to the Legislature, releasing pre-recorded messages or touring across the state to issue new policies and initiatives.Ahead of the address, the governor’s office offered brief outlines of themes Newsom is expected to touch upon. One topic includes homelessness and California’s efforts to resolve the state’s mental health crisis.Housing affordability, education and investment in public schools are other topics outlined. The governor also plans on addressing public safety, violent crime, and theft across the state, and the various levels of law enforcement working to handle those issues.Another major topic Newsom is expected to address is climate initiatives and how California’s policies have implications both nationally and globally.Newsom’s office also shared that Newsom will convey that California is a stable democracy, an economic engine with conscience, and a “functioning alternative to Donald Trump’s federal dysfunction.” The State of the State address begins at 10:30 a.m. Thursday.Because there is a two-term limit on holding the office of California governor, Newsom will not be able to run for a third term.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
SACRAMENTO, Calif. —
Gov. Gavin Newsom is set to deliver his final State of the State address as the state’s governor this Thursday.
Newsom will host the address at the state Capitol in front of a joint session of the Legislature, the first time he has done so since 2020. In recent years, he has opted for writing letters to the Legislature, releasing pre-recorded messages or touring across the state to issue new policies and initiatives.
Ahead of the address, the governor’s office offered brief outlines of themes Newsom is expected to touch upon. One topic includes homelessness and California’s efforts to resolve the state’s mental health crisis.
Housing affordability, education and investment in public schools are other topics outlined. The governor also plans on addressing public safety, violent crime, and theft across the state, and the various levels of law enforcement working to handle those issues.
Another major topic Newsom is expected to address is climate initiatives and how California’s policies have implications both nationally and globally.
Newsom’s office also shared that Newsom will convey that California is a stable democracy, an economic engine with conscience, and a “functioning alternative to Donald Trump’s federal dysfunction.”
The State of the State address begins at 10:30 a.m. Thursday.
Because there is a two-term limit on holding the office of California governor, Newsom will not be able to run for a third term.
SAN DIEGO — Six Democrats running for governor next year focused on housing affordability, the cost of living and healthcare cuts as the most daunting issues facing Californians at a labor forum on Saturday in San Diego.
Largely in lockstep about these matters, the candidates highlighted their political resumes and life stories to try to create contrasts and curry favor with attendees.
Former state Assembly Majority Leader Ian Calderon, in his first gubernatorial forum since entering the race in late September, leaned into his experience as the first millennial elected to the state Legislature.
“I feel like my experience and my passion uniquely positioned me in this race to ride a lane that nobody else can ride, being a millennial and being young and having a different perspective,” said Calderon, 39.
Concerns about his four children’s future as well as the state’s reliance on Washington, D.C., drove his decision to run for governor after choosing not to seek reelection to the Legislature in 2020.
“I want [my children] to have opportunity. I want them to have a future. I want life to be better. I want it to be easier,” said Calderon, whose family has deep roots in politics. State leaders must focus “on D.C.-proofing California. We cannot continue to depend on D.C. and expect that they’re going to give a s— about us and what our needs are, because they don’t.”
Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who also served as the state’s attorney general after a 24-year stint in Congress, argued that it is critical to elect a governor who has experience.
“Would you let someone who’s never flown a plane tell you, ‘I can fly that plane back to land’ if they’ve never done it before?” Becerra asked. “Do you give the keys to the governor’s office to someone who hasn’t done this before?”
He contrasted himself with other candidates in the race by invoking a barking chihuahua behind a chain-link fence.
“Where’s the bite?” he said, after citing his history, such as suing President Trump 122 times, and leading the sprawling federal health bureaucracy during the pandemic. “You don’t just grow teeth overnight.”
Calderon and Becerra were among six Democratic candidates who spoke at length to about 150 California leaders of multiple chapters of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
The union has more than 200,000 members in California and is being battered by the federal government shutdown, the state’s budget deficit and impending healthcare strikes. AFSCME is a powerful force in California politics, providing troops to knock on voters’ doors and man phone banks.
The forum came as the gubernatorial field to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom is in flux.
Rumors continue to swirl about whether billionaire businessman Rick Caruso or Sen. Alex Padilla will join the field.
“I am weighing it. But my focus is first and foremost on encouraging people to vote for Proposition 50,” the congressional redistricting matter on the November ballot, Padilla told the New York Times in an interview published Saturday. “The other decision? That race is not until next year. So that decision will come.”
Wealthy Democratic businessman Stephen J. Cloobeck and Republican Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco declined an invitation to participate in the forum, citing prior commitments.
The union will consider an endorsement at a future conference, said Matthew Maldonado, executive director for District Council 36, which represents 25,000 workers in Southern California.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa leaned into his longtime roots in labor before he ran for office. But he also alluded to tensions with unions after being elected mayor in 2005.
Labeled a “scab” when he crossed picket lines the following year during a major city workers’ strike, Villaraigosa also clashed with unions over furloughs and layoffs during the recession. His relationship with labor hit a low in 2010 when Villaraigosa called the city’s teachers union, where he once worked, “the largest obstacle to creating quality schools.”
“I want you to know something about me. I’m not going to say yes to every darn thing that everybody comes up to me with, including sometimes the unions,” Villaraigosa said. “When I was mayor, they’ll tell you sometimes I had to say no. Why? I wasn’t going to go bankrupt, and I knew I had to protect pensions and the rest of it.”
He pledged to work with labor if elected governor.
Labor leaders asked most of the questions at the forum, with all of the candidates being asked about the same topics, such as if they supported and would campaign for a proposed state constitutional amendment to help UC workers with down-payment loans for houses.
“Hell yes,” said former Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, who teaches at UC Irvine’s law school and benefited from a program created by state university leaders to allow faculty to buy houses priced below the market rate in costly Orange County because the high cost of housing in the region was an obstacle in recruiting professors.
“I get to benefit from UC Irvine’s investment in their professionals and professors and professional staff housing, but they are not doing it for everyone,” she said, noting workers such as clerks, janitors and patient-care staff don’t have access to similar benefits.
State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who entered the gathering dancing to Dr. Dre and Tupac’s “California Love,” agreed to support the housing loans as well as to walk picket lines with tens of thousands of Kaiser health employees expected to go on strike later this month.
AFSCME local leaders listening to former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra speak at a gubernatorial forum Saturday in San Diego.
(Seema Mehta / Los Angeles Times)
“I will be there,” Thurmond responded, adding that he had just spoken on the phone with Kaiser’s chief executive, and urged him to meet labor demands about staffing, pay, retirement and benefits, especially in the aftermath of their work during the pandemic. “Just get it done, damn it, and give them what they’re asking for.”
Former state Controller Betty Yee agreed to both requests as well, arguing that the healthcare employers are focused on profit at the expense of patient care.
“Yes, absolutely,” she said when asked about joining the Kaiser picket line. “Shame on them. You cannot be expected to take care of others if you cannot take care of yourselves.”
Celebrated for decades as Hollywood royalty, Jane Fonda could easily be living a comfortable life of extravagance and leisure.
Instead, the 87-year-old actor and Vietnam War-era provocateur is as likely to be seen knocking on voters’ doors in Phoenix on a balmy summer afternoon as sashaying down a red carpet at a glitzy movie premiere.
Politically active for more than a half-century, Fonda is now focusing her energy, celebrity, connections and resources on fighting climate change and combating the “existential crises” created by President Trump.
Calling fossil fuels a threat to humanity, Fonda created JanePAC, a political action committee that has spent millions on candidates at the forefront of that fight.
“Nature has always been in my bones, in my cells,” Fonda said in a recent interview, describing herself as an environmentalist since her tomboy youth. “And then, about 10 years ago … I started reading more, and I realized what we’re doing to the climate, which means what we’re doing to us, what we’re doing to the future, to our grandchildren and our children.
“Our existence is being challenged all because an industry, the fossil-fuel industry, wants to make more money,” she said. “I mean, I try to understand what, what must they think when they go to sleep at night? These men, they’re destroying everything.”
Rather than hosting fancy political fundraisers or headlining presidential campaign rallies, Fonda devotes her efforts to electing like-minded state legislators, city council members, utility board officials and candidates in other less flashy but critical races.
Fonda said her organization took its cue from successful GOP tactics.
“I hate to say this, but you know, in terms of playing the long game, the Republicans have been better than the Democrats,” she said. “They started to work down ballot, and they took over state legislatures. They took over governorships and mayors and city councils, boards of supervisors, and before we knew what had happened, they had power on the grassroots level.”
Fonda said her PAC selects candidates to back based on their climate-change record and viability. The beneficiaries include candidates running for state legislature and city council. Some of the races are often obscure, such as the Silver River Project board (an Arizona utility), the Port of Bellingham commission in Washington and the Lane Community College board in Oregon.
“Down ballot, if you come in, especially for primaries, you can really make a difference. You know, not all Democrats are the same,” she said. “We want candidates who have shown public courage in standing up to fossil fuels. We want candidates who can win. We’re not a protest PAC. We’re in it to win it.”
Since her birth, Fonda’s life has been infused by political activism.
Her father, the late actor Henry Fonda, witnessed the lynching of a Black man during the 1919 Omaha race riots when he was 14, casting him into becoming a lifelong liberal.
Though such matters were not discussed at the dinner table, Fonda’s father raised money for Democratic candidates and starred in politically imbued films such as “The Grapes of Wrath,” about the exploitation of migrant workers during the Dust Bowl, and “12 Angry Men,” which focused on prejudice, groupthink and the importance of due process during the McCarthy era.
But his daughter Jane did not become politically active until her early 30s.
“Before then, I kind of led a life of ignorance, somewhat hedonistic,” she said. “Maybe deep down, I knew that once I know something, I can’t turn away.”
In “Prime Time,” Fonda’s 2011 memoir, she describes the final chapter of her life as a time of “coming to fruition rather than simply a period of marking time, or the absence of youth.”
“Unlike during childhood, Act III is a quiet ripening. It takes time and experience, and yes, perhaps the inevitable slowing down,” she wrote. “You have to learn to sort out what’s fundamentally important to you from what’s irrelevant.”
In 1972, Fonda appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Tout Va Bien,” about workers’ rights in the aftermath of widespread street protests in France four years earlier. It was her first role in a political movie and coincided with her off-screen move into activism.
Fonda’s most noteworthy and reviled political moment occurred the same year, when she was photographed by the North Vietnamese sitting atop an antiaircraft gun.
Actor and political activist Jane Fonda at a news conference in New York City on July 28, 1972. Fonda spoke about her trip to North Vietnam and interviews with American prisoners in Hanoi, Vietnam.
(Marty Lederhandler / Associated Press)
The images led to Fonda being tarred as “Hanoi Jane” and a traitor to the United States, which had deployed millions of American soldiers to Southeast Asia, many of whom never returned. Fonda says it is something she “will regret to my dying day.”
“It is possible that it was a setup, that the Vietnamese had it all planned,” Fonda wrote in 2011. “I will never know. But if they did, I can’t blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake.”
Fonda’s political beliefs have been a through line in her Hollywood career.
In 1979, she played a reporter in “The China Syndrome,” a film about a fictional meltdown at a nuclear power plant near Los Angeles. The movie’s theatrical release occurred less than two weeks before the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
The 1980 movie “9 to 5,” starring Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, was a biting comedy that highlighted the treatment of women in the workplace and income inequality long before such issues were routinely discussed in workplaces.
Dolly Parton, left, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda are harassed office workers in the 1980 movie “9 to 5.”
(20th Century Fox)
Two years later, as home VCRs grew popular, Fonda created exercise videos that shattered sales records.
She urged women to “feel the burn,” and revenue from the videos funded the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a political action committee founded by Fonda and Hayden.
This year, Fonda offered signed copies to donors to JanePAC, which she created in 2022.
“I’m still in shock that those leg warmers and leotards caught on the way they did,” Fonda wrote to supporters in April. “If you’ve ever done one of my leg lifts, or even thought about doing one, now’s your chance to own a piece of that history.”
UCLA lecturer Jim Newton, a veteran Los Angeles Times political journalist and historian of the state’s politics, described Fonda as confrontational, controversial and unapologetic.
“She’s remarkable, utterly admirable, a principled person who has devoted her life to fighting for what she believes in,” said Newton, who quotes Fonda in his new book, “Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening.”
Newton added that Fonda’s outspoken nature certainly harmed her career.
“I’m sure that there are directors, producers, whatnot, especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s, who passed on chances to work with her because of her politics,” he said. “And I’m sure she knew that, right? She did it. It’s not been without sacrifice. She’s true to herself, like very few people.”
A year after Fonda and Hayden divorced in 1990, she married CNN founder and philanthropist Ted Turner, who she once described as “my favorite ex-husband.” Though Fonda largely paused her acting career during their decade-long marriage, she remained politically active.
In 1995, Fonda founded a Georgia effort dedicated to reducing teenage pregnancy. Five years later, she launched the Jane Fonda Center for Reproductive Health at Emory University.
After Fonda and Turner divorced, she worked with Tomlin on raising the minimum wage in Michigan and then launched Fire Drill Fridays — acts of civil disobedience — with Greenpeace in 2019.
Jane Fonda speaks during a rally before a march from the U.S. Capitol to the White House as part of her “Fire Drill Fridays” rally protesting against climate change on Nov. 8, 2019.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Fonda said she decided to create her political action committee after facing headwinds persuading Gov. Gavin Newsom to create setbacks for oil wells in 2020.
“He wasn’t moving on it, and somebody very high up in his campaign said to us, ‘You can have millions of people in your organization all over California, but you don’t have a big enough carrot or stick to move the governor. … You don’t have an electoral strategy,’” Fonda recalled. “Since we’ve started the PAC, it’s interesting how politicians deal with us differently. They know that we’ve got money. They know that we have tens of thousands of volunteers all over the country.”
Initially concentrated on climate change, JanePAC has expanded its focus since Trump was reelected in November.
“We’re facing two existential crises, climate and democracy, and it’s now or never for both,” Fonda said. “We can’t have a stable democracy with an unstable climate, and we can’t have a stable climate unless we have a democracy, And so we have to fight both together.”
Fonda’s PAC has raised more than $9 million since its creation through June 30, according to the Federal Election Commission.
In 2024, JanePAC supported 154 campaigns and won 96 of those races. The committee gave nearly $700,000 directly to campaigns and helped raise more than $1.1 million for their endorsed candidates and ballot measures. In 2025, they have endorsed 63 campaigns and plan to soon launch get-out-the-vote efforts in support of Proposition 50, Newsom’s ballot measure to redraw California’s congressional districts that will appear on the November ballot.
Arizona state Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, the minority leader in the state’s House of Representatives, recalled Fonda’s support during the 2024 election, not only for his reelection bid but also a broader effort to try to win Democratic control of the state Legislature.
In addition to raising $500,000 at a Phoenix event for candidates, De Los Santos recalled the actor spending days knocking on Arizona voters’ doors.
“It is a moral validator to have Jane Fonda support your campaigns, especially at a time when corporate interests have more money and more power than ever, having somebody in your corner who’s been on the right side of history for decades,” said De Los Santos, who represents a south Phoenix district deeply affected by environmental justice issues.
Voters are often stunned when Fonda shows up on their doorstep.
“I’ve had people walking out of their laundry room and dropping all the laundry,” Fonda said with a laugh.
But others don’t know who she is and Fonda doesn’t tell them.
Jane Fonda
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s amazing. You wouldn’t think that in just a few minutes on someone’s doorstep, you can really find out a lot,” Fonda said, recalling discovering her love of canvassing when she was married to Hayden.”I loved talking to people and finding out what they care about and what they’re scared of and what they’re angry about.”
Fonda does not walk in lockstep with the Democratic party. In 2023, she joined other climate-change activists protesting a big-money Joe Biden fundraiser. They argued that the then-president had strayed from the environmental promises he made when he ran for election, such as by approving a massive oil drilling project on the North Slope of Alaska.
Fonda said she supported Biden’s 2024 reelection despite disagreeing with some of his policies because of the threat she believed Trump poses.
“When you see what the choice was, of course you’re going to vote,” she said. “I get so mad at people who say, you know, ‘I don’t like him, so I’m not going to vote.’ [A] young person said to me, we already have fascism. They don’t know history. You know, we don’t teach civics anymore, so they don’t understand that what’s happening now is leading to fascism. I mean, this is real tyranny.”
But she also faulted Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris after she became the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, as well as 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for failing to speak to the economic pain being experienced by Americans who backed Trump.
“They’re not all MAGA,” she said.
Many were just angry and hurting, she said, because they couldn’t afford groceries or pay medical bills. Fonda believes many now have buyer’s remorse.
Fonda reflected on the parallels between the turmoil in the 1960s and today. In the interview, which took place before the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, she argued that today’s political climate is more perilous.
“I’m not sure that what we have right now in the U.S. is a democracy,” she said. “It’s far graver. Far, far graver now than it was.”
Fonda said she remains driven, not by blind optimism, but by immersing herself in work that she believes makes a difference.
“This is what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life,” she said.
On the eve of the Texas House voting on a new congressional map, President Donald Trump ordered his “Republican friends” in the state legislature to get it to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk “ASAP.”
They’re taking heed — the state House passed the map on Wednesday and the state Senate is expected to do so this evening, just days after Democrats ended their out-of-state protest and returned to Austin — clearing the way for passage by the end of the week. Trump’s direct message to Texas Republicans is the president applying his standard pressure campaign playbook that has worked on Capitol Hill to a new audience: state lawmakers.
When Trump wants something, he’ll often directly ask for it himself. And the president really wants to see GOP states take up mid-decade redistricting to carve out more Republican seats.
Texas Republicans, including Abbott, initially didn’t want to take on the gambit. But the White House forced their hand, setting off a redistricting arms race across the country that Republicans are well-positioned to win. Should states like Indiana, Missouri and Florida move forward with mid-decade mapmaking, Republicans could pick up as many as 10 new seats ahead of the midterms, and it’s unclear at this point if any Democratic-led states beyond California will jump in to blunt the GOP advantages.
Indiana is the latest target of the White House’s political operation, and Trump’s allies are even making the unusual consideration of backing primaries to Indiana state lawmakers who won’t accept the mission — an unusually direct involvement from a president in a state legislature. Some Indiana Republicans have expressed public resistance to falling in line — like state Rep. Ed Clere, who told POLITICO that “under no circumstances will I vote for a new map.”
Clere, a longtime member from Southern Indiana, said he doesn’t want to see emergency special sessions called unnecessarily, and he believes too many procedural and legal hurdles stand in the way. “What Texas and California are doing is simply wrong for America,” he said. “It is the political equivalent of the cold war concept of MAD — mutually assured destruction. Indiana needs to take the high road.”
Democrats are mostly powerless to respond to the White House’s intrusion into state legislatures. “I cannot recall another time that this has happened,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to state legislatures. “At the core here, the president is pressuring these lawmakers to change the maps, because that is the only way that Republicans can win.”
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun has put the onus on the legislature to take up redistricting. While legislative leaders have not revealed their plans, the pressure campaign is working on the congressional delegation, which one by one has come forward in support. And state lawmakers have been summoned to a White House meeting Aug. 26, according to invitations reviewed by POLITICO, where redistricting will likely be top of the agenda.
Another state that is surely on the White House’s radar: Ohio, which — unlike the handful of states choosing to remake their maps — is required under state law to redraw its map ahead of 2026. The White House may apply similar pressure to Buckeye Republicans to go for a maximalist approach, as Republicans there debate whether to carve out two or three seats during their process.
“You have to appreciate the hands-on engagement,” said Indiana Republican strategist Marty Obst, who predicted that Indiana will convene a special session on redistricting. “If [state lawmakers] know that the White House is active, and they know for the president himself this is a top priority, it’s going to be very hard for them not to carry that out.”
Michigan is one of only two states that shields the governor’s office and the Legislature from providing records under the Freedom of Information Act.
That could soon change after the state Senate on Thursday passed bipartisan legislation aimed at expanding FOIA to include the executive and legislative branches of state government.
Lawmakers approved the two bills by a 36-2 vote, with Sens. Jon Bumstead, R-North Muskegon, and Jonathan Lindsey, R-Allen, voting against the legislation.
It has been a long time coming. Sens. Jeremy Moss, D-Southfield, and Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, first introduced the bills nine years ago while they were in the state House.
Finally, the bills are headed to the state House for a vote. But the legislation will have to wait until the House comes back from its summer break.
“We can no longer sustain any more scandals in Lansing that are made possible by the dark areas in law in which they can exist,” Moss said in a statement. “We have finally reached the elusive Senate vote to expand FOIA and our majority is beginning a new chapter of openness in our state.”
If passed by the House, as expected, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will likely sign the bills into law. When she was running for her first term in 2018, Whitmer said expanding FOIA would be a priority.
McBroom said the legislation will shine more light on elected officials.
“There are many ways to help our state government be more accountable and this is one that should have been in place years ago,” McBroom said. “I hope we will get this passed and keep working to put the citizens first in how the government actually operates.”
The governor and Legislature have been exempt from FOIA since the law was enacted in 1976.
Michigan and Massachusetts are the only states in the country that allow the governor’s office and Legislature to bypass FOIA.
In November 2022, after state lawmakers failed to act, Michigan voters approved a measure that created new financial disclosure requirements for the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and state lawmakers. Under Proposal 1, state elected officials are required to file annual reports detailing their assets and sources of income, positions held outside of state government, and agreements or arrangements regarding future employment, gifts, and travel payments received.
State lawmakers said the FOIA legislation is an important step in restoring trust with voters.
“The passage of this bipartisan legislation demonstrates our staunch commitment to increasing government transparency and accountability, and in turn, restoring public trust in our institutions,” Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, D-Grand Rapids, said.
Additional action is needed to create more transparency and trust, said state Sen. Michael Webber, R-Rochester Hills.
“We still have a lot of work ahead of us, and I will continue to advocate for more transparency at all levels of government,” Webber said. “Government that is for the people, by the people works best out in the open for all to see.”
In the Democratic Primary, challenger Cecelia Espenoza has taken the lead in her race against incumbent Rep. Tim Hernández, who is fighting to defend his District 4 State House seat.
Espenoza has 54 percent of the vote, while Hernández has secured 46 percent, as of 11:30 p.m. — the lead having narrowed slightly as the night went on.
Shortly before midnight, Hernández said he would not concede the race yet.
Candidate reactions
Espenoza was feeling confident after the 7 p.m. vote drop, crediting her team’s on-the-ground campaigning for their success.
“We feel pretty confident that hopefully we’re going to win,” she said.
House District 6 candidate Cecelia Espenoza cheers the first data drop on Election Night, during her watch party at The Bar At Plaza 38. June 25, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Fifteen minutes after the first returns dropped, Tim Hernández arrived at Convivio Cafe to the cheer of supporters. He had not reviewed the returns.
Though he lagged in the early polls, supporters said they were still optimistic. He wasn’t that far behind — roughly 11 points — and progressives tend to vote late, his Communications Director Jennifer Dillon said.
“I know how hard representative Hernández has worked on this campaign,” said Denver City Councilmember Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, who left the District 4 seat to serve on council, leaving a vacancy that Hernández filled in September.
“He has tons of supporters, volunteers that have shown up, day after day, weekend after weekend for the last several months to campaign for him, to support him. So I’m feeling great about tonight,” Gonzales-Gutierrez said.
Hernández spent Election Day knocking on more than 220 doors. At one of his stops, a resident was selling a green lowrider truck. He purchased it and drove it to his Election Night watch party.
Tim Hernández with the green lowrider truck he bought on Election Day.Kyle Harris/Denverite
A guy sold it to him as he was canvassing for his reelection.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
As the next ballot count approached, spirits remained high at his Convivio Cafe. Union organizers, Palestinian rights activists, musicians and others gathered to celebrate their candidate.
Hernández expected early returns to be low, but he’s confident that the effort he’s put into the campaign will pay off in same-day voters.
“I knocked 220 doors today, houses and apartment complexes in Barnum and Westwood and all over the place to make sure that we could get voters to the polls and make sure that we could get across the finish line today,” he said.
Statewide the stakes in the election, as he sees it, couldn’t be higher.
“We’re going to decide tonight, and whenever we get the results of this election, about whether corporate conservative Republican and moderate interests are going to be able to buy elections in Colorado via conservative candidates, or if we’re going to actually organize ourselves to implement progressive values and progressive policies in the Capitol from a very real place,” he said.
As the cafe closed up right before midnight, forcing attendees to leave, Hernández addressed the crowd in an emotional speech. He did not concede.
“There’s a lot of moving pieces still, so I’m not going to call anything,” he said.
“I know that the right thing to do is to struggle with everything that we have.”
Hernández supporters, including pro-Palestinian activists, were on hand to support him
Natalie, a Palestinian advocate with the Colorado Palestine Coalition who declined to give her last name, praised Hernández for being the rare lawmaker who has vocally supported Palestinian rights.
“Tim has been substantial in helping us express why a free Palestine is a cause that needs to be talked about on a local level, on a city level, on the state level,” Natalie said. “And Tim has been the number one advocate for us.”
State Rep. Tim Hernández and Deep Badhesha go through the numbers after the second data drop of Election Night, during a watch party at Convivio Cafe on 38th Avenue. June 25, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
As results rolled in, some in the crowd began to worry that Hernández was losing.
Regardless of the outcome, Natalie is proud of the campaign’s work.
“Ultimately, for us, we are just proud of the people power that led us to this particular place, and this particular time, and we’re proud of the community,” she said.
More on the HD-4 race
The Democratic primary victor will take on Republican Jack Daus, the sole GOP contender for the seat in a district that has voted to elect the Democratic candidate for well over a decade.
Whoever wins the general election in November will represent a swath of north and west Denver, from the north of the Regis neighborhood to the middle of Westwood.
Both Democratic candidates already competed last year to fill the vacancy left by previous state Rep. Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, who left the role in July 2023 after winning an at-large Denver City Council seat.
Hernández won the vacancy fight and has been on the job since September.
Hernández’s political path, from classroom to state office
Hernández was previously an ethnic studies teacher at an Aurora High School and a teacher’s union leader.
Hernández has championed support for youth in the juvenile justice system and advocated for a Chicano-themed license plate. He helped usher through legislation that gave new immigrants the ability to apply for a driver’s license upon arrival in Colorado.
He has been a proponent of rent control, renters protections and eviction prevention.
“Everybody likes to talk about homelessness because it is the physical manifestation of failed housing policy,” Hernández told Denverite earlier this year. “The top two reasons why folks are ending up homeless, according to the Colorado Coalition of the Homeless, is one because they were evicted … and two because they couldn’t afford their rent.”
State Rep. Tim Hernández’s chats with supporters during his Election Night watch party at Convivio Cafe on 38th Avenue. June 25, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
He has made headlines for his vocal opposition to Israel’s war against Hamas and mass killings in Gaza.
He’s a supporter of gun violence prevention in schools and increasing education funding and school resources.
“I’m elected to represent the north and west side of Denver, which means that my responsibility, my obligations in the center of my decision making will remain the north and west side of Denver,” Hernández said. “Leaders do not tell people what to believe. Leaders lead at the will of our community and that means that we have to love our community loudly first.”
Cecelia Espenoza is fighting to defeat Hernández — again
Espenoza spent her career as an immigration judge and attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. She served in leadership positions in national Hispanic corporate and community groups.
Since losing the vacancy campaign, she began to tour through District 4, meeting residents and hearing about their most pressing issues. Housing dominated those conversations.
She wants to push for property tax reforms that would prevent the State from surprising residents with higher bills. She’d also like to collaborate with the Denver assessor on helping people pay off their surprise property tax bills in installments.
Espenoza, like her opponent, would like to regulate the rates of rent increases.
House District 6 candidate Cecelia Espenoza celebrates with her supporters after the first data drop on Election Night, during her watch party at The Bar At Plaza 38. June 25, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
“The biggest difficulty that I’m hearing at the doors is being hit with unexpected expenses,” Espenoza told Denverite earlier this year. “My goal would be for homeowners and renters to minimize their unexpected expense increase. I’ve heard of people in rental units that have had up to 100 percent increases thrown at them from landlords. That’s unacceptable. We don’t allow that in usury. We don’t allow that in other places of law. So, we need to make sure that we’re providing protections on that side.”
District 4 has some of the most dangerous roads in the state. Espenoza wants to work with both Colorado lawmakers and city lawmakers to create safety improvements across her community.
She’s a proponent of expanding mental health care and protections for reproductive rights and gender-affirming care. Espenoza is interested in exploring education and criminal justice reform.
“You want someone who’s going to represent everybody,” Espenoza told Denverite. “My commitment is to unity, leadership, tenacity and experience. I think that I have an understanding of all of HD4 and its constituents and needs.”
Desiree Mathurin contributed reporting to this story.
Denver voters will be asked in November to consider increasing the city’s sales tax to raise $70 million a year to help stabilize Denver Health, the region’s financially ailing safety-net hospital.
The Denver City Council voted 12-1 without discussion Monday to send the .34% sales-tax increase — which would add 34 cents to a $100 purchase — to the ballot. The city’s current sales tax is 8.81% and, if this measure is approved by voters, it will increase to 9.15%.
Councilman Kevin Flynn, who represents District 2, cast the only dissenting vote. He previously had expressed concern about “burdening Denver taxpayers” with tax increases.
Mayor Mike Johnston is considering asking the council to place a second sales-tax increase — one that would raise money for affordable housing — on the November ballot, administration officials told The Denver Post earlier this month.
If voters OK the Denver Health tax increase, the health system could only use the money to expand or maintain medical care in the following categories:
Emergency and trauma care
Primary care
Mental health care
Addiction treatment and recovery services
Pediatric care
There would be a cap on the administrative costs that could be drawn from the fund, as well.
The system lost about $35 million in 2022, CEO Donna Lynne told a council subcommittee at a meeting earlier this month. The hospital earned a $17 million profit in 2023, though that wasn’t enough to tackle the maintenance that it deferred in recent years, officials said.
Lynne also told council members that Denver Health could make it through the first quarter of 2025, but if it doesn’t receive additional revenue by then, it would have to make significant cuts. She didn’t specify what services those cuts might affect, but said the system has already instituted a hiring freeze, deferred maintenance, cut travel expenses and limited the circumstances where its insurance will cover anti-obesity drugs such as Wegovy.
Denver Health provided about $140 million in uncompensated care in 2023, and the hospital’s projections show it expects to spend $124 million in 2025, according to the bill approved by the council.
The city contributed about $31 million toward offsetting those costs, and the state legislature voted to make one-time payments of $5 million to assist the system last year and again in the most recent session.
The ballot question would forbid the city from reducing its contribution in response to the sales tax.
One of the most talked about pieces of legislation discussed by Hawai‘i lawmakers for a few years now has been the legalization of recreational marijuana.
With the State Attorney General Office believing this legislative session could be the year adult-use cannabis could pass into law, they offered insight into including public safety and public health provisions in the measure. Attorney General Anne Lopez filed a report and draft bill that warned the legislature of the risks while providing a framework that includes robust public safety and public health safeguards.
Big Island Island Now readers are ready for recreational marijuana to become legal. According to our latest poll, more than half the voters — 66% — indicated that cannabis should have been legalized years ago with 908 votes.
Big Island Now reader, identified as Hammy Ham Hamster wrote: “Cannabis should be just as legal and easy to obtain anywhere as alcohol currently is. In every single state. No exceptions…”
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CS wrote: “I believe in this crazy world that people need cannabis more than ever. Whether it be medical reasons or just recreational use to unwind. I know it gives people an alternative to alcohol and prescription medications also replacing some illicit substances that have become a startling factor in our communities…”
With 161 votes, voters supported the legalization of marijuana as…
As every politician knows, openly campaigning for the job of vice president is bad form. But Kristi Noem doesn’t seem to care.
Last week alone, the South Dakota governor sent out a dozen tweets praising Donald Trump. She went on Fox News’s Hannity to condemn attempts in Maine and Colorado to remove the former president from the ballot. And she hosted a get-out-the-caucus rally for him across the border in Iowa. “Show up for a couple hours and fight for the man that’s fought for you for years!” the 52-year-old governor told the crowd at the event in Sioux City. “The only reason that we have this country is because of the good that he did when he was in that White House—and how he still continues to tell the truth out there every single day.”
Asked by a reporter at the event whether she would consider the Trump VP slot, Noem smiled and replied, “I think anybody in this country, if they were offered it, needs to consider it.” Later, she retweeted the clip.
Noem’s name has been popping up on vice-presidential shortlists in the media—and in Republican focus groups—for a while now. The way that she has defended and mimicked Trump’s actions for the past several years suggests that as his VP, she would be more of an enabler than a moderating force—and aggressive on Trump’s behalf in a way that Mike Pence never was. Picking Noem as his running mate would signal that Trump will be even less willing in a second term to kowtow to the Republican establishment. Compared with two other names that also appear regularly in shortlists, Noem would be more comfortable in MAGA world than the GOP conference chair Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, but less kooky than the Trump loyalist and Senate candidate Kari Lake. Noem also has more actual governing experience than either.
It’s still early in the primary season. Republicans have yet to settle on a nominee, and although all signs point to Trump, even his own team claims it hasn’t officially begun the brainstorming process for a running mate. “Much too soon for any of that talk,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser on Trump’s campaign, told me. Typically, a VP candidate is not announced until around the time of the convention, months after the presidential primary is concluded. Unofficially, though, the audition process began long ago.
Noem will be “very competitive,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, told me. “She’s burnishing her MAGA credentials, and the more she comes across as a fire-breathing populist, that’ll help her.” (The governor did not respond to my requests for an interview.)
Noem, a former farm girl and South Dakota beauty queen, was elected in 2018 as the state’s first female governor. Before that, she spent four years in the state legislature and another eightin the U.S. Congress as South Dakota’s sole House representative. But most Americans probably heard Noem’s name for the first time in 2020, when she made national news for her laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus pandemic.
Like most governors, at the start of the virus’s spread, Noem closed schools and ordered businesses to follow CDC guidelines. But quickly, taking cues from the Trump administration, she let up on those regulations. Noem never issued a statewide mask mandate, and she encouraged counties to return to business as usual sooner than other states did. She welcomed the return of the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in late summer of 2020, which ultimately resulted in “widespread transmission” of the virus throughout the Midwest, according to a study from the CDC. Her office used $5 million in pandemic-relief funds for an ad campaign promoting state tourism.
Her pandemic-era decisions were evidence of bold, freedom-loving leadership, Noem has said, and her handling of the crisis remains a top bragging point as she travels the country giving speeches and hosting fundraisers. In other ways, too, Noem has perfectly reflected the zeitgeist of the modern Republican Party. She has repeated Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” In 2022, she signed legislation banning transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams; last year, she called upon an adviser from the conservative Hillsdale College to rework the state’s social-studies curriculum as part of a broader effort to eliminate “critical race theory” from public schools. “She’s brought legislation that is increasingly far-right for South Dakota—more so than any previous governor,” Bob Mercer, a longtime journalist in the state’s capital, Pierre, told me.
Noem has also seemed much more focused on securing national media attention than past state leaders. In 2020, she built the first TV studio in the state capitol, and she’s become a regular on Newsmax, Fox News, and other major conservative outlets. Last spring, she signed a gun-related executive order onstage during a speech at the annual NRA convention in Indiana. (In that address, Noem boasted that her 2-year-old granddaughter already had a shotgun and a rifle.)
She has also brought in several aides with national political experience, including the former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski. And she kicked off a new national “Freedom Works Here” ad campaign that urges Americans living all over the country to move to South Dakota for jobs. Noem has starred in each of the spots, cosplaying as various members of the South Dakota workforce, including a welder, a plumber, and a nurse.
Trump has always favored a culture warrior, and Noem’s political choices alone are enough to warrant VP consideration. But the governor, who is married with three children, can also claim the kind of corn-fed American backstory that voters love and that most Republican politicians wish they had. She spent her childhood pulling calves and driving grain carts on the family farm. As a teenager, she was crowned South Dakota Snow Queen, and her 2022 memoir, Not My First Rodeo, is chock-full of folksy idioms and Bible verses; Noem’s political MO, she writes, citing Matthew’s Gospel, is to “be wise like snakes and gentle like doves.” The book also recounts her life’s biggest tragedy: When Noem was pregnant with her first child, her father was killed in a grain-bin accident, forcing her, she writes, to leave college and go home to run the farm. Noem ended up earning her college degree by taking online classes during her time in Congress.
Noem has always been adept at appealing to voters by using “the great mythology of America that you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” Michael Card, a political-science professor at the University of South Dakota, told me. Those rural bona fides could be effective if she makes the Republican presidential ticket. But gender could work in her favor at least as much.
“Trump is well aware of his deficiencies as a candidate,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. And his weakness among women voters—compounded by a penchant for baiting women he perceives as a challenge and the long list of sexual-harassment allegations against him—makes choosing a female running mate seem advisable. He’ll likely try to find “somebody who normalizes him somewhat,” Longwell said, and exploit “the excitement of a woman on the ticket, someone to push back on the idea that the party is sexist.” Bannon agreed: Trump’s MAGA movement is mostly woman-led, he claimed—“smart to engage that base and make your case to suburban women.”
Noem has downsides as a VP contender. It’s not as though Trump would need her on the ticket to win over rural voters; they already love him. Vice-presidential candidates can be chosen to deliver a state that might not be in the nominee’s column, but South Dakota is a safe Republican state, and, with only three Electoral College votes, it’s not a particularly useful pickup. And although Noem has yet to come under national scrutiny, she’s already had her share of controversy. In the spring of 2022, a Republican-controlled panel of South Dakota lawmakers found that one of Noem’s daughters had received special treatment in an application for her real-estate-appraiser license. (Noem has denied any wrongdoing.) And last fall, the New York Post and theDaily Mail ran reports about an alleged affair between Noem and Lewandowski. (In response, the governor’s spokesperson dismissed the allegation as “a false and inflammatory tabloid rumor.”)
Trump has other options. He could run on a ticket with his current primary opponent Nikki Haley, as a way to appease moderate Republicans. The pairing doesn’t seem particularly plausible right now, given the sharp words both candidates have had for each other during this campaign, but Bannon sees it as a possibility—even if he and others in MAGA world don’t approve. “Haley has two constituencies—the Murdochs and the donors—and they are trying to buy her way on the ticket as VP,” he told me.
As for Noem’s other potential rivals for a Trump VP pick, a lawmaker with Stefanik’s Ivy League credentials and political experience on the ticket could help Trump shore up support from moderates, some strategists said. “Elise could at least pass as somebody who eats with a fork in Washington circles but would satisfy the MAGA base,” Jeff Timmer, a Republican strategist and senior adviser at the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, told me. But Stefanik perhaps has to work harder to win over the MAGA crowd—she was dutifully parroting Trump’s lines on Meet the Press this weekend by referring to the convicted January 6 rioters as “hostages.” Aside from Lake, the former newscaster and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate whom I profiled in 2022, other women who could get consideration include Senator Katie Britt of Alabama and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.
If Trump has secured the nomination, the VP-selection process could look very different from the way it did eight years ago. Back then, Trump was still looking to consolidate support among Republicans; now his lock on the party is airtight, unquestionable. “He gets to pick whoever he wants,” Timmer said. Which makes competition for the spot pretty unpredictable: Trump could follow his gut and pick a MAGA-style politician and relative outsider like Noem, or make a more strategic choice with a GOP insider like Stefanik. Regardless of whether Republican leaders like either, “they’re gonna smile and go along with it.”
One thing is certain: No candidate will be considered for the Trump VP slot without having demonstrated sycophantic devotion to the former president—a willingness to defend him no matter what. Noem is not the only one to clear that bar, but she has jumped higher than most.
The best way to understand last week’s unusual debate between Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Ron DeSantis of Florida is to think of them less as representatives of different political parties than as ambassadors from different countries.
Thursday night’s debate on Fox News probably won’t much change the arc of either man’s career. DeSantis is still losing altitude in the 2024 GOP presidential race, and Newsom still faces years of auditioning before Democratic leaders and voters for a possible 2028 presidential-nomination run.
What the debate did reveal was how wide a chasm has opened between red and blue states. The governors spent the session wrangling over the relative merits of two utterly divergent models for organizing government and society. It was something like watching an argument over whether the liberal government in France or the conservative government in England produces better outcomes for its people.
“The way the debate will be heard is the nationals of each country cheering their guy on,” Michael Podhorzer, a progressive political strategist and a former political director for the AFL-CIO, told me.
The sharp disagreements between the governors pointed toward a future of widening separation between red and blue blocs whose differences are growing so profound that Podhorzer has argued the sections should be understood as fundamentally different nations.
As Podhorzer and other analysts have noted, this accelerating separation marks a fundamental reversal from the generally centralizing trends in American life through the late 20th century. Beginning with the New Deal investments under Franklin D. Roosevelt (such as agricultural price supports, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Social Security), and continuing with massive expenditures on defense, infrastructure, and the social safety net after World War II (including Medicare, Medicaid, and federal aid for K–12 and higher education), federal spending for decades tended to narrow the income gaps between the southern states at the core of red America and the rest of the country.
After World War II, in a dynamic that legal scholars call the rights revolution, the federal government nationalized more civil rights and liberties and limited the ability of states to constrain those rights. Through Supreme Court and congressional actions that unfolded over more than half a century, Washington struck down state-sponsored segregation and racial barriers to voting across the South, and invalidated a procession of state restrictions on abortion, contraception, interracial marriage, and same-sex relationships, among other things.
But both big unifying trends reshaping the economy and the rules of social life have stalled and are moving in the opposite direction. Podhorzer has calculated that the convergence in per capita income between the South and other regions plateaued in 1980 and then started widening again around 2008. And, as I’ve written, the axis of Republican-controlled state governments, the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, and Republican senators wielding the filibuster are actively reversing the rights revolution that raised the floor of personal freedoms guaranteed in all 50 states.
On issues including voting, LGBTQ rights, classroom censorship, book bans, public protest, and, most prominent, access to abortion, red states are imposing restrictions that are universally rejected in blue states. As Newsom argued in an interview with me a few hours before he went onstage, “This assault on our rights and the weaponization of grievance” is designed to “bring us back to … the pre-1960s world” in which people’s rights depended on their zip code. Under DeSantis, Florida has been a leader in that process, creating policies, such as limits on classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, widely emulated across other red states.
Thursday night’s debate revolved around the differences between Florida and California, though the Fox moderator Sean Hannity hardly presented an accurate picture of the comparison. Both states have their successes and failures. But Hannity focused his questions entirely on measures that favor Florida (such as unemployment rate, violent-crime rate, and homelessness numbers) while ignoring all the contrasts that favor California (which has a much higher median income, far fewer residents without health insurance, and, according to the CDC, much lower rates of teen birth, infant mortality, and death from firearms, as well as a longer life expectancy). Hannity essentially joined in a tag team with DeSantis to frame the debate in terms familiar to his Fox audience that blue states are a chaotic hellhole of crime and “woke” liberalism; when Newsom pushed back against that characterization, or challenged DeSantis’s approach, Hannity often cut him off or steered the conversation in a different direction.
The narrow focus on California and Florida made sense in a debate between their two governors. But those comparisons can obscure the bigger story, which is the expanding divergence between all the states in the red and blue sections.
Podhorzer has documented that gap in an array of revealing measures. He divides the nation between states in which Republicans or Democrats usually hold unified control of the governorship and state legislature, and those in which control of state government is usually divided or frequently changes hands. That classification system yields 27 red states, 17 blue states (plus the District of Columbia), and six purple states. By these definitions, the red states account for just under half the population and the blue states just below two-fifths, while the blue states contribute slightly more of the nation’s GDP.
Podhorzer’s data show that on many key measures, blue states as a group are producing far better outcomes than the red states.
In new results provided exclusively to The Atlantic, Podhorzer calculates that the economic output per capita and the median family income are both now 27 percent higher in the blue section than in the red, while the share of children in poverty is 27 percent higher in the red states. The share of people without health insurance is more than 80 percent higher in the red states than in the blue, as are the rates of teen pregnancy and maternal death in childbirth. The homicide rate across the red states is more than one-third higher than in the blue, and the rate of death from firearms is nearly double in the red. Average life expectancy at birth is now about two and a half years higher in the blue states. On most of these measures, the purple states fall between red and blue.
(Podhorzer also groups the states by their voting behavior in federal elections, which results in 24 red-leaning states, 18 blue ones, and eight purple states. But the comparisons between the two big sections don’t change much under that definition.)
On most of these measures, Podhorzer calculates, the gap between the red and blue states has widened over the past 15 years. He attributes the expansion mostly to the kind of policy differences that DeSantis and Newsom debated. The difference in health outcomes, for instance, is rooted in disparities such as the continuing refusal of 10 red states, including Florida, to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act (which every blue state has done). As other economic analysts have noted, with their higher concentrations of college graduates, blue states—and the large blue metropolitan areas of red states—are benefiting the most from the nation’s transition into an information-age economy.
As DeSantis and Hannity did in the debate, defenders of the red-state approach point to other measures. Housing costs are typically much lower in red states than in blue, as are taxes. Those are probably the central reasons many of the blue states, despite their stronger results on many important yardsticks, are stagnant or shrinking in population, while several of the red states, especially those across the Sun Belt, have been adding middle-income families. Lower housing costs are also one reason homelessness is less of a problem in red states than in blue metros, especially along the West Coast.
But the relative superiority of either model is probably less important to the nation’s future than the widening separation, and growing antagonism, between them that was displayed so vividly in the debate.
Most experts I spoke with agree that there is now no single difference between the red and blue sections as great as the gulf during most of the 20th century between the states with and without Jim Crow racial segregation, much less the 19th-century distance between the slave and free states.
But the number of issues dividing the states is reaching a historic peak, many of those same experts agree. Although civil rights and racial equity have made up the most important dividing line between the states for most of U.S. history, “the way in which these issues line up today—on everything from abortion to library books to the question of how much power states ought to have over their local governments … I think there’s not been since the founding such a far-reaching debate,” Donald Kettl, a former dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, told me.
To Kettl, the new wave of restrictive social legislation spreading across red states challenges the traditional idea that local variation benefits the country by allowing states to function as the fabled “laboratories of democracy.” “It strikes me as being incredibly dangerous,” Kettl said. “The good old arguments about the laboratories of democracy is that individual states would try different ideas, find out what works, and throw out the ones that didn’t work. We are not talking about that at all. We are talking about an effort to push a particular agenda and to push it as far as possible.”
David Cole, the ACLU’s national legal director, likewise sees the erosion of a national floor of civil rights and liberties as the most ominous element of the widening red-blue separation. “We are supposed to be one nation, committed to a common set of fundamental rights,” Cole told me in an email. “But we have increasingly become two nations, with substantial rights protections for some, and robust repression for others. Federalism was designed to allow for some play in the joints, some variations among states—but not on the fundamental constitutional rights to which we are all entitled as human beings and U.S. residents.”
It’s not clear that in the near term anything will close the space between red and blue states. Neither party has many realistic chances to win power in states that now prefer the other side. And particularly in red states, the dominance of the conservative media ecosystem makes it difficult for Democrats even to present their arguments, as the debate demonstrated.
In the interview a few hours before he went onstage, Newsom told me that the principal reason he accepted the debate was not so much to rebut DeSantis as to reach Fox viewers. “I want to make the case in their filter bubble,” he told me. “We’ve got to get into their platforms.” Though the forum allowed Newsom to assert some positive facts about President Joe Biden’s record rarely heard on the network, any progress in reaching Fox viewers was likely blunted by Hannity’s framing of every issue as proof of the superiority of red over blue. After the debate, Newsom’s aides said they believed he had achieved his mission of evangelizing to Fox’s audience. But in the end, the evening may have validated Barack Obama’s lament during his presidency that it was virtually impossible for Democrats to communicate with red-state voters except through the negative filter that conservative media build around them.
Podhorzer is among those skeptical that anything will reverse this process of separation in the foreseeable future. He views the late-20th-century trend toward convergence as the anomaly; “the default position” through most of American history has been for the states we now consider the red bloc to pursue very different visions of moral order, economic progress, and the role of government than those we now label as blue. To Podhorzer, the disagreements on display at the DeSantis-Newsom debate were just the modern manifestation of the deep divisions between the free and slave states, or the Union and the Confederacy.
In the 2024 presidential race, Biden and the leading Republican candidates have each endorsed new national laws that would reverse our separation by imposing the dominant laws in one section on the other. Biden and other Democrats are backing federal bills to restore a national floor of abortion, LGBTQ, and voting rights in every state; Republicans in turn want to impose red-state restrictions on all those issues in blue states.
Podhorzer believes that the differences between the states have hardened to the point where setting common national rules on these issues in either direction has become extremely risky. “Any compromise on any of these big issues,” he told me, “means half the country will see a loss in some aspect of what they like about the way they live.” From his perspective, courting that backlash might be worth the effort to restore core civil rights, such as access to abortion, nationally. But he warns that no one should underestimate the potential for fierce red-state resistance to such an effort, extending even to violence.
It won’t be easy for either side to pass legislation nationalizing the social- and civil-liberties regime in their section; at the least, it would require them to not only hold unified control of the White House and Congress but also end the Senate filibuster, which remains an uncertain proposition. The more likely trajectory is for red and blue states to continue careening away from each other along the pathways that Newsom and DeSantis so passionately defended last week. “Without some major disruption, this cycle” of separation “hasn’t played itself out fully,” Podhorzer told me, in a view echoed by the other experts I spoke with. “There are hurricane-force winds in that direction.” Thursday’s gusty debate between these two ambitious governors only hinted at how hard those gales may blow in the years ahead.
Mike Johnson now knows what Kevin McCarthy was dealing with.
At the new speaker’s behest, House Republicans today relied on Democratic votes to avert a government shutdown by passing legislation that contains neither budget cuts nor conservative policy priorities. The bill was a near replica of the funding measure that McCarthy pushed through the House earlier this fall—a supposed surrender to Democrats that prompted hard-liners in his party to toss him from the speakership.
Johnson is unlikely to suffer the same fate, at least not yet. But today’s vote laid bare a reality that’s become ever more apparent over the past year: Republicans may hold more seats than Democrats, but they don’t control the House.
Under McCarthy and now Johnson, Republicans have been unable to pass just about any important legislation without significant help from Democrats. The three most consequential votes this year have been the spring budget deal that prevented a catastrophic U.S. debt default, September’s stopgap spending bill that averted a shutdown, and today’s proposal that keeps the government funded through early 2024. More Democrats than Republicans have voted for all three measures.
GOP leaders have struggled to pass their own proposals on spending bills, leaving the party empty-handed in negotiations with the Democratic-led Senate and the Biden administration. Like McCarthy before him, Johnson pledged that Republicans would advance individual appropriations bills to counter the Senate’s plans to combine them into legislative packages that are too big for lawmakers to adequately review. But in the past week, he’s been forced to scrap votes on two of these proposals because of Republican opposition.
McCarthy surrendered to Democrats in late September after his members refused to pass a temporary spending bill containing deep cuts and provisions to lock down the southern border. When it was his turn, Johnson didn’t even bother to try a conservative approach. On Saturday, he unveiled a bill that maintains current spending levels—enacted by Democratic majorities in 2022—for another two months. He did not include additional funding for either Israel or Ukraine, nor did he include any policy provisions that might turn off Democrats. Johnson’s only wrinkle was to create two different deadlines for the next funding extension; funding for some departments will run out on January 19, while money for the rest of the government, including the Defense Department, will continue for another two weeks after that.
The Louisiana Republican said that the dual deadlines would spare Congress from having to consider a trillion-dollar omnibus spending package right before Christmas, as it has done repeatedly over the past several years. “That is no way to run a railroad,” Johnson said this morning on CNBC. “This innovation prevents that from happening, and I think we’ll have bipartisan agreement that that is a better way to do it.”
Johnson’s decision to avoid a partisan shutdown fight seemed to catch Democrats off guard. The White House initially slammed his proposal, but once party leaders on Capitol Hill realized that the spending bill contained no poison pills, they warmed to it. Democratic support became necessary once it was clear that Republicans would not be able to pass the measure on their own. Conservatives couldn’t even agree to allow a floor vote on the proposal, forcing Johnson to bring it up using a procedure that ultimately required the bill to receive a two-thirds majority to pass.
Republican hard-liners have been no more willing to compromise under Johnson than they were under McCarthy. The conservative House Freedom Caucus, which initially suggested the two-deadline approach, ultimately opposed the bill anyway. “It contains no spending reductions, no border security, and not a single meaningful win for the American People,” the group said in a statement. “While we remain committed to working with Speaker Johnson, we need bold change.”
Buried in that final expression of support for Johnson was the first hint of a warning. Conservatives have given the untested speaker some leeway in his opening weeks. Even McCarthy received something of a grace period; when the speaker negotiated a debt-ceiling deal with President Joe Biden, conservatives voted against the bill but didn’t try to overthrow him. Hard-liners haven’t threatened to remove Johnson, but that could change if he keeps relying on Democratic votes. When McCarthy caved to Democrats on spending for the second time, he lost his job a few days later.
The former speaker and his allies warned his GOP critics that his replacement would find themselves in the same position: managing a majority that isn’t large enough to exert its will. “I’m one of the archconservatives,” Johnson told reporters before the vote, trying to defend himself. “I want to cut spending right now, and I would have liked to put policy riders on this. But when you have a three-vote majority, as we do right now, we don’t have the votes to be able to advance that.”
Johnson has now used up one of his free passes. The question is how many more he’ll get. In the coming weeks, the speaker will have to navigate a series of fiscal fights over funding for Israel, Ukraine, and the southern border. The bill that the House passed today buys Congress another two months to hash out its differences over spending, but it doesn’t resolve them. Johnson vowed not to agree to any more “short-term” extensions of federal funding, increasing the risk of a shutdown early next year. The speaker will also have to decide whether to press forward with an impeachment of Biden that could please conservatives but turn off Republicans in swing districts.
In the meantime, frustrated lawmakers from both parties are racing to leave Congress. Since McCarthy’s ouster, nine members, five of them Republicans, have announced their plans to resign or forgo reelection. Many more are likely to do so before the end of the year. After fewer than two terms in the House, GOP Representative Pat Fallon of Texas even considered returning to his old seat in the state legislature, which Republicans have long dominated, before changing his mind today. The frustration extended to other corners of the House GOP. “We got nothing,” another Texas Republican, Representative Chip Roy, lamented to reporters yesterday. He shouldn’t have been surprised. At the moment, Republicans in the House have a majority in name only.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that set a first-in-the-nation minimum wage for healthcare workers, three words in a bill analysis foretold potential concerns about its cost: “Fiscal impact unknown.”
Now, three weeks after Newsom signed SB 525 into law — giving medical employees at least $25 an hour, including support staff such as cleaners and security guards — his administration has an estimated price tag: $4 billion in the 2024-25 fiscal year alone.
Half of that will come directly from the state’s general fund, while the other half will be paid for by federal funds designated for providers of Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, according to Newsom’s Department of Finance.
SB 525 is one of the most expensive laws California has seen in years and comes as the state faces a $14-billion budget deficit that could grow larger, if revenue projections continue to fall short.
The costly legislation — promoted by unions as a way to curb the healthcare worker shortage and in turn improve patient care — was signed into law even as Newsom has warned about the state’s shaky financial future, vetoing dozens of bills last month in the name of cost savings.
“With our state facing continuing economic risk and revenue uncertainty, it is important to remain disciplined when considering bills with significant fiscal implications, such as this measure,” Newsom said repeatedly in veto messages, rejecting some bills that had far lower cost projections than SB 525.
Newsom officials declined to give The Times a cost estimate reflecting those amendments when the governor signed the bill last month. But the amendments were expected to significantly soften the immediate financial impact to the state and hospitals, since gradual wage schedules were introduced in lieu of an instantaneous increase for all.
Despite the unknowns, Democrats in the state Legislature — including some who were first hesitant about potential costs — were quick to pass the legislation after a deal was made between powerful interest groups.
The bill originally aimed to increase the minimum wage to $25 per hour for all healthcare employees starting Jan. 1. The opposition estimated that would have cost up to $8 billion annually.
While leaders of appropriations committees killed bills based on cost in September, rejecting measures that cost millions less than SB 525, the healthcare minimum wage bill cleared that key fiscal hurdle even as the Department of Finance opposed it, citing “significant economic impacts.”
It’s unclear whether other state programs will be cut to make room for the wage hikes, but expect state lawmakers to rush to write bills when the Legislature returns in January to try to address some financial concerns.
Unlike a law passed in 2016 that mandated a $15-per-hour minimum wage statewide, the healthcare worker bill does not currently include any mechanism that allows the state to delay wage hikes during economic downturns.
“This is an important law to ensure California has a robust healthcare workforce. We’re working with legislative leadership and stakeholders on accompanying legislation to account for state budget conditions and revenues,” Newsom spokesperson Alex Stack said on Friday when asked about cost concerns surrounding the bill.
The $4-billion estimate could change when the Legislative Analyst’s Office releases its annual fiscal outlook expected later this month. The cost is only expected to grow in the future, as more groups of workers become eligible for raises.
The latest estimated cost to the state reflects pay raises expected to go to half a million healthcare workers who provide services to Medi-Cal patients, plus 26,000 employees at state-owned facilities.
But the cost to the state could decrease if hospitals pay a bigger share of labor costs, said Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California, who was involved in shaping the policy. She pointed to billions already set aside for Medi-cal providers through revenue from a tax on managed healthcare organizations as one way to “help manage the impact of increased labor costs.”
“SEIU California has committed to working with the administration and the Legislature to ensure safeguards are in place to guarantee that this critical measure is taken in a way that preserves California’s fiscal health, just as we did when negotiating the last statewide minimum wage increase,” Orr said. “This is how you make progress — through flexibility and compromise in achieving shared goals.”
In a statement, David Simon, spokesperson for the California Hospital Association, which ultimately supported the bill, called the plan that Newsom signed a “better, more measured” approach to raising wages than past efforts, which the organization worried would hurt rural hospitals already struggling financially and potentially pass costs onto patients.
Like Orr, Simon signaled more work to come.
“As far as any future work related to this issue, we are committed to working with the Legislature and the governor to advance the joint goals of SB 525: investing in our state’s healthcare workforce and preserving access to healthcare,” Simon said.
Under the law, workers at large healthcare facilities will earn $23 an hour starting in June, $24 an hour in 2025 and $25 in 2026. That applies to all staff, including launderers and hospital gift shop workers.
Employees at independent rural hospitals and facilities that serve high rates of Medicare and Medi-Cal patients will see $18 an hour next year and won’t reach $25 an hour until 2033. Other smaller workplaces are required to pay employees $21 an hour next year, reaching $25 an hour in 2028.
Newsom supporters see the legislation as bold national leadership amid labor unrest and worker strikes across industries, and as a more organized way to address local demands for $25 per hour already moving ahead in cities across California. His critics question if he approved it too soon without a concrete plan in order to gain political favor.
Labor unions have long held outsize power in the California Legislature, but their wins this year were remarkable. Their influence in state politics is undeniable: the Service Employees International Union pumped nearly $4 million into eight independent expenditures alone to get their Democrats of choice elected to the Legislature this year.
Michael Genest, founder of Capitol Matrix Consulting who served as a budget director for former Gov. Arnorld Schwarzenegger, pointed to union power — and pressure — as one reason why Newsom may have moved too soon.
“This is no time to start adding really major costs to the state budget when it’s very possible we could go deeply in the wrong direction,” he said, noting the state’s economic uncertainty. “There’s always a reason to spend money, but some people care more about the reason than they do about what’s in the bank account.”
H.D. Palmer, Newom’s Department of Finance spokesperson, has also acknowledged the state’s financial unknowns but was confident in the governor’s budgeting.
“The governor is required under the state Constitution to present a balanced budget by Jan. 10 of next year, which he will do,” he said. “There are any number of actions that can be done to balance a budget. Obviously the major thing right now is: where are revenues going to go?”
When Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania announced in September that the nation’s largest swing state would implement automatic voter registration, Donald Trump threw a conniption. “Pennsylvania is at it again!” the former president posted on Truth Social, his social-media platform. The switch, Trump said, would be “a disaster for the Election of Republicans, including your favorite President, ME!”
Trump’s panic is consistent with his (baseless) view that any reforms designed to increase voter turnout, such as expanding mail balloting and early voting, are part of a Democratic conspiracy to rig elections in their favor. But he may be wrong to fear automatic voter registration: Although Shapiro is a Democrat, if either party stands to gain from his move, it’s likely to be the GOP. In Pennsylvania, the reform “really has a potential to lean more Republican,” Seo-young Silvia Kim, an elections expert who has studied the system, told me. It’s “not great news for Democrats.”
First implemented in Oregon in 2016, automatic voter registration is now used in 23 states, including three—Alaska, Georgia, and West Virginia—that are governed by Republicans. Rather than requiring citizens to proactively register to vote, some states that use the system automatically enroll people who meet eligibility requirements and then give them the option to decline or opt out. The shift is subtler in Pennsylvania; the state has simply started prompting people to register to vote when they obtain a new or renewed driver’s license or state ID.
The seemingly minor change, which voting-rights advocates still place under the umbrella of “automatic” registration, is based on behavioral research showing that people are less likely to opt out of a choice than to opt in. By including voter registration as part of a commonly used process such as obtaining a driver’s license—and by presenting it as the default option rather than a form that citizens have to request—states have found that they can increase both registration and turnout in elections. “Even though the process isn’t that big of a shift, the effects are great,” Greta Bedekovics, the associate director of democracy policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told me.
Democrats have led the move toward automatic voter registration, and their 2021 comprehensive voting-rights legislation known as the For the People Act included a requirement that state-elections chiefs implement the policy. (The bill died in the Senate.) But automatic registration does not inherently favor one party or the other, and it has appealed to Republicans in some states because it helps officials clean up voter rolls and safeguard elections. “I don’t know who it will help, and that’s kind of the point,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting-rights program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me.
A 2017 study by the Center for American Progress found that the voters who enrolled through Oregon’s automatic-registration system were more likely to be younger, more rural, lower income, and more ethnically diverse than the electorate as a whole—a demographic mix that suggests that Republicans might have benefited as much as Democrats.
Other research shows a more partisan advantage. While an assistant professor at American University in 2018, Kim, the elections expert, studied the effects of automatic registration in Orange County, California, the site of several hard-fought congressional races that year. She found that among residents who needed to update their registration because they had moved within the county, automatic registration resulted in no meaningful shift for Democrats. But it substantially boosted turnout among Republicans and independents—by 8.1 points and 7.4 points, respectively. “I was actually very surprised,” Kim said, adding that she’d expected that if any party gained, it would be Democrats. She suspects that Democrats may have been unaffected by the change because in 2018, they were already motivated to vote by Trump’s recent election.
The impact of automatic registration on any one election is likely to be marginal, but even small shifts could be significant in a state such as Pennsylvania, where less than one percentage point separated Trump from Hillary Clinton in 2016 and just more than one point separated Joe Biden from Trump four years later. Several factors suggest that the new system could benefit the GOP in Pennsylvania. Although Democrats have more registered voters in the state, Republicans have been closing the gap during the Trump era as more white working-class and rural voters who stopped voting for Democrats years ago have chosen to join the GOP. Democrats have countered that drift by capturing wealthier suburban voters, a group that helped Shapiro and first-term Democratic Senator John Fetterman win their races during last year’s midterm elections. Because this demographic already goes to the polls pretty reliably, though, automatic registration is more likely to boost turnout among the right-leaning rural working class.
An early-2020 study also suggested that the GOP stood to gain from higher voter turnout in Pennsylvania. The Knight Foundation surveyed 12,000 “chronic non-voters” nationwide before Democrats had settled on Biden as their nominee. Across the country, nonvoters said that if they cast a ballot, they would support the Democratic candidate over Trump by a slim margin, 33 percent to 30 percent. But in Pennsylvania, nonvoters went strongly in the other direction: By a 36–28 percent margin, they said they’d prefer Trump over the Democrat. The eight-point gap was the second largest (after Arizona) in favor of Trump in any of the 10 swing states that the organization polled.
“Democrats sometimes have the mistaken opinion that anybody that doesn’t show up is going to vote Democrat,” Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s been one of the myths in Democratic circles for years. Quite frankly, given the changing of the respective party bases, it makes sense that [automatic registration] may somewhat benefit Republicans.” Other recent polls have suggested that the political realignment of the Trump era has made the GOP more reliant on infrequent voters.
The place where Democrats could most use stronger turnout—particularly among the party’s base of Black voters—is Philadelphia, which provided about one-sixth of Biden’s statewide vote in 2020. The city had higher turnout than Pennsylvania as a whole in both 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama led the Democratic ticket, but it has lagged further and further behind in each election since. Last year, turnout in Philadelphia was just 43 percent, compared with 54 percent statewide.
Yet automatic voter registration might have less impact in Philadelphia than in other parts of the state. Studies have found that the switch drives higher turnout outside urban areas, where Democratic voters are most concentrated. That’s partly because automatic voter registration is operated through the state Department of Motor Vehicles—an agency with which people who rely on public transit are less likely to interact. For that reason, when New York implemented automatic registration in 2020, voting-rights advocates lobbied aggressively for the state to enroll voters through other agencies in addition to the DMV; as of 2018, a majority of the more than 3 million households in New York City did not own a car.
Pennsylvania has no plans to implement automatic voter registration beyond the state DMV. Democrats have been adamant that in enacting the new system, Shapiro was not trying to benefit his party but merely trying to reach the 1.6 million Keystone State residents who are eligible but not registered to vote. Although Republicans argued that the change should have gone through the state legislature, they have not formally challenged automatic registration in court. Few of them seemed to agree with Trump that the reform would doom the GOP. “Its impact will be somewhere between inconsequential and a nothingburger,” Christopher Nicholas, a Republican consultant in Pennsylvania, told me.
Democrats say it’s too early to assess the electoral impact of automatic voter registration, but they acknowledged that Republicans might gain more voters as a result. More than 13,500 Pennsylvanians registered to vote through the new system during its first six weeks of implementation, according to numbers provided by the Shapiro administration. Of that total, Republicans added about 100 more voters than Democrats. “Our former president is almost always wrong,” Joanna McClinton, who leads a narrow Democratic majority as the speaker of the Pennsylvania state House, told me. The fact that Trump is so opposed to the reform, she said, “reveals something we’ve always known, which is Republicans want to keep the electorate small, selective, and they don’t want to expand access to voting even if they could be the beneficiaries of it.”
Whether Trump regains the presidency next year could hinge on the tightest of margins in Pennsylvania. I asked McClinton if she worried that by implementing automatic voter registration, Shapiro had unintentionally bestowed an electoral gift on Republicans ahead of an enormously significant election. McClinton didn’t hesitate. “Not at all,” she replied quickly. “I look forward to seeing the full data, but I definitely am not looking at this from a political perspective but from a big-D democracy perspective.”
The struggle over the sweeping red-state drive to roll back civil rights and liberties has primarily moved to the courts.
Since 2021, Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of state to obtain an abortion.
In the early legal skirmishing over this agenda, opponents including the federal Justice Department have won a surprising number of decisions, mostly in federal courts, blocking states from implementing the new laws.
In the coming years, the Court will face a series of decisions on the new red-state agenda that may determine whether the U.S. maintains a strong baseline of civil rights available in all states or reverts back toward a pre-1960s world where people’s rights varied much more depending on where they lived.
“The idea of the Bill of Rights was that we would have a floor of civil rights and civil liberties that the states could not go below,” David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me. “But for that floor to be meaningful, it has to be enforced by the Supreme Court ultimately.
“In our history, the courts have sometimes done that courageously and bravely, and other times they have fallen down on the job,” Cole continued. “And when they have fallen down on the job, you get a two-tier system in this country.”
Since President Joe Biden’selection, the 22 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and the state legislature have moved with remarkable speed to create a two-tier system on issues including abortion, classroom censorship, and the treatment of LGBTQ people. “The fact that all of this is happening on so many different fronts simultaneously is unprecedented,” Donald Kettl, a former dean and professor emeritus of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, told me.
This broad red-state push to retrench rights, as I’ve written, is reversing the general trend since the 1960s of nationalizing more rights, a process often called “the rights revolution.”
Civil-rights advocates have limited options for reversing this tide of red-state legislation. So long as the Senate filibuster exists, Democrats have virtually no chance of passing national legislation to override the red-state actions on issues such as abortion and voting rights, even if the party regains unified control of the federal government after the 2024 elections.
In some states, opponents can try to rescind these measures directly through ballot initiatives, like the Ohio referendum that, if passed in November, would overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban. But not all states permit such referendums, and even in those that do, ballot measures to reverse many of the key red-state restrictions would face an uncertain fate given the underlying conservative lean of their electorates.
Opponents are challenging some of the new statutes in state courts. The Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that supports legal abortion, has cases pending in six states, including Ohio, Wyoming, Iowa, and Florida, arguing that abortion restrictions adopted since the Dobbs decision violate provisions in those states’ constitutions. But recent rulings by state supreme courts—in South Carolina, upholding the state’s six-week abortion ban, and in Texas, dismissing an injunction against the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors—show the limitations of relying on red-state courts to undo the work of red-state political leaders.
“Sometimes the state courts provide a sympathetic venue,” Cole said. “But oftentimes in the red states, precisely because the courts have been appointed by red-state governors and legislatures, they are not especially open to challenges to their legislature’s laws.”
That leaves federal courts as the principal arena for those hoping to overturn the restrictive red-state laws.
These federal cases raise a range of legal arguments. Mostly they revolve around the claim that the state laws violate the U.S. Constitution’s protection of free speech in the First Amendment and the due process and equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. As courts consider these claims, the key early federal rulings have covered cases involving a variety of issues.
Freedom of speech: In a striking victory for critics, a federal district judge in Florida issued two decisions blocking enforcement of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s signature Stop WOKE Act, which restricts how private employers and college and university professors talk about racial inequity. In one ruling, Judge Mark Walker called the law “positively dystopian.” He wrote: “The powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.’” The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has denied DeSantis’s request to lift Walker’s injunction against the law while the case proceeds.
Federal courts have also blocked enforcement of the Florida law DeSantis signed increasing the penalties for public protest. But another federal judge has twice dismissed a case attempting to block DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law restricting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in K–12 classrooms. (Opponents of the law are appealing that decision.)
Litigation against the multiple red-state measures making it easier for critics to ban books in school libraries has not advanced as far. But in May, PEN America, a free-speech group, together with Penguin Random House and several authors filed a suit against Florida’s Escambia County school district over the removal of titles about people of color and LGBTQ people that could become the bellwether case.
Abortion: Though the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision preempted any frontal federal legal challenge to the state laws restricting or banning the procedure, abortion-rights supporters continue to fight elements of the new statutes.
In late July, a federal district judge blocked guidance from Raúl Labrador, the Republican attorney general of Idaho, a state that has banned abortion, warning doctors that they could be prosecuted for helping patients travel out of state to obtain the procedure. A separate federal lawsuit filed in July is challenging Idaho’s law imposing criminal penalties on adults who transport a minor out of state to obtain an abortion. The Justice Department won an injunction last year preventing Idaho from enforcing another portion of its abortion ban on the grounds that it violates federal law requiring treatment of people needing emergency care in hospitals.
“Dobbs overturned 50 years of precedent and got rid of the fundamental liberty right to abortion, but it definitely didn’t answer every question,” Amy Myrick, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told me. “And federal courts are now being faced with a public-health crisis of enormous magnitude, so at some point they will have to decide whether a ban becomes irrational if it forces patients to get sick or even die based on what a state says.”
Immigration: Another front in the red-state offensive is an increasing effort to seize control of immigration policy from the federal government. The Biden administration last week won a federal-district-court decision requiring Texas to remove a flotilla of buoys it has placed in the Rio Grande River to repel undocumented migrants (though the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put that ruling on hold just one day later). A coalition of civil-rights groups is suing Florida in federal court over a DeSantis law making it a crime to transport an undocumented migrant in the state.
Voting: As with abortion, critics have found a legal basis to challenge only provisions at the periphery of the voting restrictions approved in most red states since 2021. Last month, the Justice Department won a federal court ruling blocking a measure that Texas had passed making it easier for officials to reject absentee ballots. In July, a federal-district-court judge upheld key components of Georgia’s 2021 law making voting more difficult, but did partially overturn that law’s most controversial element: a ban on providing food and water to people waiting in line to vote.
LGBTQ rights: Federal litigation has probably progressed most against the intertwined red-state moves to impose new restrictions on transgender people. The Biden Justice Department has joined cases seeking to overturn the red-state actions on each of the major issues.
Two federal appellate courts have blocked policies requiring transgender students to use the bathroom (or locker room) of their gender assigned at birth, while the Eleventh Circuit late last year upheld such a law in Florida. Two federal circuit courts have also blocked the enforcement of laws in Idaho and West Virginia barring transgender girls from participating on female sports teams in high school, though a lower federal court has subsequently upheld the West Virginia law.
Of all the issues affecting transgender people, litigation against the statutes passed in 22 Republican-controlled states barring gender-affirming care for minor children, even with their parents’ approval, may reach the Supreme Court first. In a flurry of decisions made mostly this summer, multiple federal district courts have issued injunctions blocking the implementation of such laws in several states. One federal appellate court has upheld such an injunction, but two others recently overturned lower-court rulings and allowed Tennessee and Alabama to put their laws into effect. (After those decisions, a federal district court last week also allowed Georgia to enforce its ban.) Such a split among circuit courts could encourage the Supreme Court to step in, as do the momentous and timely stakes for families facing choices about medical care. “For families who have adolescents who need this care, some of whom have been receiving this care, it’s a matter of family urgency,” Jennifer Pizer, the chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, a group that advocates for LGBTQ rights, told me.
Although liberal groupsand the Biden administration have been heartened by many of these early rulings, they recognize that the most significant legal fights are all rolling toward the same foreboding terminus: the Supreme Court.
Over recent years, the Court has restricted the ability of blue states to impinge on rights that conservatives prize while mostly allowing red states to constrain rights that liberals prioritize. The Court has displayed the former instinct in its rulings striking down gun-control laws in blue jurisdictions, allowing religious-freedom exemptions to state civil-rights statutes, and barring public universities from using affirmative action. Conversely, the Court has loosened restrictions on red states with the Dobbs decision and the 2013 Shelby County ruling effectively revoking the Justice Department’s authority to preemptively block changes in state voting laws.
Those who see this past as prologue believe that the current Supreme Court majority may provide the red states great leeway to establish a legal regime that defines rights much more narrowly than in the rest of the country. At various points in American history, the Supreme Court has certainly done that before, most notoriously in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, when the justices approved the system of “separate but equal” Jim Crow segregation across the South that persisted for nearly the next 70 years.
But several legal experts I spoke with said it was premature to assume that these recent rulings ensure that the Supreme Court will reflexively uphold the contemporary wave of red-state measures. Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, told me that the Court’s decisions in recent years have advanced “what’s been the conservative Republican agenda for decades: Overrule Roe v. Wade; eliminate affirmative action; protect gun rights.” It’s less clear, Chemerinsky believes, what the Court will do with this “new conservative agenda” rising from the red states. Although the six Republican-appointed justices are clearly sympathetic to conservative goals, he said, “some of what the [states] are doing is so radical, I don’t know that the Supreme Court will go along.”
The ACLU’s Cole notes that the Court appeared to move more cautiously in the term that ended in June than it did in the 2021–22 session, which concluded with the cannon shot overruling Roe. With a few prominent exceptions headlined by the decision banning affirmative action in higher education, “civil rights and civil liberties did pretty well in the Supreme Court this term,” Cole maintained. “Much is still to be determined, but I think this term showed us that you can’t just assume that this Court is going to impose right-wing results regardless of precedent.”
Conservatives remain confident that this Supreme Court majority will not reject many of these new red-state laws. They see an early signal of how some of these fights may play out in the August decision by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals allowing Alabama to enforce its law banning gender-affirming care for minors.
Written by Barbara Lagoa, who was appointed by Donald Trump, that ruling specifically cited the Supreme Court’s logic in the Dobbs case to argue that Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors would likely survive legal scrutiny. In Dobbs, the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito said the Fourteenth Amendment did not encompass the right to abortion because there was no evidence that such a right was “deeply rooted” in American history. Likewise, Lagoa wrote of gender-affirming care that “the use of these medications in general—let alone for children—almost certainly is not ‘deeply rooted’ in our nation’s history and tradition.”
Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies,predicted that such logic would ultimately persuade the conservative Supreme Court majority. “What we are seeing now is the use of the Dobbs framework in actual action,” she told me. “I think the Supreme Court quite frankly is going to be very wary of expanding Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence to rubber-stamp an experimental new treatment, especially when minor children are involved.”
The one point both sides can agree on is that the Supreme Court’s rulings on the red-state measures will represent a crossroads for the country.One path preserves the broadly consistent floor of civil rights across state lines that Americans have known since the 1960s; the other leads to a widening divergence reminiscent of earlier periods of intense separation among the states.
If the Supreme Court allows the red states a largely free hand to continue devising their own system of civil rights and liberties, Chemerinsky said, it will present Americans with a “profound” question:
“Will the county accept being two different countries with regard to so many of these important things, as it did with regard to other important things such as slavery and civil rights?” he said. “Or will there be a point that people will say, ‘What divides us as a country is much greater than what unites us.’ And will we start hearing the first serious calls to rethink the United States?”
For the 150 or so people who filled a church hall in Toledo, Ohio, for a Thursday-night campaign rally last week, the chant of the evening featured a profanity usually discouraged in a house of God.
“With all due respect, pastor, hell no!” shouted Betty Montgomery, a former Ohio attorney general. Montgomery is a Republican, which gave the largely Democratic audience even more reason to roar with approval. They had gathered at the Warren AME Church, in Toledo, to voice their opposition to a constitutional amendment that Ohio voters will approve or reject in a statewide referendum on August 8. Many of those in the boisterous crowd were experiencing a feeling unfamiliar to Democrats in the state over the past decade: optimism.
If enacted, the Republican-backed proposal known as Issue 1 would raise the bar for any future changes to the state constitution. Currently, constitutional amendments in Ohio—including the one on next week’s ballot—need only a bare majority of voters to pass; the proposal seeks to make the threshold a 60-percent supermajority.
In other years, a rules tweak like this one might pass without much notice. But next week’s referendum has galvanized Democratic opposition inside and outside Ohio, turning what the GOP had hoped would be a sleepy summertime election into an expensive partisan proxy battle. Conservatives have argued that making the constitution harder to amend would protect Ohio from liberal efforts to raise the minimum wage, tighten gun laws, and fight climate change. But the Republican-controlled legislature clearly timed this referendum to intercept a progressive march on one issue in particular: Ohioans will decide in November whether to make access to abortion a constitutional right, and the outcome of next week’s vote could mean the difference between victory and defeat for backers of abortion rights.
A year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the back-to-back votes will also test whether abortion as an issue can still propel voters to the polls in support of Democratic candidates and causes. If the abortion-rights side wins next week and in November, Ohio would become the largest GOP-controlled state to enshrine abortion protections into law. The abortion-rights movement is trying to replicate the success it found last summer in another red state, Kansas, where voters decisively rejected an amendment that would have allowed the legislature to ban abortion, presaging a midterm election in which Democrats performed better than expected in states where abortion rights were under threat.
To prevent Democratic attempts to circumvent conservative state legislatures, Republican lawmakers have sought to restrict ballot initiatives across the country. Similar efforts are under way or have already won approval in states including Florida, Missouri, North Dakota, and Idaho. But to Democrats in Ohio and beyond, the August special election is perhaps the most brazen effort yet by Republicans to subvert the will of voters. Polls show that in Ohio, the abortion-rights amendment is likely to win more than 50 percent of the vote, as have similar ballot measures in other states. For Republicans to propose raising the threshold three months before the abortion vote in November looks like a transparent bid to move the proverbial goalposts right when their opponents are about to score.
“I don’t think I’ve seen such a naked attempt to stay in power,” a former Democratic governor of Ohio, Dick Celeste, told the church crowd in Toledo. As in Kansas a year ago, the Republican majority in the state legislature scheduled the referendum for August—a time when the party assumed turnout would be low and favorable to their cause. (Adding to the Democratic outrage is the fact that just a few months earlier, Ohio Republicans had voted to restrict local governments from holding August elections, because they tend to draw so few people.) “They’re trying to slip it in,” Kelsey Suffel, a Democratic voter from Perrysburg, told me after she had cast an early vote.
That Ohio Republicans would try a similar gambit so soon after the defeat their counterparts suffered in Kansas struck many Democrats as a sign of desperation. “The winds of change are blowing,” Celeste said in Toledo. “They’re afraid, and they should be afraid, because the people won’t tolerate it.”
The upcoming vote will serve as an important measure of strength for Ohio Democrats ahead of elections in the state next year that could determine control of Congress. Democrats have had a long losing streak in Ohio. Donald Trump easily won the state in 2016 and 2020, and Republicans have won every statewide office except for that of Senator Sherrod Brown, who faces reelection next year. Still, there’s reason to believe Celeste is right to be optimistic. A Suffolk University poll released last week found that 57 percent of registered voters planned to vote against Issue 1. (A private survey commissioned by a nonpartisan group also found the August amendment losing, a Republican who had seen the results told me on the condition of anonymity.) Early-voting numbers have swamped predictions of low participation in an August election, suggesting that abortion remains a key motivator for getting people to turn out. Groups opposing the amendment have significantly outspent supporters of the change.
Abortion isn’t explicitly on the ballot in Ohio next week, but the clear linkage between this referendum and the one on reproductive rights in November has divided the Republican coalition. Although the state’s current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, backs Issue 1, the two living GOP former governors, Bob Taft and John Kasich, oppose it as an overreach by the legislature.
“That’s the giant cloud on this issue,” Steve Stivers, a former Republican member of Congress who now heads the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, told me. The Chamber of Commerce backs the amendment because, as Stivers said, it’ll help stop “bad ideas” such as raising the minimum wage, marijuana legalization, and proposals supported by organized labor. But, he said, many of his members were worried that the group would be dragged into a fight over abortion, on which it wants to stay neutral: “The timing is not ideal.”
Democrats have highlighted comments from Republicans who have departed from the party’s official message and drawn a connection between the August referendum and the abortion vote this fall. “They’ve all said the quiet part out loud, which is this election is 100 percent about trying to prevent abortion rights from having a fair election in the fall,” the state Democratic chair, Liz Walters, told me.
But to broaden its coalition, opponents of the amendment have advanced a simpler argument—preserve “majority rule”—that also seems to be resonating with voters. “I’m in favor of democracy,” explained Ed Moritz, an 85-year-old retired college professor standing outside his home in Cleveland, when I asked him why he was planning to vote no. Once a national bellwether, Ohio has become close to a one-party state in recent years. For Democrats, citizen-led constitutional amendments represent one of the few remaining checks on a legislature dominated by Republicans. Moritz noted that the GOP had already gerrymandered the Ohio legislature by drawing maps to ensure its future majorities. “This,” he said, “is an attempt to gerrymander the entire population.”
To Frank LaRose, the suggestion that Issue 1 represents an assault on democracy is “hyperbole.” LaRose is Ohio’s Republican secretary of state and, of late, the public face of Issue 1. Traversing Ohio over the past few weeks, he’s used the suddenly high-profile campaign as a launching pad for his bid for the Republican nomination for Senate in 2024.
LaRose, 44, served for eight years in the state Senate before becoming Ohio’s top elections officer in 2019. (He won a second term last year.) He’s a smooth debater and quick on his feet, but on the Issue 1 campaign, he’s not exactly exuding confidence.
In an interview, he began by rattling off a litany of complaints about the opposition’s messaging, which he called “intentionally misleading.” LaRose accused Issue 1’s opponents of trying to bamboozle conservative voters with literature showing images of the Constitution being cut to pieces and equating the amendment with “Stop the Steal.” “That’s completely off base,” he said. “We’ve had to compete with that and with a mountain of money that they’ve had, and with a pretty organized and intentional effort by the media on this.”
LaRose likes to remind people that even if voters approve Issue 1, citizens would still be able to pass, with a simple majority, ballot initiatives to create or repeal statutes in Ohio law. The August proposal applies only to the state constitution, which LaRose said is not designed for policy making. Left unsaid, however, is that unlike an amendment to the constitution, any statutory change approved by the voters could swiftly be reversed by the Republican majority in the legislature.
“Imagine if the U.S. Constitution changed every year,” he said. “What instability would that create? Well, that’s what’s at risk if we don’t pass Issue 1.” LaRose’s argument ignored the fact that Ohio’s rules for constitutional amendments have been in place for more than a century and, during that time, just 19 of the 77 changes proposed by citizen petitions have passed. (Many others generated by the legislature have won approval by the voters.)
LaRose has been spending a lot of his time explaining the amendment to confused voters, including Republicans. When I spoke with him last weekend, he had just finished addressing about two dozen people inside a cavernous 19th-century church in Steubenville. He described his stump speech as a “seventh-grade civics class” in which he explained the differences between the rarely amended federal Constitution and Ohio’s routinely amended founding document. The laws that Ohio could be saddled with if the voters reject Issue 1, LaRose warned, went far beyond abortion: “It’s every radical West Coast policy that they can think of that they want to bring to Ohio.”
The challenges LaRose has faced in selling voters on the proposal soon became apparent. When I asked a pair of women who had questioned LaRose during his speech whether he had persuaded them, one simply replied, “No.” Another frustrated attendee who supported the proposal told LaRose that she had encountered voters who didn’t understand the merits of the idea.
Republicans have had to spend more time than they’d like defending their claim that Issue 1 is not simply an effort to head off November’s abortion amendment. They have also found themselves playing catch-up on an election that they placed on the ballot. “They got out of the gate earlier than our side,” the state Republican Party chair, Alex Triantafilou, told me, referring to an early round of TV ads that opposition groups began running throughout the state.
The GOP’s struggle to sell its proposal to voters adds to the perception that the party, in placing the measure on the ballot, was acting not from a position of strength but of weakness. The thinly disguised effort to preempt a simple-majority vote on abortion is surely a concession by Republicans that they are losing on the issue even in what has become a reliably red state.
When I asked LaRose to respond to the concerns about abortion that Stivers reported from his members in the Chamber of Commerce, he lamented that it was another example of businesses succumbing to “cancel culture.”
Confidence can be dangerous for a Democrat in Ohio. Barack Obama carried the state twice, but in both 2016 and 2020, late polls showing a tight race were proved wrong by two eight-point Trump victories. A similar trajectory played out last year, when the Republican J. D. Vance pulled away from the Democrat Tim Ryan in the closing weeks to secure a seven-point victory in Ohio’s Senate race.
“Democrats in the state are beaten down,” says Matt Caffrey, the Columbus-based organizing director for Swing Left, a national group that steers party donors and volunteers to key races across the country. He’s seen the decline firsthand, telling me of the challenge Democrats have had in recruiting canvassers and engaging voters who have grown more discouraged with each defeat.
That began to change this summer, Caffrey told me. Volunteers have flocked to canvassing events in large numbers, some for the first time—a highly unusual occurrence for a midsummer special election, he said. At a canvass launch I attended in Akron over the weekend, more than three dozen people showed up, including several first-timers. As I followed Democratic canvassers there and in Cleveland over two days last week, not a single voter who answered their door was unaware of the election or undecided about how they’d vote. “It’s kind of an easy campaign,” Michael Todd, a canvasser with the group Ohio Citizen Action in Cleveland, told me. “Not a whole lot of convincing needs to be done.”
The response has prompted some Democrats to see the August election as an unexpected opportunity to reawaken a moribund state party. The referendum is a first for Swing Left, which has exclusively invested in candidate races since it formed after Trump’s victory in 2016. “It’s a great example of what we’re seeing across the country, which is the fight for reproductive freedom and the fight for democracy becoming closely attached,” the group’s executive director, Yasmin Radjy, told me in Akron. “We also think it’s really important to build momentum in Ohio, a state that we need to keep investing in.”
A win next week would make the abortion referendum a heavy favorite to pass in November. And although Ohio is unlikely to regain its status as a presidential swing state in 2024, it could help determine control of Congress. Brown’s bid for a fourth term is expected to be one of the hardest-fought Senate races in the country, and at least three Ohio districts could be up for grabs in the closely divided House.
For Democrats like Caffrey, the temptation to think bigger about a comeback in Ohio is tempered by the lingering uncertainty about next week’s outcome—whether the party will finally close out a victory in a state that has turned red, or confront another disappointment. “It would be hard for Democrats in Ohio to feel complacent. I wish we would be in a position to feel complacent,” Caffrey said with a smile. “This is more about building hope.”
The red-state drive to reverse the rights revolution of the past six decades continues to intensify, triggering confrontations involving every level of government.
In rapid succession, Republican-controlled states are applying unprecedented tactics to shift social policy sharply to the right, not only within their borders but across the nation. Just last Thursday, the GOP-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two young Black Democratic representatives, and Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, on Saturday moved to nullify the verdict of a jury in liberal Travis County. In between, last Friday, a single Republican-appointed federal judge, acting on a case brought by a conservative legal group and 23 Republican state attorneys general, issued a decision that would impose a nationwide ban on mifepristone, the principal drug used in medication abortions.
All of these actions are coming as red states, continuing an upsurge that began in 2021, push forward a torrent of bills restricting abortion, LGBTQ, and voting rights; loosening controls on gun ownership; censoring classroom discussion of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and preempting the authority of their Democratic-leaning metropolitan cities and counties.
This flood of legislation has started to erase the long-term trend of Congress and federal courts steadily nationalizing more rights and reducing the freedom of states to constrict them—what legal scholars have called the “rights revolution.” Now, across all these different arenas and more, the United States is hurtling back toward a pre-1960s world in which citizens’ basic rights and liberties vary much more depending on where they live.
“We are in the middle of an existential crisis for the future of our burgeoning multicultural, multiethnic democracy,” and the extreme events unfolding in Tennessee and other states “are the early manifestations of an abandonment of democratic norms,” Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, wrote to me in an email.
The past week’s events in Tennessee and Texas, and the federal court case on mifepristone, extend strategies that red states have employed since 2020 to influence national policy. But these latest moves show Republicans taking those strategies to new extremes. Together these developments underscore how aggressively red states are maneuvering to block the federal government and their own largest metropolitan areas from resisting their systematic attempt to carve out what I’ve called a “nation within a nation,” operating with its own constraints on civil rights and liberties.
“It shows there really is no limit, no institution that is quote-unquote ‘sacred’ enough not to try to use to their advantage,” Marissa Roy, the legal team lead for the Local Solutions Support Center, a group opposing the broad range of state preemption efforts, told me.
This multipronged offensive from red states seeks to reverse one of the most powerful currents in modern American life. Since the 1960s, on issues including the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage and the banning of discrimination on grounds of race or gender, the Supreme Court, Congress, and federal agencies have broadened the circle of rights guaranteed nationwide and reduced the ability of states to limit those rights.
Over the past decade, Republican-controlled states have stepped up their efforts to reverse that arrow and restore their freedom to impose their own restrictions on rights and liberties. Nelson sees this red-state drive as continuing the “cycle of progress and retrenchment” on racial equity through American history that stretches back to Reconstruction and the southern resistance that eventually produced Jim Crow segregation. “The current pendulum swing is occurring both in reaction to changing politics and changing demographics, making the arc of that swing that much higher toward extremism,” she told me.
The vote in the Tennessee House of Representatives, for instance, marked a new level in the long-term struggle between red states and blue cities. In most red states, Republicans control the governorship and/or state legislature primarily through their dominance of predominantly white non-urban areas. Over the past decade, those red-state Republicans have grown more aggressive about using that statewide power to preempt the authority of, and override decisions by, their largest cities and counties, which are typically more racially diverse and Democratic-leaning.
These preemption bills have removed authority from local governments over policy areas including minimum wage, COVID masking requirements, environmental rules, and even plastic-bag-recycling mandates. Legislatures have accompanied many of these bills with other measures, such as extreme gerrymanders, meant to dilute the political clout of their state’s population centers and shift influence toward exurban and rural areas where Republicans are strongest. In Tennessee, for example, the legislature voted to arbitrarily cut the size of the Nashville Metropolitan Council in half, a decision that a state court blocked this week. Many of the bills that red states have passed since 2020 making it harder to vote have specifically barred techniques used by large counties to encourage participation, such as drop boxes or mobile voting vans.
Republicans who control the Tennessee House took this attack on urban political power to a new peak with their vote to expel the two Black Democratic representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who represent Memphis and Nashville, respectively. Though local officials in each city quickly moved this week to reappoint the two men, the GOP majority sent an ominous signal in its initial vote to remove them. The expulsions went beyond making structural changes to diminish the power of big-city residents, to entirely erasing those voters’ decision on whom they wanted to represent them in the legislature. Conservative legislatures and governors “have become so emboldened [in believing] that they can tread on local democracy,” Roy said, “that they are going all out and perhaps destroying the institution altogether.”
One of the most aggressive areas of red-state preemption this year has been in moves to seize control of policing and prosecutorial powers in Democratic-leaning cities and counties, which typically have large minority populations. In Georgia, for instance, both chambers of the GOP-controlled state legislature have passed bills creating a new oversight board that would be directed by state officials and have the power to recommend removal of county prosecutors. In Mississippi, both GOP-controlled chambers have approved legislation to expand state authority over policing and the courts in Jackson, the state capital,a city more than 80 percent Black. The Republican governor in each state is expected to sign the bills.
Tennessee legislators passed a bill in their last session increasing state authority to override local prosecutors. This week they went further. Although it didn’t attract nearly the attention of the expulsion vote, the Tennessee House Criminal Justice Committee on Tuesday approved a bill to eradicate an independent board to investigate police misconduct that Nashville residents had voted to create in a 2018 referendum.
In 2019, the GOP legislature had already stripped the Nashville Community Oversight Board of the subpoena power that was included in the local referendum establishing it. The new legislation approved this week, which is also advancing in the State Senate, would replace the board and instead require that citizen complaints about police behavior in Nashville and other cities be directed to the internal-affairs offices of their police departments. The legislation is moving forward just weeks after five former police officers were indicted in Memphis for beating a Black man named Tyre Nichols to death. “You would think that while the Tyre Nichols case is going on … that we would be really wanting more oversight, not less,” Jill Fitcheard, the executive director of the Nashville oversight board, told me. Coming so soon after the vote to expel the two Black members, the attempt to eradicate the oversight board, she said, represents “another attack on democracy in Nashville.”
Texas has joined this procession with bills backed by Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick advancing in both legislative chambers to make it easier for state officials to remove local prosecutors who resist bringing cases on priorities for the GOP majority, such as the measures banning abortion or gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
But Abbott last Saturday introduced an explosive new element into the red-state push to preempt local law-enforcement authority. In a statement, Abbott directed the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole to fast-track consideration of a pardon for a U.S. Army sergeant convicted just one day earlier of killing a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020. Abbott, who had faced criticism from conservative media for not intervening in the case, promised to approve the pardon, and criticized the Democratic district attorney who brought the case and the jury that decided it in Travis County, an overwhelmingly blue county centered on Austin.
Although many Republicans are seeking ways to constrain law-enforcement officials in blue counties, Abbott’s move would invalidate a decision by a jury in such a Democratic-leaning area. And whereas the preemption legislation in Texas and elsewhere targets prosecutors because of the cases they won’t prosecute, Abbott is looking to override a local prosecutor because of a case he did prosecute.
Gerry Morris, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers now practicing in Austin, told me that Abbott’s move was especially chilling because it came before any of the normal legal appeals to a conviction had begun. Morris said he can think of no precedent for a Texas governor intervening so peremptorily to effectively overturn a jury verdict. “I guess it means if you are going to kill somebody in Texas,” Morris said, “you need to make sure it’s somebody Governor Abbott thinks ought to be killed; because if that’s the case, then he’ll pardon you.”
The past week’s third dramatic escalation came from District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump with ties to the social-conservative movement. Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the FDA’s approval in 2000 of mifepristone was in one sense unprecedented. “Never has a court actually overturned an FDA scientific decision in approving a drug on the grounds that [the] FDA got it wrong,” William Schultz, a former deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on a press call Monday.
But in another sense, the case merely extended what’s become a routine strategy in the red states’ drive to set their own rules. Nearly two dozen Republican state attorneys general joined the lawsuit in support of the effort to ban mifepristone. That continued a steady procession of cases brought by Republican-controlled states to hobble the exercise of federal authority, or to erase rights that had previously been guaranteed nationwide.
The most consequential example of this trend is the case involving a Mississippi abortion law that the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority used to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer. But shifting coalitions of GOP state attorneys general have also sued to block environmental regulations proposed by President Joe Biden, and to prevent him from changing Trump-administration immigration-enforcement policies or acting to protect LGBTQ people under federal antidiscrimination laws. Red states “have been very interested in opposing virtually every rule or guidance that would provide nondiscrimination protection to LGBTQ people,” says Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign.
All of these legal and political struggles raise the same underlying question: Can Democrats and their allies defend the national baseline of civil rights and liberties America has built since the 1960s?
Democrats have found themselves stymied in efforts to restore those rights through legislation: While Democrats held unified control of Congress during Biden’s first years, the House passed bills that would largely override the red-state moves and restore a set of national rules on abortion, voting, and LGBTQ rights. But in each case, they could not overcome a Republican-led Senate filibuster.
The Biden administration and civil-rights groups are pursuing lawsuits against many of the red-state rights rollbacks. But numerous legal experts remain skeptical that the conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority will reverse many of the red-state actions. The third tool available to Democrats is federal executive-branch action, such as the Title IX regulations the Education Department proposed last week that would invalidate the blanket bans against transgender girls participating in school sports that virtually all the red states have now approved. Yet federal regulations that attempt to counter the red-state actions may prompt resistance from that conservative Supreme Court majority.
And even as Democrats search for strategies to preserve a common baseline of rights, they face the prospect that Republicans may seek to nationalize the restrictive red-state social regime. Congressional Republicans have introduced bills to write into federal law almost all of the red-state moves, such as abortion bans and prohibitions on classroom discussion of sexual orientation or participation in school sports by transgender girls. Several 2024 GOP presidential candidates are starting to offer similar proposals.
The past week has seen Republicans reach a new extreme in their effort to build a nation within a nation across the red states. But the next time the GOP achieves unified control of Congress and the White House, even this may seem like the beginning of an attempt to impose on blue states the rollback of rights and liberties that continues to burn unabated through red America.
DENVER — More than a year before police say Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and wounded 17 others at a gay night club in Colorado Springs, Aldrich was arrested on allegations of making a bomb threat that led to the evacuation of about 10 homes.
Aldrich, who uses the pronoun they and is nonbinary according to their attorneys, threatened to harm their own family with a homemade bomb, ammunition and multiple weapons, authorities said at the time. They were booked into jail on suspicion of felony menacing and kidnapping, but the case was later sealed and it’s unclear what became of the charges. There are no public indications that the case led to a conviction.
Officials refuse to speak about what happened, citing the sealing law, which was passed three years ago to help prevent people from having their lives ruined if cases are dismissed and never prosecuted. It was passed as part of a nationwide movement aimed at addressing the “collateral consequences” from people’s run-ins with law enforcement that often make it difficult for them to get jobs or housing.
Amid a flurry of questions about the incident after Aldrich was identified as the suspect in the Nov. 19 shooting at Club Q, District Attorney Michael Allen said during a Nov. 21 news conference that he “hoped at some point in the near future” to share more about the incident, raising expectations that he wanted the information to be made public.
But 11 days later, Allen still hasn’t shed light on the incident and the documents remain sealed despite a petition to make them public submitted by a coalition of media organizations including The Associated Press.
Here is a closer look at what is known about the incident, the records and what is being done to make them public as a grieving community clamors for more information.
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WHY ARE THE CASE DOCUMENTS SEALED?
There had been ways to seal criminal records in Colorado for decades, but in 2019, state lawmakers changed the law to allow records to be automatically sealed when a case is dropped and defendants aren’t prosecuted. Before that law was passed, anyone seeking to seal their records would’ve had to petition the court in what was an opaque process that was difficult for many to navigate, said one of the sponsors, Democratic state Rep. Mike Weissman.
Weissman said he thinks Colorado’s law strikes the right balance with a mechanism to ask for documents to be unsealed, but that speeding up the process for unsealing cases that draw intense public interest could be a possible improvement.
Law enforcement agencies are still able to access sealed records, though they are limited in what they can share publicly. The law prevents authorities from even acknowledging the existence of such sealed cases when someone from the public asks about them. Allen has cited the 2019 law in his refusal to discuss what happened.
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CAN SEALED RECORDS BE MADE PUBLIC?
Yes, but it isn’t easy. Colorado law allows anyone to ask a court to unseal a record if they believe the benefit outweighs the defendant’s right to privacy. But that can only be done if someone has reason to believe a record may exist, since court officials can’t disclose such information to the public.
The process happens behind closed doors with no docket to follow. It isn’t even known which judge is considering the request. All of that makes it impossible to know when a decision could come.
David Loy, legal director at the First Amendment Coalition, said it seems troubling that the public is unable to follow the petition request to unseal the documents.
“It’s sort of a black box as to who the judge is, we don’t normally have secret judges, we don’t normally have secret courts, for very important reasons,” he said.
Getting access to records is important for learning the details of cases and whether the justice system worked as it should have, including whether a red flag order should have been pursued to remove any firearms, said Jeff Roberts, who heads the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition,
“You don’t truly know the circumstances until you can see what law enforcement authorities wrote about what happened,” he said.
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WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE BOMB THREAT INCIDENT?
Most of what is known about the June 18, 2021, incident in Colorado Springs comes from a news release put out that night by the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.
In it, the office said that a woman calling from the street where Aldrich’s grandparents lived reported that “her son” was threatening to harm her with a homemade bomb, multiple weapons and ammunition. Aldrich was later found at house about a mile (1.6 kilometers) away, on the block where his mother lived. The release noted that no explosives were found, but it didn’t mention if any other weapons were found.
Ring doorbell video obtained by the AP shows Aldrich arriving at their mother’s front door with a big black bag, telling her the police were nearby and adding, “This is where I stand. Today I die.”
Two squad cars and what appears to be a bomb squad vehicle later pull up to the house, and a barefooted Aldrich emerges with hands up.
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WHAT HAPPENED AFTER ALDRICH’S 2021 ARREST?
It’s not clear, because case records are sealed. What is known is that in August, Aldrich told a reporter for The Gazette in Colorado Springs that they had spent two months in jail after the 2021 arrest, though it is unknown if that is true. The reporter called Aldrich in response to a voicemail Aldrich had left with the newspaper asking that its previous story about the bomb threat be removed or updated, asserting that the case had been dropped.
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SHOULD COLORADO’S RED FLAG LAW BEEN USED?
That is difficult to say, largely because of the lack of public details about what happened after Aldrich’s arrest and what other evidence authorities might have gathered. And it isn’t clear when Aldrich acquired the semi-automatic rifle and handgun investigators recovered at the scene of last month’s shooting.
The law allows a law enforcement agency or household member ask a court to order someone to surrender their firearms if they pose a significant risk to themselves or others.
Had a red flag order been issued against Aldrich, any firearms they had at the time would have been taken away and they would have been prevented from buying additional weapons from a gun dealer required to perform a background check.
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Associated Press writer Jesse Bedayn contributed to this report. Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
When the closely watched Georgia Senate race went to a runoff, nonprofit organizations that educate voters strained to ramp up operations again after Election Day.
“It’s not just, ‘Find new canvassers and recruit new volunteers.’ It’s also, ‘Find new money,’” said Kendra Cotton, CEO of New Georgia Project — founded by Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who lost her second campaign to become the state’s governor last month. The project’s goal was to raise $1 million to inform voters about the runoff, help them find out where and how to vote through phone banking and text banking, as well as voter protection at the polls. As of Monday, they have raised $797,000.
Grassroots groups have missed the mark in educating donors, Cotton said, explaining that she’ll hear from even high dollar donors that they don’t need to donate to her group because they’ve already given to Abrams or to Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock, who will take on Republican challenger Herschel Walker in the runoff.
Many don’t understand, she said, that their political donations do not trickle down and that grassroots nonprofits cannot work with campaigns or advocate for candidates.
However, the group believes their efforts are essential, especially in this case. Many voters don’t know there is a runoff and are confused about whether they are eligible to vote in it, Cotton said. Canvassers will say, “’Yes, ma’am or yes sir, you might have already voted on November 8th, but there is another election on December 6th,’ and they’re like, ‘What the hell? Between who?’” Cotton said.
In Georgia, where district boundaries and voting rules have changed since 2020, this kind of voter outreach and education is vitally important and not something most political campaigns focus on, she said. Her organization put together a map of the hours and locations of early voting sites in every county, which numerous other nonprofits are using.
Other grassroots organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta are also involved in voter education, targeting what Phi Nguyen, the organization’s executive director and a civil rights attorney, called “high potential, low propensity” voters, especially in Asian American and Latino communities.
“We will be knocking on doors, we’ll be texting, we’ll be phone banking, and we’ll be doing election protection,” said Nguyen, whose sister Bee Nguyen was the Democratic nominee for secretary of state in Georgia. In that race, the incumbent Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was reelected.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta also provide interpreters for people at polling sites in 10 counties, including five in the Atlanta area.
The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) support dozens of organizations like these in five southern states. In June 2020, SPLC announced it would grant $30 million from its endowment to fund grassroots organizations “to increase voter registration and participation among people of color with a lower propensity to vote.” Last December, it added another $100 million over 10 years, again from its endowment, to its Vote Your Voice grant program, which the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta is overseeing.
The project is part of SPLC’s mission of achieving racial justice in the South, said senior advisor Amy Dominguez-Arms. Contributions to SPLC more than doubled from 2016 to 2017, the year Donald Trump was elected president, from $58 million to $136 million according to nonprofit information source Candid.
Philanthropic funding for tax exempt nonprofits that do nonpartisan voter registration or mobilization is often concentrated in the two months before Election Day, but this support is long term. Participation in a democracy doesn’t just happen when it’s time to vote, Dominguez-Arms said.
Major philanthropic conveners like the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation are encouraging donors who want to fund civic engagement or democracy portfolios to unlink their funding from the political calendar.
“Organizations, if they’re really going to be building civic engagement in democracy, small ‘d’ democracy, the money is needed year round,” said Paul Ryan, deputy executive director of the FCCP.
Political donations that are not tax exempt are also pouring into the Georgia runoff, even though Democratic control of the Senate is already decided. The IRS rules that govern nonprofit activity allow nonpartisan voter registration and mobilization as well as things like education on the voting process, creating candidate questionnaires and supporting or opposing ballot measures.
Nonprofits are prohibited from supporting political campaigns in any way whether that is through donations, the sharing of resources or written or verbal endorsement.
The rules for nonprofit activity around elections have come under scrutiny especially after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan made a $400 million donation in 2020 to two nonprofits that then granted funds to help elections officials administer the vote during the pandemic when neither vaccines nor effective treatments were available.
Lawson Bader, president and CEO of DonorsTrust, whose mission is to safeguard the philanthropic intent of self-described conservative and libertarian donors, said his organization hasn’t tracked an increase in donations around the midterms, though he wouldn’t be surprised if there was more interest in helping elections become more efficient.
He said it’s worrisome that frustration with money’s influence in politics has spilled over from the world of political action committees and 501(c)4 nonprofits, whose work is not tax exempt, into nonpartisan work.
“I don’t think anyone disagrees that it would be great if this didn’t have to be philanthropy and it could be resourced through the government. But unfortunately, that’s not where we’re at,” said Ashley Spillane, senior advisor at Power the Polls, an initiative that started in 2020 to help recruit poll workers when the pandemic was keeping many, especially older poll workers, from participating.
Her organization recruited potential poll workers on Election Day this year and is continuing to recruit for the runoff in Georgia.
Voters have less than three weeks to receive and return absentee ballots and at least five days of early voting during the last week of November. That’s a narrow timeframe, Spillane said.
“Voters in Georgia are going to have to show up to polling locations,” Spillane said. “And making sure that they are incredibly well staffed and that there aren’t any gaps or polling location closure closings is absolutely critical in an election like that.”
The Warnock campaign sued successfully to allow for early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, though only some decided to open polling stations that day, leading to long lines and hours-long waits.
Political affiliations vary among the communities that Nguyen’s organization reaches, she said, given the range of ethnicities, languages and migration backgrounds that shape people’s worldviews.
“When we’re out there doing nonpartisan voter registration and getting out the vote, it really could be that the person is voting for anyone,” she said, adding, “It’s absolutely a nonpartisan issue to want every Georgian and every eligible voter to be able to access the ballot.”
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As millions of Americans returned to their jobs this week after the Thanksgiving holiday, several of the elected leaders of Cochise County, Arizona, opted not to do theirs.
The board of supervisors in this sparsely populated southeastern chunk of the state refuses to certify the county’s midterm-election results. Of course, nothing actually went wrong in Cochise County’s election. Instead, on Monday, the two Republican members of the Cochise County board outvoted its single Democrat to delay certification of the election, missing the deadline. By refusing to complete the process, these two officials chose instead to make a kind of generalized protest against imagined election fraud in Arizona. Their action could mean that Cochise County voters won’t have their ballots counted in the state’s final results.
Nullifying the votes of some 47,000 people for no reason is certainly a choice—and a nihilistic one at that. These two board members are engaging in a strategy of bottom-up election obstruction, apparently to clog the gears of democracy with enough sand to spread distrust throughout the entire system. Nationally, the Cochise County supervisors’ strategy may prove inconsequential, at least for now. But it’s a perfect illustration of the state of American democracy—and could be a test run of much greater consequence for 2024.
Even though prominent election deniers lost big in the November polls, in both Arizona and elsewhere, the election-denial movement is still alive, and even thriving, at the state and local level around the country. The “Stop the Steal” blueprint that Donald Trump drew up is there for anyone to follow, in the next presidential cycle and quite possibly beyond.
Before the midterms, election experts had their eyes fixed on Arizona, and in particular on Cochise County, 200 miles southeast of Phoenix. There, in the home of the Dragoon Mountains and the old frontier boomtown of Tombstone, suspicion of voting machines runs deep—so much so that county officials were demanding a full hand recount of the votes before the election had even happened. (Although all Arizona postelection audits require a small hand-counted sample, a full hand count of the votes would be illegal and, experts say, extremely prone to error.) In the end, the Arizona Supreme Court had to prevent Cochise County officials from doing it.
Ultimately, Election Day went smoothly in Cochise, and Republicans cleaned house in the county’s results: The GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Senate hopeful Blake Masters defeated their Democratic opponents there by 18 and 11 points respectively, even though both lost overall. Still, county GOP leaders wouldn’t take yes for an answer, and they weren’t finished sowing chaos.
One of the Republican supervisors acknowledged in an interview that delaying the county’s election certification was in fact intended as a protest over the election—not in Cochise, but in Maricopa County, where Republicans claim, without evidence, that machine errors disenfranchised thousands of voters. In other words, the play here is to use local political control in one county to cast doubt on another’s larger and more politically important election—to taint the entire process by contaminating a small piece of it.
As I reported at the time, Maricopa County did have some technical problems on Election Day. Dozens of tabulation-machine printers weren’t working, despite those machines having been previously tested for accuracy. But voters weren’t turned away from polling sites. Instead, their ballots were dropped in an auxiliary box and taken to the county’s central tabulation center, to be counted along with millions of other ballots. If anyone was disenfranchising Arizonans, it was the state’s GOP leaders demanding that voters not put their ballot in the auxiliary box.
But all of that is truly beside the point. Certification is not just a formality; the process enables officials to review an election for wrongdoing. Which sometimes happens! Back in 2018, the North Carolina state election board refused to certify the results of a House race, because Republican campaign operatives had engaged in illegal ballot harvesting and tampering.
But nothing like that went down in Cochise or Maricopa Counties this year. Instead, local GOP officials are choosing to invalidate the votes of their own neighbors in order to express their displeasure with an election outcome. It’s childish. It’s wrong. It seems very illegal. And it’s probably not going to work. On Monday, Secretary of State (and now Governor-elect) Katie Hobbs filed a lawsuit against the board, tweeting that Cochise County “had a statutory duty to certify the results of the 2022 General Election by today.” The judge will hear the suit later today, and may offer a decision as early as this afternoon.
The most likely outcome is that the judge forces the board to certify the election. “Stop the Steal” zealots have tried the Cochise move before, after all. Earlier this year, commissioners in heavily Republican Otero County, New Mexico, decided not to certify their party primary-election results. That didn’t fly at the state supreme court, which ruled that the commissioners had to do their jobs. (Commissioner Couy Griffin notably still voted no, announcing that his vote was “based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”) But if the court doesn’t force Cochise officials to change their ways, the secretary of state’s office could, in theory, tally the rest of Arizona’s votes without the county’s included. The irony is that, in a purely electoral sense, this would be great news for Democrats, potentially flipping a U.S. House seat from red to blue.
Something that became very clear in 2020 is that America’s election system relies not on spelled-out rules and regulations, but on human beings acting honestly. Before 2016, the certification process was not used as a weapon to fight back against a disappointing result. “That’s not how healthy democracies function,” Tammy Patrick, the program CEO for the election center at the National Association of Election Officials, told me. And American democracy is only as healthy as its weakest link.
What happens next in Cochise County may have little significant effect on the rest of the country. But Cochise serves as a reminder that the election-fraud myth persists. And in places where its believers have unchecked power, they will do their utmost to flex it.
The hope was that, after major midterm losses and continued rebukes from the courts, the election-denial movement would peter out—that Stop the Steal types might simply grow tired of failing. But if Trump is a viable candidate for president in 2024, you can expect him to sing from the same songbook he used in 2016 and 2020. Other candidates will amplify those lies, too, if they can benefit from doing so. Whether election denialism will survive independently of Trump is hard to anticipate. But Republicans “have seen that while it may not be the way to gain office, it is certainly the way to drive donations and fundraising and elevate your stature in the party,” Patrick said.
Cochise is a useful stress test for America’s electoral system “in terms of demonstrating the continued dangers to our democracy”—and what can be done about them, Rick Hasen, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, told me. Congress should pass reforms to the Electoral Count Act, Hasen said. States can also try to prevent what’s happening in Cochise County from recurring in 2024. Colorado passed legislation this year clarifying its rules about certification. But state leaders are similarly well positioned to make the waters of democracy muddier. In 2021, Arizona Republicans tried and failed to pass legislation that would allow the state legislature to reject the results of an election it didn’t support. An upcoming Supreme Court decision on the authority of state legislatures in administering elections will be incredibly consequential to any future election-subversion efforts.
Over the past six years, millions of people in this country have been encouraged by political leaders on the right to see themselves as the real Americans—the nation’s true rulers—who are in danger of being cheated out of their political inheritance by voter fraud on the left. They’ve been trained to respond to electoral losses with deflection, conspiracy, and dishonesty. They don’t need Trump around to keep doing that.
