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Tag: Supreme Court decision

  • Supreme Court lets Trump block transgender and nonbinary people from choosing passport sex markers

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    The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to enforce a policy blocking transgender and nonbinary people from choosing passport sex markers that align with their gender identity.The decision by the high court’s conservative majority is Trump’s latest win on the high court’s emergency docket, and it means his administration can enforce the policy while a lawsuit over it plays out. It halts a lower-court order requiring the government to keep letting people choose male, female or X on their passport to line up with their gender identity on new or renewed passports.The State Department changed its passport rules after Trump, a Republican, handed down an executive order in January declaring the United States would “recognize two sexes, male and female,” based on birth certificates and “biological classification.”Transgender actor Hunter Schafer, for example, said in February that her new passport had been issued with a male gender marker, even though she’s marked female on her driver’s license and passport for years.The plaintiffs argue that passports limited to the sex listed on a birth certificate can spark harassment or even violence for transgender people.”By classifying people based on sex assigned at birth and exclusively issuing sex markers on passports based on that sex classification, the State Department deprives plaintiffs of a usable identification document and the ability to travel safely,” attorneys wrote in court documents.Sex markers began appearing on passports in the mid-1970s and the federal government started allowing them to be changed with medical documentation in the early 1990s, the plaintiffs said in court documents. A 2021 change under President Joe Biden, a Democrat, removed documentation requirements and allowed nonbinary people to choose an X gender marker after years of litigation.A judge blocked the Trump administration policy in June after a lawsuit from nonbinary and transgender people, some of whom said they were afraid to submit applications. An appeals court left the judge’s order in place.Solicitor General D. John Sauer then turned to the Supreme Court, pointing to its recent ruling upholding a ban on transition-related health care for transgender minors. He also argued Congress gave the president control over passports, which overlap with his authority over foreign affairs.”It is hard to imagine a system less conducive to accurate identification than one in which anyone can refuse to identify his or her sex and withhold relevant identifying information for any reason, or can rely on a mutable sense of self-identification,” Sauer wrote in court documents.

    The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to enforce a policy blocking transgender and nonbinary people from choosing passport sex markers that align with their gender identity.

    The decision by the high court’s conservative majority is Trump’s latest win on the high court’s emergency docket, and it means his administration can enforce the policy while a lawsuit over it plays out. It halts a lower-court order requiring the government to keep letting people choose male, female or X on their passport to line up with their gender identity on new or renewed passports.

    The State Department changed its passport rules after Trump, a Republican, handed down an executive order in January declaring the United States would “recognize two sexes, male and female,” based on birth certificates and “biological classification.”

    Transgender actor Hunter Schafer, for example, said in February that her new passport had been issued with a male gender marker, even though she’s marked female on her driver’s license and passport for years.

    The plaintiffs argue that passports limited to the sex listed on a birth certificate can spark harassment or even violence for transgender people.

    “By classifying people based on sex assigned at birth and exclusively issuing sex markers on passports based on that sex classification, the State Department deprives plaintiffs of a usable identification document and the ability to travel safely,” attorneys wrote in court documents.

    Sex markers began appearing on passports in the mid-1970s and the federal government started allowing them to be changed with medical documentation in the early 1990s, the plaintiffs said in court documents. A 2021 change under President Joe Biden, a Democrat, removed documentation requirements and allowed nonbinary people to choose an X gender marker after years of litigation.

    A judge blocked the Trump administration policy in June after a lawsuit from nonbinary and transgender people, some of whom said they were afraid to submit applications. An appeals court left the judge’s order in place.

    Solicitor General D. John Sauer then turned to the Supreme Court, pointing to its recent ruling upholding a ban on transition-related health care for transgender minors. He also argued Congress gave the president control over passports, which overlap with his authority over foreign affairs.

    “It is hard to imagine a system less conducive to accurate identification than one in which anyone can refuse to identify his or her sex and withhold relevant identifying information for any reason, or can rely on a mutable sense of self-identification,” Sauer wrote in court documents.

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  • The Supreme Court could decide Monday whether Trump can be barred from the 2024 ballot

    The Supreme Court could decide Monday whether Trump can be barred from the 2024 ballot

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    WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump could learn Monday whether the Supreme Court will let him appear on this year’s ballot as the leading Republican presidential candidate tries to close in on his party’s nomination.

    The justices are expected to decide at least one case Monday, with signs strongly pointing to a resolution of the case from Colorado that threatens to kick Trump off some state ballots because of his efforts to overturn his election loss in 2020. Any opinions will post on the court’s website beginning just after 10 a.m. EST.

    Trump is challenging a groundbreaking decision by the Colorado Supreme Court that said he is disqualified from being president again and ineligible for the state’s primary, which is Tuesday.

    The resolution of the case on Monday, a day before Super Tuesday contests in 16 states, would remove uncertainty about whether votes for Trump will ultimately count. Both sides had requested fast work by the court, which heard arguments less than a month ago, on Feb. 8.

    The justices seemed poised then to rule in Trump’s favor.

    RELATED: Takeaways from the Supreme Court oral arguments on the Trump 14th Amendment case

    The Colorado court was the first to invoke a post-Civil War constitutional provision aimed at preventing those who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office. Trump also has since been barred from primary ballot in Illinois and Maine, though both decisions, along with Colorado’s, are on hold pending the outcome of the Supreme Court case.

    The Supreme Court has until now never ruled on the provision, Section 3 of the 14th amendment.

    The court indicated Sunday there will be at least one case decided Monday, adhering to its custom of not saying which one. But it also departed from its usual practice in some respects, heightening the expectation that it’s the Trump ballot case that will be handed down.

    Except for when the end of the term approaches in late June, the court almost always issues decisions on days when the justices are scheduled to take the bench. But the next scheduled court day isn’t until March 15. And apart from during the coronavirus pandemic when the court was closed, the justices almost always read summaries of their opinions in the courtroom. They won’t be there Monday.

    ALSO SEE: Trump faces deadline to ask SCOTUS for delay in election interference trial

    Separately, the justices last week agreed to hear arguments in late April over whether Trump can be criminally prosecuted on election interference charges, including his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The court’s decision to step into the politically charged case, also with little in the way of precedent to guide it, calls into question whether Trump will stand trial before the November election.

    The former president faces 91 criminal charges in four prosecutions. Of those, the only one with a trial date that seems on track to hold is his state case in New York, where he’s charged with falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to a porn actor. That case is set for trial on March 25, and the judge has signaled his determination to press ahead.

    Copyright © 2024 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

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    AP

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  • Amending the Constitution Is Impossible Until Suddenly It’s Not

    Amending the Constitution Is Impossible Until Suddenly It’s Not

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    The American experiment with constitutional democracy is in grave peril. If Donald Trump becomes president again, fighting to preserve U.S. constitutional democracy through his second term will require the courage, commitment, and creativity of a broad prodemocracy coalition.

    But the problem is not merely Trump. The U.S. Constitution itself contributes to the country’s crisis. As David Frum observed in a recent issue of The Atlantic, “If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote” but rather because our system for selecting the president “has privileged a strategically located minority, led by a lawbreaking president, over the democratic majority.” America must fight the immediate threat, but it must also go beyond that and stop this problem at its core: addressing once and for all the aspects of the Constitution that enable an authoritarian leader to remain within striking distance of the presidency.

    The original Constitution was written when democracy meant something radically different than it does today. Over time, Americans have amended the Constitution to make it more democratic, but shortcomings remain. The most significant, in our view, are the hardwired constitutional structures that are inimical to any modern understanding of democracy: the Electoral College, which could put Trump in office without majority support for a second time, and the equal allocation of two seats in the Senate to each state (an arrangement that gives a Wyoming voter 70 times more senatorial clout than a Californian). Reforming those structures would get the country much closer to the one-person, one-vote democratic ideal.

    Adam Serwer: Who’s afraid of calling Donald Trump an insurrectionist?

    In 1787, few considered the one-person, one-vote principle to be foundational to democratic republican governance. Now it’s axiomatic. In American law, the principle traces its origins to a Supreme Court decision called Reynolds v. Sims, decided almost 60 years ago in an opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren. “Legislators,” the Court noted, “represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.” As Chief Justice Warren explained, once you see voters, not geographic units, as the source of democratic legitimacy, it quickly follows that “a majority of the people of a State could elect a majority of that State’s legislators.”

    One person, one vote is a standard principle structuring democratic republics around the world. Contemporary commentators on the left and right espouse it. And yet, none of the three branches of the federal government has its members chosen in a manner consistent with this principle. The president is elected through an Electoral College system that encourages campaigns to ignore most states and that sometimes grants the presidency to a candidate who loses the overall vote, the Senate is grossly malapportioned, and the members of the Supreme Court are determined by those two flawed institutions together.

    These antidemocratic structures have an odious historical pedigree. The Electoral College and the composition of the Senate resulted from compromises required to get slave states to agree to the Constitution by overweighting the influence of those states. And they continue to prevent the federal government from functioning effectively, particularly in areas where a coalition of senators representing a minority of the country can systematically block legislation. They also increase the risk of American democracy declining into authoritarianism. As the democracy scholars Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky have pointed out in this publication, “The U.S. Constitution, in its current form,”—meaning with the Senate and the Electoral College—“is enabling the radicalization of the Republican Party and exacerbating America’s democratic crisis.” They argue that these distorted institutions allow “the GOP to pursue extremist strategies that threaten our democracy without suffering devastating electoral consequences.”

    Although the Senate and the Electoral College are not all that ails American democracy, they should be the focus of efforts to amend the Constitution. Some important improvements to our democracy (such as court reform) may be accomplished by enacting statutes; other valuable amendment ideas (such as taking money out of politics or enshrining a stronger right to vote) are worth pursuing but could be vulnerable to death by interpretation at the Supreme Court. Reforming the Senate and the Electoral College would change the underlying structures of our democracy. At the same time, because such reforms seek to rewire the basic constitutional machinery, they could not be accomplished by passing ordinary laws or persuading the Supreme Court to adopt better judicial doctrines; the only way to truly fix these structures is to amend the document.

    Nancy Pelosi: What January 6 made clear to me

    This will not be easy. We are under no illusions about the difficulty of our country re-brokering key elements of the compromises that first created a union, however imperfect, more than 200 years ago. Indeed, one of us works for a democracy organization within which progressives, moderates, and conservatives all committed to fixing some of the core problems of American democracy have yet to reach consensus on these types of reforms.

    But debating them openly is what a healthy 21st-century democracy should do, and those who would preempt that debate on the theory that our Constitution is unamendable both do our future a deep disservice and misread our history. The history of constitutional amendment can offer some encouraging—and concretely useful—insights for considering the Constitution’s future. Those insights teach that amending the Constitution is always impossible, except for when it suddenly becomes inevitable.

    Why has the U.S. lived with this creaky constitutional architecture for so long? Part of the answer is that a quest to amend the Constitution is viewed as futile, and with good reason: The procedures for passing an amendment, as provided in Article V of the Constitution, set out a daunting path. First, a proposed amendment must win support from two-thirds of the members of both the House and Senate, and it must then be ratified by three-quarters of the states. (In theory, the proposed amendment can also come from a convention established by Congress, if two-thirds of the state legislatures petition for one, before being submitted to the states for ratification, but that process has never been used.) An effort to restructure the Senate faces an additional obstacle: The text of Article V blocks amendments that would deprive any state of its “equal Suffrage in the Senate” without its “consent” (although nothing in the text prohibits amending that provision).

    In a sense, amending the Constitution’s antidemocratic structures presents a sort of constitutional catch-22: Because a supermajority in Congress and a supermajority among state legislatures are required to amend the Constitution, a determined political minority can block constitutional change. The conventional wisdom is that Republican politicians have the most to lose from more democratic structures, so they have an incentive and the means to shut down any change. Amendments are thus treated as a nonstarter. One prominent constitutional scholar, in an influential 2006 book lamenting the Constitution’s democratic deficits, referred to the amendment process as an “iron cage” confining the country to a dangerously outdated national charter.

    These procedures are overwhelming, but are they truly insurmountable? We might find inspiration in the successful effort, just over 100 years ago, to make the Senate more democratic through Constitutional amendment.

    By the turn of the 20th century, the Senate was a mess—a millionaires’ club, filled with people who had no business being there. In the words of one influential journalist of the time, the Senate’s corruption was so profound as to render it a site of “treason.” This was no surprise given the way senators were selected. The Constitution gave state legislatures—not voters—the power to choose senators. But this was a disaster. For one thing, state legislators often couldn’t agree on whom to send to Washington, and many of the resulting deadlocks meant they sent no one. One study found that from 1891 to 1905, “eight state legislatures failed to elect senators and were without full representation from periods of ten months to four years.” The alternative to a deadlock was in many cases a “stampede election,” in which a legislature would vote several dozen times without converging on a winner. As the clock ran out, exhausted and acrimonious legislators would settle on characters with little to recommend them in terms of individual merit or popular standing within their state. The resulting scenes were sometimes reminiscent of a Coen-brothers script. Consider this description of the Missouri legislature’s efforts, in 1905, to appoint a member to the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body:

    Lest the hour of adjournment should come before an election was secured, an attempt was made to stop the clock upon the wall of the assembly chamber. Democrats tried to prevent its being tampered with; and when certain Republicans brought forward a ladder, it was seized and thrown out of the window. A fist-fight followed, in which many were involved. Desks were torn from the floor and a fusillade of books began. The glass of the clock-front was broken, but the pendulum still persisted in swinging until, in the midst of a yelling mob, one member began throwing ink bottles at the clock, and finally succeeded in breaking the pendulum. On a motion to adjourn, arose the wildest disorder. The presiding officers of both houses mounted the speaker’s desk, and, by shouting and waving their arms, tried to quiet the mob. Finally, they succeeded in securing some semblance of order.

    For years, people had proposed amending the U.S. Constitution to fix this mess. By the 1890s, the House of Representatives backed a constitutional amendment providing for the direct election of senators. But passing this amendment meant persuading two-thirds of the Senate to renounce the system that had made them senators in the first place, and then persuading three-quarters of the states’ legislatures to surrender an important power that gave them huge political influence in their home state and in Congress. And so, for almost two decades, the Senate itself was the graveyard for efforts to reform the Senate.

    George T. Conway III: The Colorado ruling changed my mind

    And yet, we all know how this story ends: The Constitution changed, and now voters choose their senators directly. The reason for that transformation is the Seventeenth Amendment, which became part of the Constitution in 1913. How did reformers a century ago pull this off?

    They started with hacks and work-arounds. In Oregon, where voters were especially fed up with the Senate’s dysfunction, they enacted a law in 1901 that set up an advisory “election” to choose senators. The election lacked direct legal force, but the idea was to influence the legislators by requiring that the results be read to state lawmakers before they selected a senator. This initial experiment failed miserably: After the first advisory election, the legislators still fought and deadlocked, eventually selecting someone who had received exactly zero votes in the popular “election.”

    Undeterred, the voters of Oregon tried again. In 1904, they passed another popular initiative with a more muscular policy to tame its legislature: This time, when state legislators ran for office, they would have to choose between two possible position statements accompanying their name on the ballots. They had to either pledge to vote for the candidate who received the most votes in the (formally nonbinding) election, or else stipulate that they would remain “at liberty to wholly disregard that vote.” This did the trick. From then on, Oregon legislators threw their support behind the popular-vote winner (even when it meant crossing party lines), and over the next several years, enough states adopted this policy that it came to be known as “the Oregon system.”

    Alongside those state-centered strategies, advocates looked for ways to increase pressure on the Senate by making inaction seem worse to senators than allowing an amendment to move forward. To do so, they focused on that unused alternative pathway to amending the Constitution that we mentioned earlier. Article V requires Congress to summon a “convention for proposing amendments” if asked to do so by two-thirds of the state legislatures. The prospect of opening the Constitution to potentially sweeping revision through a convention struck many onlookers at the time as a scary proposition. (It still does today.) Beginning in the 1890s, a group of state legislatures that favored direct elections began submitting petitions to Congress seeking an amendment convention. According to one early-20th-century scholar, “Some senators who were opposed to popular election saw in this proposal of a constitutional convention a portent so big that they preferred to submit the specific amendment that was desired rather than incur the risks that might be opened up if such a convention were called.” In other words, many senators concluded that the devil they knew (direct election of senators) was preferable to a potentially open-ended mandate to rethink the constitutional order.

    And then in 1912, after four decades of glacial and uncertain progress, the country sprinted toward amendment: Congress sent the proposed Seventeenth Amendment to the states, and a year later, the amendment was ratified. Voters would get to choose their senators.

    The Constitution’s process for amendment is intimidating. Devoting time and energy to that process can feel futile, even politically naive. Indeed, the editorial board of The Washington Post once declared that “we may properly regard the Constitution as practically unamendable.”

    It made that pronouncement in 1899. Americans would go on to amend the Constitution 12 times over the next several decades. That surge of activity would include—in addition to providing for the democratic election of senators—amendments granting women the right to vote, establishing (and then disestablishing) Prohibition, ending the poll tax, lowering the voting age, and clarifying the rules of presidential succession.

    The last time Congress proposed a constitutional amendment that was successfully ratified was in 1971, when Congress sent to the states the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, establishing a universal voting age of 18. More than half of the U.S. population today wasn’t even alive in 1971. What’s become clear in the intervening years is that the current document isn’t up to the job of protecting and promoting a vibrant 21st-century democracy.

    In the midst of an ongoing democratic crisis—where a leading presidential candidate speaks openly of acting as a “dictator” and exacting retribution against his political opponents—investing in long-term reform can seem like a fantasy. Failing to do so, however, carries its own risks. Without attending to the architecture of American democracy, the inherent weaknesses at its foundation may, in time, cause it to come tumbling down.

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    Larry Schwartztol

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  • Trump’s Plan to Police Gender

    Trump’s Plan to Police Gender

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    After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender children; Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to purge Florida classrooms of books that acknowledge the reality that some people aren’t straight or cisgender; Missouri has imposed rules that limit access to gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages. Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect.

    Explore the January/February 2024 Issue

    Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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    During his 2016 campaign, Trump seemed to think that feigning sympathy for queer people was good PR. “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” he promised. Then, while in office, he oversaw a broad rollback of LGBTQ protections, removing gender identity and sexuality from federal nondiscrimination provisions regarding health care, employment, and housing. His Defense Department restricted soldiers’ right to transition and banned trans people from enlisting; his State Department refused to issue visas to the same-sex domestic partners of diplomats. Yet when seeking reelection in 2020, Trump still made a show of throwing a Pride-themed rally.

    Carter Sickels: Being trans shouldn’t exclude me from health laws

    Now, recognizing that red-state voters have been energized by anti-queer demagoguery, he’s not even pretending to be tolerant. “These people are sick; they are deranged,” Trump said during a speech, amid a rant about transgender athletes in June. When the audience cheered at his mention of “transgender insanity,” he marveled, “It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that.” He pantomimed weak applause. “But you mention transgender, everyone goes crazy.” The rhetoric has become a fixture of his rallies.

    Trump is now running on a 10-point “Plan to Protect Children From Left-Wing Gender Insanity.” Its aim is not simply to interfere with parents’ rights to shape their kids’ health and education in consultation with doctors and teachers; it’s to effectively end trans people’s existence in the eyes of the government. Trump will call on Congress to establish a national definition of gender as being strictly binary and immutable from birth. He also wants to use executive action to cease all federal “programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” If enacted, those measures could open the door to all sorts of administrative cruelties—making it impossible, for example, for someone to change their gender on their passport. Low-income trans adults could be blocked from using Medicaid to pay for treatment that doctors have deemed vital to their well-being.

    The Biden administration reinstated many of the protections Trump had eliminated, and the judiciary has thus far curbed the most extreme aspects of the conservative anti-trans agenda. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that, contrary to the assertions of Trump’s Justice Department, the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ people from employment discrimination. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the investigations that Governor Abbott had ordered in Texas. But in a second term, Trump would surely seek to appoint more judges opposed to queer causes. He would also resume his first-term efforts to promote an interpretation of religious freedom that allows for unequal treatment of minorities. In May 2019, his Housing and Urban Development Department proposed a measure that would have permitted federally funded homeless shelters to turn away transgender individuals on the basis of religious freedom. A 2023 Supreme Court decision affirming a Christian graphic designer’s refusal to work with gay couples will invite more attempts to narrow the spaces and services to which queer people are guaranteed access.

    Listen: When the state has a problem with your identity

    The social impact of Trump’s reelection would only further encourage such discrimination. He has long espoused old-fashioned ideas about what it means to look and act male and female. Now the leader of the Republican Party is using his platform to push the notion that people who depart from those ideas deserve punishment. As some Republicans have engaged in queer-bashing rhetoric in recent years—including the libel that queerness is pedophilia by another name—hate crimes motivated by gender identity and sexuality have risen, terrifying a population that was never able to take its safety for granted. Victims of violence have included people who were merely suspected of nonconformity, such as the 59-year-old woman in Indiana who was killed in 2023 by a neighbor who believed her to be “a man acting like a woman.”

    If Trump’s stoking of gender panic proves to be a winning national strategy, everyday deviation from outmoded and rigid norms could invite scorn or worse. And children will grow up in a more repressive and dangerous America than has existed in a long time.

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Stoke a Gender Panic.”

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    Spencer Kornhaber

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  • Four Lessons Republicans Must Learn Before 2024

    Four Lessons Republicans Must Learn Before 2024

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    The Republican Party swaggered into Tuesday’s midterm elections with full confidence that it would clobber President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party, capitalizing on voters’ concerns over inflation and the economy to retake majorities in both chambers of Congress. The question, party officials believed, was one only of scale: Would it be a red wave, or a red tsunami?

    The answer, it turns out, is neither.

    As of this morning, Republicans had yet to secure a majority in either the House or the Senate. Across the country, Democrats won races that many in the party expected to lose. Millions of votes are still to be counted, particularly in western states, but this much is clear: Even if Republicans eke out narrow congressional majorities, 2022 will be remembered as a triumph for Democrats, easily the best midterm cycle for an incumbent president’s party since 2002, when the country rallied around George W. Bush and his GOP in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

    Given the tailwinds they rode into Election Day—a fragile economic outlook, an unpopular president, a pervasive sense that our democracy is dysfunctional—Republicans spent yesterday trying to make sense of how things went so wrong. There was a particular focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three battleground states that went from red to blue on Election Day 2020, and states where Democrats won major victories on Tuesday.

    Based on my reporting throughout the year, as well as data from Tuesday’s exit polling and conversations with Republican officials in the immediate aftermath of Election Day, here are four lessons I believe the party must learn before the next election in 2024.

    1. Democratic turnout is going to boom in the post-Dobbs era.

    For 50 years, Republicans raged against the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to an abortion, arguing that the ruling should be struck down and abortion policies should be determined by individual states. When it finally happened—when Politico in early May published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization striking down Roe v. Wade—I warned the evangelical leader Russell Moore on his podcast that Republicans, and especially conservative Christians, were about to deal with some devastating unintended consequences.

    Up until the 2022 election, most voters had engaged with the abortion issue as an every-four-years, very-top-of-the-ticket decision. Presidents appoint Supreme Court justices, after all, and only a Supreme Court ruling could fundamentally change abortion policies in the country. (This was essential to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016: Nearly a quarter of his voters said the Supreme Court was their top issue in the election, after he’d promised to appoint “pro-life judges.”) Given that abortion rights were protected by Roe, the voters who identified abortion as their top priority always skewed Republican, and they were primarily mobilized by presidential campaigns and the prospect of Supreme Court vacancies.

    We have now entered a different political universe.

    More than a quarter of all voters named abortion as their top priority in this election. That number would be astonishing in any cycle, much less in a midterm campaign being waged against a backdrop of historic inflation and a looming recession. (The only issue of greater salience to voters overall—and not by much—was the economy, which 31 percent named as their top priority.) Even more surprising was the gap in partisan enthusiasm: Among the 27 percent of voters who prioritized abortion in this election, 76 percent supported Democratic candidates, according to exit polling, while just 23 percent backed Republicans.

    This is a direct result of the Dobbs ruling, which left individual states scrambling to figure out their own abortion regulations. With Republicans pushing a menu of restrictive measures across the nation, Democrats running for office at every level—Congress, state legislature, governor, attorney general—suddenly had ammunition to mobilize a party base that was, until that time, looking complacent. (When Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in deep-blue Virginia last year, only 8 percent of voters named abortion as their top priority.) At the same time, Dobbs gave Democrats a tool to reach moderates and independents, particularly suburban women, who’d rejected the Republican Party in 2020 but were beginning to drift back toward the GOP because of concerns about inflation and crime.

    Democrats I spoke with throughout the summer and fall were hopeful that the abortion issue would be sufficient to prevent a Republican rout. It did that and much, much more. The Dobbs effect on this election is almost impossible to exaggerate. All five states that featured a ballot referendum on questions of abortion saw the pro-choice side win. (This includes Kentucky and Montana, states that President Joe Biden lost by 26 points and 16 points, respectively.) In those states alone, dozens of Democrats, from the top of the ballot to the bottom, received a potentially race-deciding boost from the abortion referendum. Even in the 45 states where abortion wasn’t literally on the ballot, it was clearly the issue that carried the day for a host of vulnerable Democrats.

    By every metric available—turnout, exit polling, individual races, and referendum results—abortion was the dominant motivator for Democrats, particularly younger Democrats, who have historically skipped midterm elections. It was also the dominant motivator for moderates and independents to stick with an unpopular president. The story of this election was that millions of voters who registered dissatisfaction with Biden and his economic policies voted for his party anyway. Why? Because they were more concerned about Republicans’ approach to abortion than Democrats’ approach to inflation.

    This is very bad news for the GOP. Democrats now have a blueprint for turning out the vote in a punishing political environment. In each of the two midterm elections under President Barack Obama, Democrats hemorrhaged congressional and state legislative seats because the party lacked a base-turnout mechanism—not to mention a persuasion tactic—to compensate for voters’ concerns over a sluggish economy. Politics is a copycat business. Now that Democrats have found a winning formula, you can expect to see entire field programs, messaging campaigns, microtargeting exercises, and ballot-initiative drives built around abortion access.

    A winning issue today is not necessarily a winning issue tomorrow. Abortion rights will rise and fall in terms of resonance, depending on the place, the party in control, and the policies that govern the issue locally. We’ve seen Democrats overplay their hand on abortion in the past, as in 2014, when Republicans flipped a U.S. Senate seat because the Democratic incumbent, Mark Udall, campaigned so myopically on abortion rights that even the liberal Denver Post editorial board ridiculed him as “Senator Uterus.” If Democrats rely too much on the issue—or, maybe the greater temptation, if they use their legislative power to advance abortion policies that are just as unpopular with moderates and independents as some of what Republicans campaigned on this cycle—their advantage could evaporate quickly.

    Still, the “Senator Uterus” episode came in the pre-Dobbs era, back when Americans still viewed the Supreme Court as the most immediate arbiter of abortion rights, and local candidates didn’t have nearly the reason (or incentive) to engage with the issue. This is now the post-Dobbs era. Voters who care about abortion are thinking less about Supreme Court justices and more about state legislators. The political advantage, at least for now, belongs to a Democratic Party that just weaponized the issue to turn out its base in a major and unexpected way.

    2. Bad candidates are an incurable (and fast-spreading) cancer.

    In Michigan, “Prop 3,” the ballot proposal enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution, drove enormous voter participation. Democrats were the clear beneficiary: They won all three statewide campaigns as well as the state’s most competitive congressional races. But Democrats did even more damage at the local level, ambushing Republicans in a number of off-the-radar local contests and winning back control of both state legislative chambers for the first time since 1983.

    But if you ask Republicans in the state, Prop 3 wasn’t the biggest contributor to the down-ballot massacre. Instead, they blame the terrible GOP candidates at the top of the ticket.

    Whereas Republicans in other states nominated one or perhaps even two far-right candidates to run in marquee statewide races, Michigan Republicans went for the trifecta. Tudor Dixon, the gubernatorial nominee, was a political novice who had made extreme statements about abortion and gun control in addition to casting doubts on Trump’s 2020 defeat. Matt DePerno, the nominee for attorney general, was best known for leading a crusade to investigate and overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Kristen Karamo, the nominee for secretary of state, was a like-minded conspiracy theorist who manifestly knew nothing about the way Michigan’s elections are administered, and even less about the other duties of the job she was seeking.

    “You just can’t ignore the question of candidate quality,” Jason Roe, who ran Republican Tom Barrett’s campaign against Elissa Slotkin, one of the nation’s premier congressional contests, in Michigan’s Seventh District, told me. “We had a fundraising disadvantage, we had Prop 3 to overcome, but candidate quality—that was our biggest headwind. Tom ran about seven points ahead of the statewide ticket. I’m not sure what else he’s supposed to do.”

    The same pattern was visible in different parts of the country. In Pennsylvania, Democrats seized back control of the state House chamber for the first time in more than a decade. How? Two words: Doug Mastriano.

    In the campaign to become Pennsylvania’s next governor—what was once expected to be one of the nation’s tightest races—Mastriano, the GOP nominee, proved particularly unpalatable. It wasn’t just Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in that state, who stayed away; most GOP state lawmakers, even those who shared some of Mastriano’s fringe worldview as it pertains to election legitimacy or Christian nationalism, kept their distance.

    But it hardly mattered. The smoldering crater left by Mastriano’s implosion (he trailed by nearly 14 points as of yesterday evening) swallowed up Republicans all around him. Not only did Democrats improbably win back control of the state House; they also won all three of the state’s contested congressional races.

    Time and again on Tuesday, bad candidates sabotaged both their own chances of victory and also the electoral prospects of their fellow partisans on the ticket. And for most of these bad candidates, a common quality stood out: their views on the legitimacy of our elections.

    3. Voters prefer “out of touch”  to “out of their mind.”

    For Republicans, a central charge against Democrats throughout 2022 has been that Biden and his party are out of touch with ordinary Americans. A distilled version of the argument went like this: Democrats, the party of social and cultural elites, can’t relate to the economic pain being felt by millions of working people.

    That message penetrated—to a point.

    According to exit polls, 20 percent of voters said inflation has caused their families “severe hardship” over the past year. Among those respondents, 71 percent supported Republicans, and 28 percent supported Democrats. This is broadly consistent with other findings in the exit polling, as well as public-opinion research we saw throughout the summer and fall, showing disapproval of Biden and his stewardship of the economy. This would seem damning for Democrats—that is, until you consider the numbers in reverse and ask the obvious question: Why did three in 10 people who said they’ve experienced “severe hardship” decide to vote for the party that controls Congress and the White House?

    The simplest explanation is that although many of these voters think Democrats are out of touch, they also think Republicans are out of their minds. And it seems they prefer the former to the latter.

    “This is what I would see in our focus groups all summer, and it makes more sense now in retrospect,” says Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who produced a podcast series this year narrating her sessions with undecided voters. “We would have these swing voters who would say things are going bad: inflation, crime, Biden’s doing a bad job, all of it. And then you say, ‘Okay, Gretchen Whitmer versus Tudor Dixon. Who are you voting for?’ And even though they’re pissed at Whitmer—she hasn’t fixed the roads, she did a bad job with COVID—they were voting for her. Because they all thought Dixon was crazy.”

    It was the same thing, Longwell told me, in her focus groups all over the country—but particularly in the Midwest. She said that Tony Evers, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, kept getting the same benefit of the doubt as Whitmer: “They didn’t like a lot of his policies, but they thought Tim Michels”—his Republican challenger—“was an extremist, a Trumplike extremist.” Her conclusion: “A lot of these people wanted to vote for a Republican; they just didn’t want to vote for the individual Republican who was running.”

    For many voters, the one position that rendered a candidate unacceptable was the continued crusade against our elections system. In Pennsylvania, for instance, 34 percent of voters supported Democrats despite experiencing “severe hardship,” significantly higher than the national average. The reason: 57 percent of Pennsylvanians said they did not “trust” Mastriano to oversee the state’s elections.

    Another strategy Republicans used to portray Democrats as “out of touch” was to focus on rising crime rates in Democratic-governed cities and states. This was an unqualified success: Exit polling, both nationally and in key states, showed that clear majorities of voters believe Republicans are better suited to handle crime. In Michigan, 53 percent of voters said they trusted Dixon to deal with crime, as opposed to just 42 percent for Whitmer. But it barely made a difference in the outcome: Despite trailing by 11 points on that question, Whitmer actually won the race by 11 points. To understand why, consider that 56 percent of Michigan voters characterized Dixon as “too extreme.” Only 38 percent said the same about Whitmer.

    In the exit polls, perhaps the most provocative question was about society’s changing values relative to gender identity and sexual orientation. Half of all voters—exactly 50 percent—said those values are changing for the worse. Only 26 percent, meanwhile, said those values are changing for the better. (The remaining 24 percent did not have a strong opinion either way.) This is another data point to suggest that Democrats, by championing an ultraprogressive approach to LGBTQ issues, come across as out of touch to many Americans. And yet, even among the voters who expressed alarm over America’s values in this context, 20 percent voted for Democrats. This is a revelation: Given the ferocity of rhetoric in this campaign about drag shows, transgender athletes, and sexualized public-school curricula, one might have predicted virtually zero people would both decry the LGBTQ agenda and vote Democratic. But two in 10 voters—more than enough to tip any close election—did exactly that. Why?

    Again, the simplest explanation is probably best: Plenty of voters are worried about unchecked progressivism on the left, but they’re even more worried about unchecked extremism on the right.

    That extremism takes many forms: delegitimizing our elections system, endorsing the January 6 assault on the Capitol, cracking jokes and spreading lies about the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. And all of this extremism, which so many swing voters spurned on Tuesday, is embodied by one person: Donald Trump.

    4. Trumpism is toxic to the middle of the electorate.

    Here’s the scenario many of us were expecting on Election Day: The president, still the titular head of his party despite a growing chorus of questions about his age and competence, suffers a series of humiliating defeats that reflect the weakness of his personal brand and cast doubt on his ability to lead the party moving forward.

    And that’s precisely what happened—to the former president.

    If Tuesday felt strange—“the craziest Election Night I’ve ever seen,” as the elections-analyst Dave Wasserman tweeted—it’s because so many races revolved around someone who wasn’t running for anything. The reason that practically every first-term president in modern history has gotten pummeled in the midterms is that the opposition party typically cedes the stage and makes it all about him. The idea is to force the party in power to own everything that’s unsatisfactory about the country—its economic performance, military failures, policy misfires. It’s a time-honored tradition: Make the election a referendum on the new guy in charge.

    Until now.

    In each of the three states that saw major Democratic victories—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—25 to 30 percent of voters said they had cast their vote in opposition to Trump. To reiterate: This is a quarter of the total electorate, consistently across three of the nation’s most polarized battleground states, acknowledging that they were motivated by the idea of defeating someone who wasn’t on the ballot, and who currently holds no office. It’s easy to see why they succeeded: In these states, as well as nationally, the only thing worse than Biden’s approval rating was Trump’s. In state after state, congressional district after congressional district, voters rejected the Trump-approved candidate, for many of the same reasons they rejected Trump himself two years ago.

    Looking to 2024, GOP leaders will attempt to address the missed opportunities of this election. They will, no doubt, redouble their efforts to recruit strong candidates for statewide races; they will prioritize proven winners with mainstream views on abortion and democratic norms and the other issues by which moderates and independents will assess them. Whatever success party officials might find on a case-by-case basis, they will be treating the symptoms and ignoring the sickness. The manifest reality is that Trumpism has become toxic—not just to the Never Trumpers or the RINOs or the members of the Resistance, but to the immense, restless middle of the American electorate.

    We’ve long known that Trumpism without Trump doesn’t really sell; the man himself has proved far more compelling, and far more competitive, than any of his MAGA imitators. But what we saw Tuesday wasn’t voters selectively declining certain decaffeinated versions of Trump; it was voters actively (and perhaps universally, pending the result in Arizona’s gubernatorial race) repudiating the core elements of Trump’s political being.

    This trouncing, on its own, might have done little to loosen Trump’s chokehold on American conservatism. But because it coincided with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s virtuoso performance—winning reelection by an astonishing 1.5 million votes; carrying by double digits Miami-Dade County, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 points; defeating his Democratic opponent by nearly 20 points statewide—there is reason to believe, for the first time in six and a half years, that the Republican Party does not belong to Donald Trump.

    “I’ll tell you why Tuesday was a bad night for Trump: Ron DeSantis now has 100 percent name ID with the Republican base. Every single Republican voter in the country knows who he is now,” says Jeff Roe, who managed Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign and runs the nation’s largest political-consulting firm. “A lot of these people are gonna say, ‘All these other Republicans lost. This is the only guy that can win.’ That’s really bad for Trump. Republicans haven’t had a choice in a long time. Now they have a choice.”

    Trump’s intraparty critics have long complained that his brutally effective takeover of the GOP obscures his win-loss record. This is someone, after all, who earned the 2016 nomination by securing a string of plurality victories against a huge and fragmented field; who lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million; who gave away the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020; who lost the popular vote to Biden by 7 million and handed over the White House; and who just sabotaged the party’s chances of winning key contests in a number of battleground states.

    Earlier this week, Trump pushed back the expected launch of his 2024 presidential campaign. This was done, in part, so that he could appropriate the narrative of a grand Republican victory against Biden and the Democrats. Given his humiliating defeats, and how they’re being juxtaposed against the victories of his emerging young rival from Florida, Trump might want to move the announcement back up before a very different narrative begins to take hold.

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    Tim Alberta

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  • Abortion Could Define California’s Elections

    Abortion Could Define California’s Elections

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    CERRITOS, Calif.—Abortion rights dominated the message when the Democratic congressional candidate Jay Chen sent off a small group who had gathered to canvass for him here early on Sunday morning.

    “A right that we had all assumed we would have, the right of a woman to have control of her own health-care decisions, was taken away after 50 years,” Chen told the volunteers. He reminded them that his opponent, Republican Representative Michelle Steel, had co-sponsored “a federal ban on abortion” that would prohibit the procedure even in deep-blue California.

    “You name it, she’s on the extreme end of all these issues,” Chen said. “She’d be a complete outlier even in deep-red Kansas because even in Kansas they protected the right to an abortion. So for her to try to represent [this district] does not make any sense.”

    Chen’s exhortation captured the outsize role abortion rights could play across this year’s unusually large field of competitive U.S. House races in California, after the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer. The Golden State offers Democrats the nation’s single largest concentration of opportunities to offset losses elsewhere by flipping House seats now held by Republicans. And the abortion-rights issue offers Democrats their best chance to do so—particularly with a state constitutional amendment protecting access to the procedure also on the November ballot as Proposition 1.

    “Because we have this on the ballot, Republicans cannot run away from this issue,” says Dave Jacobson, a Democratic consultant who is advising Christy Smith, the party’s nominee against Republican Representative Mike Garcia in another Los Angeles–area district. “Every Republican in a competitive district is vulnerable with this issue at the top of the ballot as a constitutional amendment. I think it is going to drive turnout.”

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    California will provide a crucial measure of how broadly the abortion issue may benefit Democrats this year. On both sides, there’s agreement that abortion’s increased prominence will strengthen Democrats in districts with a large number of white-collar voters—including the coastal seats south of Los Angeles now held by Democratic Representatives Katie Porter and Mike Levin. Less clear is whether the issue will prove as powerful in districts, such as those held by Republican Representatives Garcia and David Valadao, with larger numbers of blue-collar and Latino voters who may be acutely feeling the effects of inflation. The district in which Chen is challenging Steel demographically falls somewhere in between.

    “Presumably you’ll see coastal Republicans split with the party on things like choice,” predicts Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist and the publisher of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which analyzes state elections. “On the other hand, when you are looking at some inland and Central Valley districts, they are very different,” he told me. Although “there’s all this chatter that abortion is so important,” Sragow added, “I suggest most Americans do not wake up with abortion the thing they are most worried about,” particularly in working-class communities.

    Though solidly Democratic at the state level—Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is cruising to reelection this year without serious Republican opposition after defeating a GOP-backed recall effort—congressional contests in California have proved highly susceptible to swings in the national mood. As part of the “blue wave” in 2018, the party flipped seven Republican-held seats, reducing the GOP to its smallest share of California’s congressional delegation since the 1880s. But in 2020, Republicans recaptured four of those districts—a key part of their unusual success at gaining House seats nationwide while losing the White House.

    Earlier this year, when inflation was raging and the Democratic legislative agenda seemed stalled, Republicans were optimistic about advancing farther across California by potentially ousting Democratic Representatives Josh Harder in the Central Valley and Porter and Levin in Orange and San Diego Counties. Although Democrats acknowledge that those races (and another Democratic-held open seat) remain competitive, they now see the opportunity to go on the offensive against Steel, Valadao, and Garcia, as well as potentially Representatives Ken Calvert and Young Kim in Southern California; they also see an opportunity to contest a Republican open seat in the Sacramento area.

    Several other issues have also contributed to this reversal of fortune: increased attention to gun violence after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting; renewed focus on Donald Trump amid the revelations from the House January 6 committee and the firestorm over his mishandling of classified documents; and climate change after the passage of the Democrats’ slimmed-down reconciliation bill. But analysts in both parties see the Supreme Court decision reversing Roe as the pivotal factor shifting the congressional landscape across California. “We are just seeing an unprecedented level of outrage,” Representative Levin told me in an interview.

    As in other states, Republicans continue to express cautious optimism that frustration over inflation and disenchantment with the performance of President Joe Biden will outweigh views on abortion. “Of course [abortion] is going to be an issue, way more than it was in May of this year,” Lance Trover, a Republican consultant advising Representative Steel, who ousted a Democratic incumbent in 2020, told me. “But at the end of the day, the fundamentals of the economy are going to be key.”

    California Republicans face an unusually powerful headwind in moving beyond the abortion issue. Almost all Republicans holding or seeking congressional seats have staked out hard-line anti-abortion positions that directly collide with polls showing deep and broad support for abortion rights across the state.

    Polling in July by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that more than two-thirds of state residents opposed the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. That included about three-fourths of African Americans and Asian Americans, seven in 10 white voters, and just over three-fifths of Latino voters. About three-fourths of independents, whom Republicans need to compete in California, because they are so outnumbered by registered Democrats, opposed the ruling. Opposition to the decision was greatest in the big blue metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco, but even in areas where Republicans have traditionally performed somewhat better, such as Orange and San Diego Counties and the Central Valley, preponderant majorities opposed the decision.

    In another survey released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times, more than seven in 10 California voters said they intended to support the constitutional amendment inscribing abortion rights into the state constitution.

    “From a public-opinion perspective, it’s a settled issue in California,” Mark Baldassare, the PPIC president, told me. “We have seen what we would describe as overwhelming support for abortion rights in California consistently in our polls over many, many years … That’s pretty consistent across demographic groups and regions of the state.”

    The state’s Republican congressional delegation—as well as the party’s challengers in the key races—have placed themselves firmly on the opposite side of that consensus. Four of the House Republicans facing the potentially toughest contests—Steel, Garcia, Valadao, and Calvert—signed a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. All of them but Calvert have co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, a Republican bill that would define the unborn as a person under the Constitution from “the moment of fertilization” and effectively ban abortion nationwide, legal scholars say. Representative Kim, another Republican facing a potentially competitive race in an Orange County district, did not co-sponsor that bill, but has described herself as a “proud pro-life woman” who believes “the rights of the child must be respected.” The GOP challengers to Harder, Levin, and Porter have also publicly declared their opposition to legal abortion.

    As signs have grown of the backlash to the Supreme Court decision—including the Democratic victory in a New York congressional special election and the resounding defeat of a Kansas ballot initiative that would have opened the door to state abortion restrictions—several of the California Republicans have tried to obscure their positions. For instance, although the Life at Conception Act offers no exceptions and Steel earlier this year said she supported legal abortion only when the mother’s health was endangered, she told me in a statement, “I am pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest, and the health and life of the mother, and baby.” In a statement to the Los Angeles Times this week, Representative Garcia backed the same exceptions—which, again, are not included in the “life begins at conception” bill he is co-sponsoring.

    In her statement, Steel downplayed the possibility that a Republican-controlled Congress would seek to ban abortion nationwide, though notably without disavowing the idea: “Discussions surrounding a nationwide ban on abortion are purely hypothetical at this point,” she declared.

    But such vague dismissals may not dispel the vulnerability California Republicans face over the possibility of a national ban on abortion, particularly amid the parallel debate over amending the state constitution.

    Though neither supporters nor opponents of the constitutional amendment have yet raised much money, Newsom, who is emerging as a national leader for Democrats on cultural issues, is expected to campaign heavily for it and raise its visibility this fall. “I don’t want to give away our plans … but I would expect him to play a very prominent role,” Sean Clegg, a senior strategist for Newsom, told me. Abortion rights and the constitutional amendment to protect them, he added, are “going to have an effect in every single race in California.”

    Conor Friedersdorf: Gavin Newsom, the Ron DeSantis of the left

    The proposed amendment on the ballot in November represents the third level of protection for abortion rights in California. In earlier rulings, the state supreme court has already decided that the procedure is protected under the state constitution’s guarantees of liberty and privacy. This amendment, placed on the ballot by Newsom and the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature, adds an explicit guarantee that “the state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom … which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.”

    Yet even all those reinforcing levels of protection for abortion rights in the California constitution would be preempted if Congress approved a national ban, legal analysts agree. The Life at Conception Act would surely face legal challenges if a future Republican-controlled Congress passes it, but should the law be upheld, it would override any California action to guarantee abortion rights, according to Cary Franklin, a constitutional-law professor at UCLA and the faculty director of its Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “If Congress were to pass a national ban on abortion, that would trump state law, even state constitutional law,” she told me.

    That’s a message Democrats are likely to pound across the state in the campaign’s final months. “If Steel has her way, she will pass a federal ban on abortion, which will override our protections here, and I think Californians are coming to realize that,” Chen, a Naval reservist and the owner of a business that manages commercial properties, told me. By contrast, Chen, like the other Democratic incumbents and challengers, supports legislation restoring a national right to abortion.

    Opponents of the state constitutional amendment, such as Steel, say it would authorize abortions at any point in pregnancy, ending current state restrictions after a fetus is viable outside the womb (unless the mother’s life is endangered). Its sponsors deny that interpretation, but it will likely become the centerpiece of the campaign against the amendment. “Pro-life people may have had enough,” Susan Swift Arnall, the vice president of legal affairs at California’s Right to Life League, told me. “They may say, ‘This is too far. This is too extreme … And we want to send a message back to the legislature that we don’t support abortion on demand for all nine months and even into the birth of the baby.’”

    But the greater likelihood is that the amendment mobilizes turnout among the decisive majority in the state who support abortion rights. “There’s no question the [Supreme Court] decision has really created a great deal of increased interest from women voters for sure, and not just Democrats,” Levin said. “We are talking about independents, even some Republicans. Those who historically haven’t voted in midterm elections, I think, are motivated.”

    By solidifying Democrats in suburbia, abortion rights’ growing visibility, like the increased focus on gun violence and renewed attention to Trump, may narrow the range of House districts the GOP can realistically contest both in California and nationwide, and lower the ceiling on their potential gains. But not enough voters may prioritize abortion to neutralize Republicans’ other advantages in economically strained areas. Like so much else in modern American politics, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe seems likely to further widen the chasm between white-collar and culturally cosmopolitan metropolitan areas trending toward the Democrats and blue-collar, socially conservative smaller places hardening in their support for the GOP, even in staunchly Democratic California.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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