On Wednesday, former President Barack Obama joined California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a livestream for volunteers in support of Proposition 50, the governor’s redistricting measure, and the sole question on the ballot in the November 4 special election. As I reported last week in a story on the almost unprecedented spending around the measure: > Prop 50 is part of a larger redistricting fight unfolding across the country, > as Democrats seek to retake the House of Representatives and Republicans try > to retain their narrow majority in next year’s midterm elections. It all began > in June, when President Donald Trump nudged Texas Republicans to redraw the > state’s voting maps mid-decade, off the usual 10-year schedule, to swing five > seats in the national party’s favor. “This is in reaction to something unprecedented,” Newsom said at the start of Wednesday’s call. Proposition 50, Newsom said, is his attempt to counter Republican efforts to redraw congressional lines at the president’s behest, not just in Texas but in other states—like Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina—with GOP-run legislatures.  Obama, the highest-profile of many Democratic political notables to throw their weight behind the measure, joined midway through the call to drive home Newsom’s message.  “The problem that we are seeing right now,” Obama said, is that Trump and his administration are brazenly saying that they want to “change the rules of the game midstream” to “give themselves an advantage.”  “This is not how American democracy is supposed to operate. And that’s what Prop 50 is about,” he added, noting that the measure “has critical implications not just for California but for the entire country.” “As a consequence of California’s actions, we have a chance at least to create a level playing field in the upcoming midterm elections,” he said.  This comes days after Obama featured in the Yes on 50 campaign’s latest ad, and the same day that the Washington Post released a report about how the former president has been advocating for the measure behind the scenes since the summer.  As part of Saturday’s No Kings demonstrations, thousands of Bay Area protesters at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach showed their support for the proposal and opposition to Trump’s authoritarian policies by forming a human banner that read, “NO KINGS,” and below that, “YES ON 50.”

The GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature, which has already gone to extreme lengths to undermine the will of the voters, is set to pass a new Trump-inspired gerrymandered congressional map this week that is expected to give Republicans one additional seat heading into the midterms. It will make one of the most gerrymandered states in the country even more gerrymandered, likely giving Republicans nearly 80 percent of US House seats in an otherwise closely divided swing state where Trump won 51 percent of the vote in 2024. The state senate passed the bill on Tuesday in near record time, with the state house to follow shortly thereafter. The map targets the district of Democratic US House Rep. Don Davis, which has been represented by a Black member of Congress for more than three decades, shifting it from a district that Trump won by 3 points in 2024 to 12 points under the new lines. To make the district more Republican, majority-Black counties in eastern North Carolina’s Black Belt, including Davis’ home county, would be moved out of the district and replaced with majority-white counties that favor Trump. “In the 2024 election with record voter turnout, NC’s First Congressional District elected both President Trump and me,” Davis said in a statement on Tuesday. “Since the start of this new term, my office has received 46,616 messages from constituents of different political parties, including those unaffiliated, expressing a range of opinions, views, and requests. Not a single one of them included a request for a new congressional map redrawing eastern North Carolina. Clearly, this new congressional map is beyond the pale.” > “Instead of nibbling at the margins of participation, today’s strategies are > about cheating outright.” The new map continues the trend of Republicans eliminating the seats of Democrats of color in their unprecedented bid to redraw districts in as many controlled states as possible in advance of the midterms; Missouri’s congressional gerrymanderer dismantled the district of Black Democrat Emanuel Cleaver while Texas’ map, which launched the GOP’s mid-decade redistricting frenzy, seeks to remove three Hispanic Democrats and one Black Democrat from office. “Instead of nibbling at the margins of participation, today’s strategies are about cheating outright,” said Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of the pro-democracy group North Carolina For the People Action. Republican leaders in North Carolina have openly admitted that they drew the new map to placate Trump, with reports alleging that Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger spearheaded the effort in exchange for Trump’s endorsement in his contested primary. “We are doing everything we can to protect President Trump’s agenda, which means safeguarding Republican control of Congress,” Berger said. North Carolina has been ground zero for Republican gerrymandering schemes for more than a decade. The maps passed by North Carolina Republicans after the 2020 census were struck down by the Democratic majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court, leading to an even split in the state’s congressional delegation for the 2022 elections. But after Republicans won a majority on the state supreme court in that election, they overturned the court ruling blocking the gerrymandered map, allowing Republicans to pass a new gerrymander that gave the party three new seats in the 2024 election, which helped the GOP retain control of the US House. “We would have been in the majority if North Carolina hadn’t egregiously redistricted and eliminated three Democratic seats,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) said after the election. That map, which earned an F from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, attempted to oust Davis, a former Air Force captain and member of the state senate from 2013 to 2023, shifting his district from a Democratic advantage to narrowly favoring Republicans, but he survived in 2024, winning by two points even as Trump carried his district. A federal lawsuit alleges that his current district, which has been represented by a Black member of Congress since 1992, was drawn by Republicans to dilute Black voting strength. But now Republicans are redoubling their efforts to oust Davis, turning an F map into an F-. “Racist maps make racist reps!” protesters at the North Carolina capitol chanted before the state senate passed the bill. (In 2023, the legislature snuck in a provision to the state budget shielding redistricting records from public view, which could make it harder to challenge the new gerrymander in court.) “They want to lock in that no Democrat, especially no Black Democrat, can ever win again,” former Democratic Rep. Eva Clayton, who represented the first district from 1992 to 2003, as the first Black woman elected to Congress from North Carolina, said on Tuesday. It was a case originating in North Carolina that led to the Supreme Court effectively greenlighting extreme partisan gerrymandering in 2019, which has allowed Trump and his Republican allies to redraw districts for partisan advantage in state after state this year. In 2016, a federal court ruled that two of the state’s congressional districts were illegally racially gerrymandered. When Republicans, under the guidance of the late GOP redistricting godfather Tom Hofeller, redrew the congressional maps, legislative leaders openly admitted their top goal was to maintain a partisan advantage. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats,” said GOP state Rep. David Lewis, who oversaw the redistricting process. He conceded: “I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander, which is not against the law.”  The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice John Roberts holding in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandered claims couldn’t be brought in federal court—a decision that turbocharged gerrymandering across the country.   Roberts claimed that the Rucho decision did not bar efforts to outlaw racial gerrymandering. But the Supreme Court just heard arguments in a case that could end the Voting Rights Act’s ability to stop racial gerrymandering as well, which would kill the last remaining protection of the landmark civil rights law. Such a ruling could jeopardize majority-minority districts across the country, shifting up to 19 seats to the GOP. North Carolina Republicans have long been at the forefront of GOP efforts to undermine democracy. The legislature convened a lame-duck session after the 2024 election that was supposed to focus on hurricane relief but instead stripped the state’s Democratic governor, Josh Stein, of the power to appoint a majority of members to the state and county election boards. The new state board is now controlled by Republicans with a long history of limiting access to the ballot who could use their authority to close polling places, cut early voting hours, and contest election outcomes. Already, a North Carolina Republican state supreme court justice, Jefferson Griffin, spent seven months trying to overturn the victory of his Democratic opponent Allison Riggs following the 2024 election. “They’re abusing their power to take away the people’s power, the voters’ power, because they’re trying to decide for the voters who their congressperson is,” said Stein, who does not have the power to veto the redistricting bill.   Now, the GOP’s toxic attempt to oust a Black Democrat in North Carolina is a disturbing preview of what a post-Voting Rights Act America will look like.

If you live in California, like me, chances are you’ve been inundated with political ads and have a recycling bin filled up with mailers urging you to vote for or against Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting proposal in response to Texas’ newly gerrymandered congressional map.  Prop 50 is part of a larger redistricting fight unfolding across the country, as Democrats seek to retake the House of Representatives and Republicans try to retain their narrow majority in next year’s midterm elections. It all began in June, when President Donald Trump nudged Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s voting maps mid-decade, off the usual 10-year schedule, to swing five seats in the national party’s favor.  In response—and after the Texas GOP quashed Democratic opposition with threats of arrest—Newsom unveiled a proposal to counter Trump’s plans to rig the race.  “We have got to fight fire with fire,” Newsom said when announcing his plan to circumvent the state’s independent redistricting process and offset Texas’ gains with a map that would likely flip the same number of red seats blue. Since 2010, California’s congressional maps have been drawn by a nonpartisan 14-member commission of citizens. If Prop 50 were to pass, the state would adopt gerrymandered maps until the 2030 census, after which it would revert to the old model.  Since it was certified for the ballot in late August, Prop 50 has already become one of the most expensive ballot measures in California’s history, drawing about $140 million in spending for and against with weeks remaining until the November 4 special election. More than twice as much—some $97.7 million—has gone to the Yes on 50 campaign. While tens of millions of dollars have been raised from small donors and labor unions, the largest contributions, about $11 million, came from the House Majority PAC, focused on electing Democrats to office, followed by $10 million from the Fund for Policy Reform, a lobbying group funded by billionaire Democratic donor George Soros. Of the more than $42 million raised for the No campaign, the majority—$32 million—comes from conservative megadonor Charles Munger Jr., who helped former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger establish the state’s nonpartisan Citizens Redistricting Commission in the late aughts and has donated to anti-abortion and anti-LGBT groups. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, and Republican former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy have also contributed $5 million and $1 million, respectively. In one Munger-funded No on 50 ad with half a million views on YouTube, local politicians and faith leaders claim the measure will destroy California’s “reputation as a national leader for fair elections” and sacrifice “fair elections and voter choice.” On the flip side, Yes on 50 ads featuring Gov. Newsom and California Sen. Alex Padilla, and well-known national Democrats including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and most recently, former president Barack Obama, insist that the new map is needed to “protect democracy.” > As the 2026 midterms approach, ad spending is projected to reach a record > $10.8 billion, with California leading at an estimated $1.1 billion. In one ad, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett draws a straight line between her home and the Golden State, telling California voters, “When Donald Trump ordered Texas Republicans to rig the next election, they drew my seat off the map…With Prop 50, you have the power to stop them.” As the 2026 midterms approach, ad spending is projected to reach a record $10.8 billion, with California leading the states at an estimated $1.1 billion in spending this cycle, according to an August report by AdImpact. A Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) poll conducted in mid-August, before the ad blitz, surveyed nearly 5,000 registered voters—about 48 percent of whom said they would support Prop 50, with 32 percent against and the remaining 20 percent undecided. “This will be an intense campaign with both sides spending tens of millions to try to move those undecided voters,” IGS co-director Eric Schickler predicted in a press release at the time.  A poll of nearly 1,000 likely voters conducted by the research company Co/efficient about a month later found that 54 percent of those polled supported the proposition, 36 percent opposed it, and only 10 percent were still undecided. By comparison, campaigns around California’s most expensive ballot measures—Propositions 26 and 27, a 2022 pair of measures on legalizing sports betting, and Prop 22, a 2020 proposal about whether to recognize rideshare drivers as independent contractors or employees—received more than $463 and $224 million, respectively. While efforts to pass those measures were bankrolled by major corporations with deep pockets, Prop 50 is unusual: it isn’t about the profits of one industry or a few firms, but who will hold the reins of federal government. While Texas’ new map faces challenges in federal court, and Californians wait to cast their ballots, the midterms—and Congress—hang in the balance. Additional data analysis by Melissa Lewis.

The Voting Rights Act turned 60 years old this month. It’s a landmark piece of legislation designed to enforce voting rights protected by the Constitution, especially for Black Americans in Southern states with a history of suppressing racial minorities from voting. The act is considered one of the most effective laws ever passed to protect voting rights. Today, it’s a shell of itself. Jamelle Bouie, a political columnist for The New York Times, often analyzes today’s political stories through the lens of a historian. He’s written about why the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision to exclude African Americans from becoming citizens still matters today and how the Trump administration’s war on the federal government is similar to the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” campaign. And he’s recently taken on the conservative movement’s successful effort to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. “The notion that everyone deserves equal access to the ballot, that everyone deserves equal access to elections, that one person ought to mean one vote, and that there ought to be some measure of political equality has never really sat well with the political right in this country,” Bouie says. On this week’s More To The Story, Bouie sits down with host Al Letson to talk about how the Voting Rights Act has been defanged by the Supreme Court, why the Democratic Party is made up of “a bunch of weenies,” and why he believes the country is now in a constitutional emergency. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So this month marks the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act being signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Supreme Court seems to be dismantling it bit by bit. Tell me a little bit about the history of the act and how it’s changed over the years. Jamelle Bouie: The Voting Rights Act is more or less drafted and passed and signed in the first half, more or less of 1965. It’s signed into law August 6th, 1965. Much of the work is done earlier in the year. And anyone who’s seen the movie Selma, who knows sort of basic civil rights chronology, knows that it was prompted, precipitated by movement efforts to demonstrate the high barriers to voting that still existed post 1964 Civil Rights Act. And the signature piece of it, the piece of it that really made it transformative was section five, which is called pre-clearance. And pre-clearance simply meant that in jurisdictions covered by the law, if they wanted to change their voting rules, they had to go to the Justice Department, submit them and get approval. That’s it. But in practice it meant that lots of localities and municipalities and states that were looking for ways to dilute or otherwise undermine the voting power of black residents simply couldn’t because the federal government was maintaining kind of a sharp and watchful eye over their conduct. And in the 2013 case, Shelby County Beholder, the Supreme Court basically gutted pre-clearance. Specifically the court said that the existing pre-clearance formula, which was based off of states that had histories of voting discrimination, was outdated. John Roberts essentially is saying, the chief justice, he wrote the opinion for the court. Roberts saying that, “Times have changed. It’s unfair to hold these states to account for actions taken in a previous generation.” So in theory, a Congress could pass a new voting rights bill with a different formula for pre-clearance. You could have universal pre-clearance, which is something I would prefer, where all states had to submit voting plans prior to enactment, to make sure they’re not discriminating. But in practice, Congress just has not had a voting majority for any kind of serious voting rights bill. And so the Roberts Court decision and pre-clearance, and subsequent decisions from the court have weakened the law in other ways. So in 2021, for example, in a decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court held that you needed to prove intent to discriminate in order to file suit under section two, which gives sort of a cause of action. You can sue under section two for voting discrimination. And proving intent is so hard, the evidence of it you can see and clearly point to, but proving intent, I mean that’s a tough bar to reach. That’s what made the decision in 2021 so absurd, because even at the height of voting discrimination in this country, lawmakers were smart enough not to say, “We’re doing this to discriminate against Black people or Hispanic people or whomever.” The 15th Amendment still exists. It explicitly bars discrimination in voting on race. And so obviously lawmakers figured out ways to get around it. And so to prove intent, it’s impossible. I think people that are watching the way politics are playing out right now, especially if you’re not a student of history, you may not realize that all of these movements, everything that we’re seeing right now has been in the works for a very long time. Like Chief Justice Roberts hasn’t liked the Voting Rights Act since he was a young man working under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. So this is sort of fulfillment of a promise that was made many years ago, to shift society into this new place or maybe more accurately, to shift society back to an old place. I think that’s right. I mean, Roberts has a long history of disliking the Voting Rights Act, but in general, the conservative movement has never liked the Voting Rights Act. It’s never liked the idea of a federal government exercising its authority in strong ways to curb states from shaping their electorates and shaping their elections. The notion that everyone deserves equal access to the ballot, that everyone deserves equal access to elections, that one person ought to mean one vote, and that there ought to be some measure of political equality has never really sat well with the political right in this country. And with the Trump administration and with the Supreme Court, they are very clearly aiming to use this power to advance their vision of some people have more access than others. So do you feel like we are in a constitutional crisis? I mean, yeah, I’m very much of the view that we’re in some kind of constitutional emergency, whether you want to call it a constitutional crisis, whether you want to describe it as an ongoing assault on the constitutional structure, the term I like a lot, whether you want to see it as an acute instance of constitutional rot, the foundation is rotting under our feet, however you want to describe it, right? There’s different ways to talk about this. I think it’s clearly true that we’re in a state of constitutional emergency. So I want to step back a little bit and just look at the Democratic Party. I’m curious if the struggles that you’re seeing right now, like what’s going on with the Voting Act, but also when we look at taking away women’s rights to choose, in red states, I’m curious if you think that the Democratic Party has just been a little bit too meek in the past and not been able to codify these things. I’ve heard many people say that the argument over Roe V. Wade, we didn’t even need to have that. It could have been codified to stop this from happening, but the Democrats never did it. I don’t know, what’s your thoughts on that? I think you could fault the Democrats probably rightfully for not codifying Roe V. Wade when they had the chance, although it’s worth saying that probably the first time there was an actual voting majority, like a pro-choice voting majority in Congress was the most recent democratic trifecta, that people who remember the 2009 to 2011 cycle may recall that part of what almost killed the Affordable Care Act were pro-life Democrats who were demanded a promise that there would not be any funding for abortion in the law. During the time when there was briefly a Democratic super majority, a chunk of that super majority constituted Democrats who probably would not vote to codify Roe V. Wade. So just for saying that. But the reason conservatives are anti-abortion isn’t because liberals support choice, they’re anti-abortion because they have a sincere belief that one should not be able to get a legal abortion. And I think it’s worth remembering that the other side gets a vote, right? The other side has agency, they don’t do things purely in reaction to their opponents, but they have an independent source of motivation. Now having said that, do I think that the Democratic Party is a bunch of weenies? I do. Do I think that Democrats could use more fight in them? I absolutely do. I know you know this, but listeners who maybe have not watched The Wire or rewatched The Wire may not remember, I believe it’s a scene in season four, when the character Marlowe Stanfield goes into a convenience store and steals a lollipop just because he can. And there’s a security guard there who sees him steal it and is like, “Hey man, could you just do me a solid and put it back, because I know you’re just kind of disrespecting me to disrespect me, but I have no choice, I have this job. This is what I do and you know I just can’t let you leave having stolen something.” And Marlowe, who is kind of like a murderer psychopath, and a powerful on the rise drug kingpin, looks at him and says to him, “You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.” And I think about that all the time with relation to Democrats. I think so many elected Democrats who are of a generation of lawmakers who came of age on the oldest side in the seventies, in the eighties and the nineties, in a period where even when the country’s politics were headed towards stark polarization, that would’ve been the nineties. There are still moderate Republicans, there are still conservative Democrats. There’s still kind of a bipartisan ethos in Washington. And there’s still the sense in their political upbringing that you could calm the common ground with your opponents, that you kind of basically wanted the same things, just had different ways of going about it. And there was a sense as well that the country was generally kind of conservative, and so you just had to work around that. And so Democrats of that ilk, of that generation, I think are just dispositionally inclined to behave as if their Republican counterparts are operating in good faith, as if they don’t really mean the extreme things they say. And I think this belief is downstream of this view that kind of we’re all playing a game, but that’s not how it is. They want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. And the other way is that, “No, Republicans want to destroy you.” The Republican Party is out to win and win for the duration. To your point, I think that many Democrats, including the current Democratic leadership, and when I say leadership, I’m talking about Chuck Schumer, they want to go back or they wholeheartedly believe that we are still living in the world of Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan, and I’m curious if you agree with this, the Democrats are very much entrenched in the idea of, whose turn is it? Instead of like, who’s got the sharpest blade? So they will push forward a candidate that they feel like, “Well, it’s their turn,” instead of the candidate that really has a blade that’s sharp and can go in and cut, and Republicans are the exact opposite. So I do agree with this. I think that Hakeem Jeffries knows that we’re not in the era of Reagan and Tip O’Neill, but I think what we’re sensing from democratic leadership is that they imagine themselves in the face of this chaotic president and this transgressive political movement, they imagine themselves as the protector of the system. They’re defending the way things used to be so they can be restored. Unfortunately, this just reads as being weak and there’s no going back. What it means is that you can’t do a game of seniority anymore. I think of the minor in the scheme of things, but revealing, the fight over who is going to be the ranking member in the House Oversight Committee. Initially Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was running for that spot and her opponent was Jerry Connolly. Now Ocasio-Cortez, I believe we’re about the same age, I think. So she’s like 36, 37. Jerry Connolly was 74 years old, and his supporters were like, “Yeah, he’s 74, but he’s like a young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” direct quote, “A young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” and Connolly- It’s just a wild caveat. I mean, that’s just a wild caveat. It’s comical. And he won and was promptly just like an inert and not particularly interesting chairman or ranking member. And he passed away recently. And it’s like that’s the problem. I get it. I get it, older members. Leadership may not like AOC all that much. They may think that she is too aggressive, whatever, but she’s unquestionably one of the most media savvy and compelling people in the Democratic Party. Why wouldn’t you want her to be the ranking member on your oversight committee, which offers plenty of opportunities to make noise against your opponents? Why wouldn’t you want to do that? And it demonstrates, as you said, it’s not even that they don’t want to elevate the person with the sharpest blade. They seem to be afraid of the blade, afraid of what it looks like to be that aggressive. You see this with the reaction to Zohran Mamdani, another compelling telegenic, charismatic Democrat, who you would think that any rational party would be like, “Yeah, let’s make this guy, let’s elevate this guy because he has it, whatever it is.” But there’s all this fear, all this worry that like, “Oh, he’s Muslim. Oh, he’s kind of left-wing. So voters are going to be…” But there’s no understanding that political leadership is a thing that exists and that you can shape the environment in which voters understand your party and your candidates ,and the Democratic Party’s refusal to do this has left it in a situation where voters don’t know what it stands for, that people who identify as Democrats think the party is weak, and that Republicans and conservatives can just make up stuff and say, “Yeah, Democrats said it.” And people, I guess they did. When you talk about Mamdani, I think about, if there was a, for lack of better term, a Bizarro Mamdani, where he was the exact opposite, but still charismatic and all of those things, he’d be a star in the Republican Party, and they’d be putting a lot of love behind him and pushing him forward. Whereas in the Democratic Party, they don’t want to touch him. And it’s just a really clear example of how party leadership seems to be out of step with the actual rank-and-file members of the party. This is so true, and it’s interesting. So back in the eighties there was a conclusion, there are many more moderate Democrats who felt that the party elite was out of step with the rank-and-file by which they meant that it had moved too far to the left. And so things like the Democratic Leadership Council, guys like Bill Clinton were trying to realign the party leadership with what they believed to be the moderate base of the party. And I’m not certain that they were wrong, because Clinton does end up winning two terms as president, Democrats have a pretty good [inaudible 00:17:25] so on, so forth. I think there’s a misalignment between the party base and the leadership, but I don’t think it’s an ideological misalignment, and I don’t think it’s an ideological misalignment because I think the figures who are rising to the top as people that rank-and-file Democrats are excited about, don’t have ideology in common. Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, they’re all over the board of Democratic Party ideology. But what they have in common is a willingness to treat Republicans not as wayward colleagues, but as opponents, as people you have to beat and to be willing to be creative and compelling in attempting to do that. And that’s I think, where the mismatch is. You see, there are a lot of polls right now showing Democratic Party’s low overall approval, but so much of it is driven by actual Democratic voters looking to Washington and just being frustrated with Chuck Schumer and Jeffries and aging and inert leadership. If Democrats can solve that problem, if it can elevate people who understand that the moment that we’re in requires more fight, then those numbers are going to go up. So Jamelle, there is one thing in politics that drives me absolutely crazy. Whenever there’s an election, I hear people say, “We need candidate X in office because he’s a good businessman and we need government to run like a business.” What do you think about that? So I 100% agree about the notion that it’s absurd to want to think of government as a business. The goal of a business is to make a profit. The goal of a government is to deliver services. A businesses run like a little dictatorship, right? The CEO says, the boss says what goes. And the thing about businesses is a lot of them fail, but I’ll say that I think maybe one reason the public is so attracted to this notion of running the government like a business, aside from the way that our culture elevates the businessman as this figure of emulation, the entrepreneur. But I think one reason perhaps is that our government does not do a good job of delivering services in a way that makes it clear that this is a product of the government. So much of what our government does is obscured under layers of tax credits and incentives and that kind of thing. Direct benefits, a one-to-one relationship between, we say we’re going to do this, and this happens to you, few and far between, and I think it creates the impression that the government isn’t doing anything. I’m always struck by, people love social security, they love social security, they love Medicare, and I think one of the reasons is that social security is very simple. You see, in your check it says you pay your social security tax, and then when you turn 65 or 67, you get a check in return. It’s very straightforward. Yep. Simple. To go back to Mamdani, I’m convinced that part of his appeal isn’t even the substance of the policies, but the fact that they’re so simple. Free buses,. City grocery stores, rent control, that’s easy to understand. It’s simple. Our federal government doesn’t do this so well. I also think, to your point, that what Trump has done very well is made his policies simple. It’s Make America Great Again, and these are all the things that I’m going to do to enact that. And also, say what you want about Trump, he is a master marketer and he has an innate understanding of his audience. And so when the COVID checks went out and he made sure that his name was on it, even though he was opposed to the checks going out, when people got those checks, they saw his name on it. But the fact that the effective political messaging keeps it simple is a huge part of it. I think that’s absolutely right. I have a couple thoughts. The first is that, the example of Trump putting his name on the checks is such a great one. During the last year’s election, there was a rally where Obama was speaking, and Obama was praising Biden for not putting his name on his checks because that showed he was for the American people and not just for himself. But I saw that and I was like, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” that politics isn’t this game of showing how responsible you are. First of all, it’s winning elections, but second of all, it’s using rhetoric, public engagement, public speaking, public discourse to connect ordinary people to government and to persuade them that you will do better for them than the other guy. And that involves sending messages however you can. And so if writing your name on the check is what it takes to remind voters that you are doing something for them, you should do it. This is the basic insight of the old 19th century political machines. You’re an Irish immigrant. You show up in New York and boss, the Tammany machine, greets you, says, “Hey, I represent this neighborhood. You need a job, you need a place to live? Come to me. We’ll get you a job.” And the job is coming from Tammany, it’s coming from us, and the only thing we need from you is your support. Election comes along, give us a ballot. That’s all we need. That direct relationship, yeah, there’s corruption, whatever, but that represents a direct relationship between the representative, the system, and the voter. And Trump, I think kind of intuitively gets this. He’s very 19th century figure in a lot of ways. He intuitively gets this, and I’m not sure Democrats intuitively get this, some do, but I think that this older generation, existing leadership are too just acculturated in this era where that kind of directness seems like uncouth or inappropriate. But no, it’s exactly what’s needed. And yes, does it mean maybe that you can’t have big complicated policies anymore? Probably, but that’s probably a good thing to begin with. Maybe there should be a return to just simplicity in our policymaking, rather than trying to figure out what kind of tax credits you’re going to get if you make this kind of money, just say, “Oh, every family gets a flat amount of money to help with their kids. Everyone gets access to a basic level of healthcare. Everyone gets a flat amount of money to help pay for housing.” It’s simple and it’s direct thing. Roosevelt understood this. I mean, you go around the country, you’ll find buildings that still have that dude’s name stamped right in them, reminding you that you have this bill, you have this library, you have this courthouse, you have this playground because Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted you to have it, and that’s powerful. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

The state of Texas is currently mourning at least 120 lives lost due to horrific flooding in the Hill Country. But Texas Republicans appear focused on a different priority: re-gerrymandering their state to reduce Democrats’ chances of retaking the US House in 2026. After intense lobbying by the White House, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Wednesday that the GOP-dominated state legislature would reconvene this summer to redraw its Congressional districts. It’s a shocking move on multiple fronts. First, there’s the timing. Districts are typically redrawn after the decennial census at the beginning of the decade to account for population changes. And, given the scale of the devastation in the Hill Country and questions about the state and national preparedness to alert residents and combat the flooding, one would think that state leaders would be laser-focused on preventing another such tragedy. “While Texans battle tragic and deadly flooding, Governor Abbott and House Republicans are plotting a mid-decade gerrymander,” Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) wrote on X. “They should be modernizing emergency response—not rigging maps.” Then there’s the substance. Texas already has some of the most gerrymandered congressional districts in the country. Republicans control two-thirds of US House seats, even though in the 2024 election Trump only won 56 percent of the vote in the state. Texas gained 4 million people between 2010 and 2020, giving the state two new congressional seats. Ninety-five percent of the population growth came from people of color, but, in a brazen effort to forestall the impact of demographic changes, the state drew two new seats in areas with white majorities instead. “The partisan effects of the maps are achieved by discriminating against communities of color,” Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice told me at the time. Both the Biden Justice Department and civil rights groups sued the state, alleging that the maps intentionally discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. A federal trial in that case just recently concluded, with the verdict pending. As if the current maps weren’t skewed enough, the Trump White House reportedly urged Texas Republicans to pursue an even more “ruthless” approach ahead of the midterms that could net the GOP four or five new seats. In fact, Trump’s Justice Department, which has dramatically reversed all voting rights enforcement, appears to have orchestrated the push to redraw the state’s US House districts. The department sent a letter to Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday alleging that four of Texas’s congressional districts were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” Abbott then cited “constitutional concerns” as a reason to call a special redistricting session. > “I view the DOJ letter as offering a fig leaf, if you think one is necessary, > to give the governor an excuse to redistrict.” “I view the DOJ letter as offering a fig leaf, if you think one is necessary, to give the governor an excuse to redistrict,” says Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama. It just so happens that all four of the districts singled out by the DOJ have been represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats. That raises the likelihood that Texas Republicans, in a bid to give their party more seats, will redraw their districts in a way that further reduces representation for voters of color, who are already severely underrepresented in the state where their numbers are growing. The DOJ is interpreting the Voting Rights Act, experts say, in an extremely dubious way that turns the purpose of the law on its head. Its letter claims that coalition districts like the ones in Texas, where minority groups together form a majority, “run afoul of the Voting Rights Act.” As evidence, it cites one major case, a 2023 ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative appellate court in the country, in which it overruled a lower court opinion by a Trump-appointed judge striking down a county commissioners’ map in Galveston, Texas, that eliminated the only majority-minority district. The 5th Circuit’s opinion has not been upheld by the Supreme Court, nor adopted by any other appellate court. Levitt called the 5th Circuit’s decision “dead wrong” and the DOJ letter “embarrassing.” The GOP strategy, while potentially blunting Democratic efforts to retake the House, is not without risks. The last time Texas Republicans redrew their districts mid-decade, in 2003 under the orders of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, state legislative Democrats fled the state, leading to a lengthy political battle. It’s possible that could happen again. During the summer of 2021, they also decamped to Washington, DC, in an unsuccessful bid to prevent Republicans from passing new voting restrictions. It’s also possible that blue states like California or New York could retaliate by redrawing their own maps to counter the GOP. And Texas Republicans, by moving voters from safe Republican areas to target Democratic incumbents, could also endanger the reelection bids of some of their own members. “If the Republicans get too terribly greedy,” says Levitt, “they could end up achieving exactly the opposite of what they’re trying to achieve.”

On March 22, Elon Musk hosted conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel and US Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) for a discussion on X about the importance of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election on April 1. It began 36 minutes late and was beset with technical difficulties, as Musk repeatedly talked over Schimel. But once things got straightened out, Musk made it clear why he is offering voters $100 a pop to sign a petition opposing “activist judges” and spending $18 million through various political groups—a record for any donor in a Wisconsin judicial contest—to elect Schimel and flip the ideological majority of the court. “This is a very important race for many reasons,” Musk said. “The most consequential is that [it] will decide how congressional districts are drawn in Wisconsin, which if the other candidate wins, instead of Justice Schimel, then the Democrats will attempt to redraw the districts and cause Wisconsin to lose two Republican seats. In my opinion that’s the most important thing, which is a big deal given that the congressional majority is so razor-thin. It could cause the House to switch to Democrat if that redrawing takes place.” Musk’s fear is that the court, if it retains a progressive majority, will strike down the congressional lines that give Republicans a 6-2 advantage in the US House delegation. (Democrats have made similar claims.) The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave that map an F for partisan fairness, saying it had a “significant Republican advantage.” The court has yet to take up a lawsuit challenging the congressional map, but if they were to eventually strike it down, that could help Democrats retake the House, which would allow Democrats to scrutinize the unprecedented role Musk is playing in shredding the federal government, accessing sensitive personal information on millions of Americans, and the $38 billion in federal funding his businesses receive. Musk was essentially admitting that his spending spree in Wisconsin has nothing to do with the state itself, and everything to do with protecting his own power. (It should also be noted that Tesla is currently suing the state for blocking the company from opening car dealerships there.) That’s a prevailing theme for the Trump administration. At the same time Musk and Trump are threatening to impeach federal judges for rulings they don’t like, they’re going all-out to put their handpicked judges on the bench, who they’re confident will rubber-stamp their radical agenda and extend their plan for oligarchy to the states. And Schimel, a former state attorney general and judge in suburban Milwaukee, is a willing accomplice. What’s most notable about his campaign, other than the amount of money he’s attracted from Musk, is how obsequious he has been toward Trump. He attended Trump’s inauguration and practically begged for an endorsement from the president, which finally arrived on Friday night. He said he wanted to “nationalize the race” so that large donors, like Musk, would spend millions of dollars on his behalf. He appeared at a “Mega Maga Rally” on the campaign trail in March, posing in front of a 50-foot blowup doll of Trump with a “Vote Brad Schimel” sign on it. He wore a Trump-as-garbage-man costume on Halloween. He was pictured on a boat wearing a shirt that said, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.” This is ethically dubious behavior from a judge who could hear cases involving the president. More substantively, he has defended some of Trump’s most extreme actions and amplified some of his most dangerous rhetoric. He told the right-wing group Turning Point USA that he is running for the court to provide a “support network” for Trump and combat the lawsuits against his administration. He claimed the January 6 insurrectionists did not receive fair trials and defended Trump for pardoning 1,500 of them. He told supporters that “the Wisconsin Supreme Court screwed [Trump] over” by keeping a Green Party candidate off the ballot in 2020 and declined to say whether he would have voted to overturn the 2020 election (the court came one vote short of doing so). He criticized the one conservative judge, Brian Hagedorn, who voted with the liberal justices to uphold the election as “soft-headed” and called the progressive female justices “dumb as a sack of hammers,” “addled,” and “crazy.” He has echoed Trump’s election disinformation, telling a conservative radio host recently that Republicans needed to make the election “too big to rig” so that Democrats in Milwaukee could not steal it. “So we don’t have to worry that at 11:30 in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines,” Schimel said, repeating one on the most prevalent conspiracy theories spread by Trump in 2020. (In reality, some votes are often counted later in the day because of a state law, which the GOP-controlled legislature refuses to change, prohibiting election officials from processing absentee ballots before 7 a.m. on Election Day.) That earned a rebuke from a bipartisan group, the Democracy Defense Project, that includes Schimel’s Republican predecessor as state attorney general, JB Van Hollen. “We don’t discourage people from voting early but phrases like ‘too big to rig’ cast doubt on our election process in Wisconsin, when just the opposite is true,” the group’s board responded. Musk has spread his own election misinformation. He first mentioned the race on X in January, writing that it was “very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” He was referencing a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in July 2024 reinstating mail-in ballot drop boxes, even though there is no evidence that the use of drop boxes has led to voter fraud. Even worse, one of the dark money groups he funds, Building America’s Future, created a deceptive front group called Progress 2028 that purports to be a progressive alternative to Project 2025 and is running digital ads and sending out text messages praising Schimel’s opponent, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford for positions she has not actually taken. “Judge Susan Crawford would reform cash bail (and) supports second chances, not incarceration,” one text message said. “Say thank you.” These fake ads are meant to tie Crawford to unpopular positions and motivate conservative activists. “Musk’s group takes things to an unacceptable new low,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote in a strongly worded editorial. “Disinformation is misinformation on steroids. It is not just stretching the truth or even innocently sharing mistruths, it is deliberately false and misleading. Progress 2028’s actions are corrosive not only for cleverly weaving truths with targeted false information, but because they also foment distrust in the electoral system and democracy.” Musk and his advisers are betting that the onslaught of dark money against Crawford and the strategy of aggressively tying Schimel to Trump will motivate Trump’s supporters to return to the polls on April 1. “This is entirely winnable, and you know, if we do win it, again, we have to thank Elon for all the support he’s given this race,” Ron Johnson said on the livestream with Musk. Andrew Romeo, the senior adviser for Building American’s Future, wrote on March 20 that “Schimel is in the midst of a monumental comeback,” moving from down 13 points to within 5 of Crawford in their recent survey and could win the race by “closing the enthusiasm gap with the base.” At the same time, Democrats believe that casting the race as a referendum on Musk is a winning strategy for them. “Knowing that Musk is trying to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court is propelling a wave of energy into supporting Susan Crawford and defeating Brad Schimel,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me recently. On the livestream with Schimel, Musk seemed dismayed by the turnout to date. “If you look at the early voting data so far, Democrats are winning, which is not good,” he said.

Ohio voters defeated a major ballot initiative on Tuesday that would have ended partisan gerrymandering in the state and curbed the lopsided majorities Republicans hold in the state legislature and US House delegation. The measure, known as Issue 1, was voted down with 54 percent of the vote. Republicans aggressively used their power to thwart a measure that seemingly had the support of a large majority of the state’s voters. Ohio voters passed two previous redistricting reform measures, in 2015 and 2018, with more than 70 percent of the vote each time. But when it came time to put Issue 1 on the ballot, Ohio Republicans grossly misrepresented the intention of the measure, which would have created a citizens redistricting commission to draw new maps for the state legislature and US House after GOP legislative leaders gutted the previous redistricting initiatives. The summary of the ballot initiative adopted by the Ohio Ballot Board, which has a Republican majority, implied the measure would encourage partisan gerrymandering rather than curb it, claiming the initiative would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and “manipulate the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.”  The board’s chair, GOP Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who lost the GOP primary for US Senate in 2024, is a member of the GOP-dominated redistricting commission that repeatedly voted for the state’s gerrymandered maps that gave Republicans supermajorities in both chambers—67 percent of seats in the state House and 69 percent in the state Senate, despite Trump only getting 53 percent of the vote in 2020. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the gerrymandered state legislative and US House maps seven times, but Republicans like LaRose kept overriding the court’s opinions. The group behind Issue 1, Citizens Not Politicians, which is led by former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, immediately sued the ballot board, asking the Ohio Supreme Court to block the “biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional ballot language.” But the Ohio Supreme Court, which gained a more conservative Republican majority after O’Connor’s retirement in 2022, largely approved the misleading language. That led to complaints from Ohio voters that they had been tricked into opposing a redistricting reform initiative that they actually supported. As Bolts magazine reported: > When Songgu Kwon went to the polls earlier this month, he was eager to help > Ohio adopt an independent redistricting commission. The comic book writer and > illustrator, who lives near Athens, dislikes the process with which > politicians have carved up Ohio into congressional and legislative > districts that favor them, enabling Republicans to lock in large majorities. > So he was pleased that voting rights groups had placed Issue 1, a proposal > meant to create fairer maps, on the Ohio ballot this fall.  > > “I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the > will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to > gerrymander,” says Kwon. > > In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His > ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander > the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it > would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.”  > > So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that > had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone > in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he > guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The > language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for > gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration.  > > But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he > quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve > the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove > redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had > to vote ‘yes.’ Those reports of confused voters were widespread. Eight in 10 Ohioans told pollsters they believed that it was important that “a candidate of one political party isn’t always guaranteed to win” when it comes to drawing legislative districts. But when the misleading GOP-crated ballot summary was read to voters, support dropped precipitously. The result is a major defeat for democracy reform efforts nationwide. And it was also a sign of how Republicans were using their entrenched power to thwart direct democracy. That happened in other states as well. In Florida, 57 percent of voters supported a measure to enshrine protections for reproductive rights in the state. But it became the first to fail to pass an abortion rights measure since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade because Florida requires a 60 percent supermajority to pass a ballot initiative and the state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis campaigned heavily against it, even going so far to send his election fraud police to the homes of voters who signed a petition supporting abortion rights. That was a brazen abuse of power, but it was par for the course in the GOP’s bid to preserve minority rule.

On an unusually warm Thursday afternoon three weeks before Election Day, Joe Sheehan, a Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin Assembly, took me on a tour of his hometown of Sheboygan, an industrial city of 50,000 on Lake Michigan that calls itself the “Malibu of the Midwest” and is best known for its bratwurst. We stopped on Superior Avenue, a wide, tree-lined street that runs east-west across the city, from the lake toward the countryside. “This is one district,” Sheehan said, pointing to the north side of the block. He walked 10 feet to the other side of the street. “This is another district. Ta-da, gerrymandering!” Both sides looked identical, with maple and oak trees and two-story homes festooned with Halloween decorations and blue Harris-Walz yard signs. But in 2011, when Republicans drew new redistricting maps in secret to give themselves lopsided majorities in the legislature, they split the city of Sheboygan in half at Superior Avenue to attach both parts to the surrounding redder rural areas. Sheboygan had been represented by a Democrat in the Assembly in all but four years between 1959 and 2011, but ever since it has elected two Republicans, becoming a poster child for the gerrymandered maps that were regarded as among the worst in the country. Last year, however, a progressive majority took over Wisconsin’s Supreme Court and struck down the skewed lines. The Republican-controlled legislature reluctantly passed new maps proposed by the state’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, which gave both parties a roughly equal chance of winning control and dramatically increased the number of competitive races. Democratic-leaning Sheboygan, which Joe Biden carried by 8 points in 2020, became whole again and is now one of the 15 seats Democrats need to win to regain control of the state Assembly (the lower house) for the first time in a decade and a half. > “Wisconsin was not a democracy by any meaningful definition of that word. This > year, Wisconsin is a democracy. Whoever gets more votes, will probably get > more seats.” Sheehan is running for office for the first time at 66. He served for 20 years as the superintendent of Sheboygan-area schools, but came out of retirement to help Democrats regain control of the Assembly after new maps were put in place. “That’s a huge part of me running,” he told me. “Previously, when the city was split up, Democrats had a really hard time winning because their vote was split up. Now their vote isn’t.” Sheehan has a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and describes himself as a Tim Walz Democrat, “not formal, more of a coach-teacher type.” His first TV ad shows him in the classroom talking, much like Walz, about the importance of free breakfast and lunch for kids, which his opponent, GOP Rep. Amy Binsfeld, voted against. He’s the type of home-grown and authentic candidate that Democrats believe can help end 13 years of hard-edged GOP control of the state. While the presidential race consumes virtually all of the country’s political oxygen, there’s a tremendous amount at stake at the state legislative level in 2024 as well. Democrats are vying to retake or maintain control of legislative chambers in more than half of the presidential battlegrounds, including Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The new lines in Wisconsin represent a sea change in one of the country’s most important toss-up states. Democrats have won 14 of the past 17 statewide elections in Wisconsin, but Republicans control 65 percent of seats in the Assembly and 67 percent of seats in the state Senate, just short of a supermajority in both chambers. “For over a decade, we had maps in Wisconsin that made it more likely that Republicans would have two-thirds supermajority than Democrats would have a majority in an almost perfectly 50–50 state,” said Rep. Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the Assembly. This seemingly voter-proof advantage gained through gerrymandering gave legislative Republicans a green light to entrench their power through tactics like voter suppression, dark money, and stripping Democrats of power, while the size of their inflated majorities allowed them to block, with little accountability, popular policies on issues like abortion rights, health care, gun restrictions, and education. “For more than a decade, Wisconsinites knew the victor in the state legislative races in advance,” said Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “Wisconsin was not a democracy by any meaningful definition of that word. This year, Wisconsin is a democracy. Whoever gets more votes, will probably get more seats.” In 2022, there was just one true toss-up Assembly race in the state, according to the Milwaukee-based journalist Dan Shafer, despite competitive elections for virtually every statewide office. Now, under the new lines, there are 10 districts that Biden won by 2 points or less. “We absolutely believe there’s a path to a Democratic majority here,” said Neubauer, while admitting that picking up 15 seats to regain control “is a lot to flip in one year.” (Only half of the state Senate is up this cycle, so 2026 is the earliest it could flip to Democrats.) But even if Democrats simply reduce the GOP’s advantage, that will bring the legislature more in line with the purple nature of the rest of the state. “What the gerrymander did was prevent the voters from holding Republican legislators accountable for the decisions that they were making in Madison,” said Neubauer. “I really do see these fair maps starting to restore the democratic process in Madison and hopefully increasing bipartisan work.” Wikler believes that legislative candidates like Sheehan represent a “secret weapon” for Democrats up and down the ballot this year. Democrats recruited candidates in 97 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts and the increase in the number of competitive races could boost Democratic turnout, he argues, which could make the difference in a state that is regularly decided by 20,000 votes or less in presidential elections. “There’s always these moments in the Fast & Furious movies when Vin Diesel hits the nitrous and pulls into the lead, and that nitrous super boost this year for Democrats could be the state legislative races,” he said. The progressive group Run for Something, which recruits candidates for downballot races, calls it the “reverse coattails” effect. The group studied seven battleground states in 2020, including Wisconsin, and found that when Democratic state legislative candidates ran for office in districts where Republicans previously ran unopposed, the Democratic vote share for the top of the ticket increased by anywhere from 0.4 percent to 2.3 percent. Wikler predicts there’s a small but significant number of potential Democratic voters in the state who are disillusioned by national politics but will vote in state races because of issues like Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban or cuts to public schools. “It’s not a huge number, but it doesn’t take a huge number of people to tip statewide elections in Wisconsin,” he said. “If you turn out a few hundred more voters in a handful of key state legislative districts that could add up to the statewide margin of victory in the presidential race in the state that tips the entire Electoral College.” He’s betting that candidates like Sheehan can break through stereotypes of the party in a way that Harris might not be able to do, like the one splashed on a giant red-and-white sign I saw when I drove into Sheboygan: “Kamala wants to do to Wisconsin what she did to California.” Few voters will perceive Sheehan as a California liberal, however. His yard signs are green, the color of his beloved Green Bay Packers, and the campaign material he gives to voters has the team’s schedule on the back. “That’s one thing they won’t throw away,” he said. As Sheehan knocked on doors in Sheboygan, his crossover appeal became evident—but so did the difficulty of automatically translating his support to the rest of the Democratic ticket. He turned off Superior Avenue and passed a gray house adorned with colorful Halloween decorations, including a severed head that looked all too real. Darbie Magray, a welder who wore a purple-and-blue tie-dye sweatshirt, yelled out that she’d already voted by mail for Sheehan. She is the type of swing voter Democrats need to win if they hope to flip the legislature and carry the state—a registered Independent who is skeptical of Trump but still not sold on Harris. “I don’t like Donald Trump at all,” she said, as her son precariously climbed on the porch railing to attach a head on a skeleton. But she wasn’t a fan of Harris, either. “I don’t like some of the things she’s done either,” she said. “I don’t like that she let all these immigrants come over.” Magray wouldn’t say which candidate she supported for president, but she openly expressed her admiration for Sheehan, citing his support for public schools and vow to protect abortion rights. “I just think he’s the best candidate,” she said. Sheehan said he’s knocked on 3,000 doors in Sheboygan and talked to 40 voters who said they’ll vote for him and Trump. “What they told me is, ‘Joe, it sounds like you’re listening to me and want to get along,’” he said. > “If you turn out a few hundred more voters in a handful of key state > legislative districts that could add up to the statewide margin of victory in > the presidential race in the state that tips the entire Electoral College.” After knocking on doors, he took me to his favorite bratwurst restaurant, Northwestern House, a former brothel next to the railroad tracks. The owner gave him a dap as he entered and said he’d voted for him. So did a number of other elderly white patrons who didn’t look like your stereotypical wine-drinking, latte-sipping, Zoom-watching Harris voter. Sheehan ordered a double brat sandwich with butter and brown mustard, a Sheboygan staple, with a side of tater tots—the type of meal that would put most candidates to sleep. “You got a familiar face,” a man visiting from Janesville told him. “You’re either running for something or a car dealer.” When Sheehan said he was running for Assembly, the man told him, “You got a friendly face. Good luck.” With so much polarization in politics these days, maybe a friendly face eating brats is exactly what could swing the balance of power in a battleground state that will be decided by the smallest of margins. In 2010, as Democrats were preoccupied with passing Barack Obama’s legislative agenda in Washington, Republicans blindsided them by picking up nearly 700 state legislative seats. This “shellacking,” as Obama called it, gave the GOP the power to draw four times as many state legislative and US House districts as Democrats in the subsequent redistricting cycle, including in critical swing states like Wisconsin. Democrats have been playing catch up at the state level ever since. They unexpectedly picked up chambers in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania in 2022, but remain at a significant disadvantage, with Republicans controlling 56 legislative chambers compared to 41 for Democrats. The States Project, an outside group that supports Democratic state legislative candidates, is focusing on nine states in 2024: flipping GOP-held chambers in Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin; defending new Democratic majorities in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania; preventing GOP supermajorities in Kansas and North Carolina to preserve the ability of Democratic governors to veto legislation; and winning a Democratic supermajority in Nevada that could override the vetoes of the state’s Republican governor. Major national developments, including Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election at the state level and the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, have underscored the importance of state legislative races. “2024 is potent combination of state legislatures posing a risk to a free and fair presidential election and state legislatures having been handed a fundamental constitutional right,” said Daniel Squadron, co-founder of the States Project. In addition to the weighty issues state legislatures decide—from voting laws to abortion rights to gun control to book bans—their balance of power is often decided by a handful of votes. New Hampshire Republicans won a majority in the state house by 11 votes in three races in 2022. Control of the Virginia House of Delegates was determined by a coin flip in 2017. Despite the outsize importance of state legislative chambers—and the fact that Republicans have used their power over state politics to roll back so many hard-won rights—Democrats continue to pay less attention to these races than Republicans.   On October 10, one day after the Harris campaign announced that it had raised a staggering $1 billion, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) warned that it was $25 million short of money needed for “essential voter contact tactics,” including funding for TV ads, mailers, digital outreach, and door-knocking programs, despite receiving $2.5 million from the Harris-Walz ticket. “The latest data from the field shows our party’s collective effort to win key state legislative races could fall short this cycle without a significant increase in financial support to close essential funding gaps in the final weeks of this election,” wrote DLCC President Heather Williams. “Right now, our internal data suggests we may be on an eerily similar trajectory to the 2020 election outcomes—when Democrats narrowly won the White House and took full control of Congress, yet lost more than 100 Democratic legislative seats and two chamber majorities in the states.” Those resources are especially vital because Democrats are less likely to vote for downballot races than Republicans, who tend to vote straight-ticket for all contests. That could end up costing Democrats control of pivotal swing chambers. “It’s no secret we are still working to tell the story of what I would say is an ‘and’ strategy,” said Williams. “Democrats need to care about what is happening in the White House and the Congress and the states.” When I asked Squadron, a former New York state senator, if state legislative races were getting enough attention amid the presidential race, he responded, “The answer is an emphatic no! Enough attention relative to the ability to impact electoral outcomes? No. Enough relative to their impact on people’s lives? No. Enough attention relative to their role in preserving a liberal democracy in this country? No.” Even though many Democratic candidates, including Harris, have focused their campaigns on issues like abortion and fair elections, a shocking number of Democratic donors and voters still don’t seem to understand that states are far more likely to decide these issues than the federal government, especially in the wake of recent Supreme Court decisions embracing states’ rights. “Structurally, state legislatures don’t get the attention that top of the ticket races do,” said Squadron. “There continues to be a fundamental belief, especially among Democrats, that the federal government is a greater source of harm or improvement in people’s lives than state governments in a way that just isn’t accurate.” But deep-pocketed GOP donors do understand the importance of investing at the state level. Two GOP megadonors, Elizabeth Uihlein (whose family has bankrolled much of the election denial movement) and Diane Hendricks (the state’s richest woman), donated $4.5 million last month to Wisconsin Assembly Republicans, giving them a $2.5 million advantage over Assembly Democrats. Republicans changed Wisconsin law in 2015 to allow unlimited donations to legislative campaign committees—one of the many ways in which they undermined the democratic process under GOP Assembly Leader Robin Vos to entrench their power. “We have no one who can write us a $1 million check,” Neubauer said. “That puts us at a competitive disadvantage.” But what Democrats lack in money, they hope to make up in old-fashioned shoe leather. Compared to past elections, where GOP control of the legislature was predetermined, Neubauer said she’s “seen incredible enthusiasm in Sheboygan and the other districts that were significantly gerrymandered under the old maps. People are thrilled to have the opportunity to compete in a competitive election at the legislative level.” After I visited Sheboygan, I drove an hour north to Green Bay, where Harris was holding a campaign rally across the street from Lambeau Field. Wikler spoke first to the crowd of 4,000 supporters. One of the biggest applause lines of the night came when he referenced the state legislative races. “We finally have fair maps in the state of Wisconsin!” he said to cheers. “We can make Robin Vos the minority leader in the state Assembly and Greta Neubauer the majority leader.” Few voters nationally could name these people, but everyone at the rally in Wisconsin understood the stakes.

In June, Ohio held a special election to fill an open congressional seat in a district that voted 72 percent for Donald Trump in 2020. On Election Day, former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Maureen O’Connor drove the length of the sprawling 200-mile district, which Republicans drew two years ago to dilute the influence of Democratic voters and boost their own power. Crisscrossing 11 counties and four media markets, she started at the fairgrounds in rural Marietta, on the West Virginia border; followed the Ohio River through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains; stopped in Steubenville, near Pennsylvania; and ended at a polling site in urban Youngstown. Although Democrats performed much better than expected, the outcome of the race was never in doubt. GOP state Sen. Michael Rulli, a grocery store owner who called himself “the Trump candidate,” won easily. “This was drawn to make the 6th Congressional District as favorable to a Republican as possible,” a dismayed O’Connor said after. “That’s the definition of gerrymandering.” O’Connor, 73, has short gray hair and an affinity for pearls, with the tough, no-nonsense demeanor of a former prosecutor. She’s been a Republican for four decades, serving as the first female chief justice in Ohio and the longest-tenured female statewide politician. But, now retired, she was traveling the state like a Johnny Appleseed for democracy, rallying voters against gerrymandering and taking on leaders of her own party, who have aggressively used the tactic to give Republicans lopsided majorities in the legislature and the state’s US House delegation. (Nationally, gerrymandering gives Republicans an advantage of 16 House seats, according a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice.) She was visiting the 6th District to collect signatures for an initiative on the November ballot that would create a citizens redistricting commission to draw district maps free from political interference. “The system doesn’t work because of the involvement of the politicians,” O’Connor told me. “Let’s get politicians out of the mix and return that power, like it was at the beginning of the country, to ‘we the people.’” > “This is part of a larger story of whether we truly have a representative > democracy and how the rules are being written in a way where people don’t have > as much of a say. And so the response has been people turning to the ballot > measure process.” Half of all states allow citizens to place constitutional amendments and other initiatives on the ballot, and the importance of direct democracy extends well beyond Ohio. The initiative and referendum process originated at the turn of the 20th century, when Jim Crow was firmly entrenched in the South and robber barons held sway over much of the North and West, leading to growing complaints that democratic institutions were no longer responsive to popular demands. “I believe in the initiative and the referendum, which should be used not to destroy representative government, but to correct it whenever it becomes misrepresentative,” former President Teddy Roosevelt said when he visited Columbus, Ohio, in 1912 to endorse an effort to amend the state’s constitution through ballot initiatives. Direct democracy does not always lead to good public policy—see Brexit, for example. Special interests and ideologues have often hijacked the ballot initiative process, putting complicated issues before voters that could be better handled by the legislature. But in hyper-gerrymandered states like Ohio, the only way to ensure that the will of the majority is followed is to override representative democracy and go directly to the people. This strategy has taken on renewed urgency in response to recent US Supreme Court decisions taking away fundamental rights, from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. These initiatives can garner support across party lines in a way that is otherwise impossible in a highly polarized partisan political climate. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, seven states have voted directly on abortion, and in all seven—red and blue alike—abortion-rights advocates have won. This year, voters in 10 states, a record number, will vote on whether to enshrine protections for reproductive rights, including in battlegrounds such as Arizona, Florida, Montana, and Nevada. “Dobbs gave people a real clear example of rights that we thought were guaranteed not being secure,” says Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), a progressive advocacy group. “Right now, in a number of states, this is the only way to protect reproductive rights.” This election cycle, voters will weigh in on 153 statewide measures, including 57 initiated by citizens, according to BISC. In addition to fighting gerrymandering and protecting reproductive rights, they will have the opportunity to adopt ranked-choice voting (Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon), enshrine no-excuse absentee voting (Connecticut), protect marriage equality (California, Colorado, Hawaii), and raise the minimum wage (Alaska, California, Massachusetts, Missouri). Not all these measures will lead to progressive policies. State-level Republicans are also using the initiative process to advance their own priorities, such as tougher immigration laws, private school vouchers, and new voting restrictions. Meanwhile, they are also pushing proposals that would make it harder for citizen-led groups to get future initiatives on the ballot. At a time when so much attention is focused on the presidential race, what happens at the frequently overlooked bottom of the ballot will be just as consequential. If Trump regains power, states will become the last line of defense for protecting fundamental rights. And if Kamala Harris wins and Democrats recapture both houses of Congress, the states can once again become “laboratories of democracy,” in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, showing how to regain freedoms that have been ripped away by Republicans in Washington and a regressive Supreme Court. “This is part of a larger story of whether we truly have a representative democracy and how the rules are being written in a way where people don’t have as much of a say,” Fields Figueredo says. “And so the response has been people turning to the ballot measure process where they can to make decisions that govern their lives.” Matt Chase The fight against gerrymandering is personal for O’Connor. In 2015, 71 percent of Ohio voters approved the creation of a redistricting commission that was supposed to stop gerrymandering in the state. It included the state’s most powerful politicians—the governor, secretary of state, auditor, and leaders of the state legislature—and tasked them with ending “the partisan process” for drawing state legislative maps. Three years later, an even larger percentage of Ohio voters approved a similar initiative applying to congressional districts. But when Republicans on the commission, which had a 5–2 GOP majority, drew new legislative maps after the 2020 census, they flagrantly ignored this assignment. The lines they approved gave Republicans a supermajority in both chambers of the legislature—67 percent of seats in the state House and 69 percent in the state Senate. GOP members of the commission laughably asserted that because Republicans had won 13 of the past 16 statewide elections, they were entitled to up to 81 percent of legislative seats, even though Republican candidates hadn’t gotten anywhere close to that percentage of votes statewide. Under O’Connor’s leadership, the Ohio Supreme Court did not buy that argument. By a 4–3 vote, it struck down the maps in January 2022; O’Connor joined her Democratic colleagues to cast the deciding vote. But Republicans on the redistricting commission, instead of following the court’s orders, kept defying them—not once, but seven times. Every time the court struck down a gerrymandered map, Republicans passed a new one, until a separate federal court stepped in and said there was no time to rectify the gerrymandering before the 2022 election, forcing Ohioans to vote in districts that had been deemed illegal over and over. With a legislative supermajority, “we can kind of do what we want,” bragged commission member Matt Huffman, the Republican state Senate president. And they did, passing one extreme policy after another, from a six-week abortion ban to a bill allowing Ohioans to carry a concealed handgun practically anywhere without a permit or background check to stripping the Republican governor and his health director of the authority to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. Some far-right members of the legislature even floated impeaching O’Connor. O’Connor grew up as one of eight kids in an Irish Catholic family in suburban Cleveland and rose through the ranks of Ohio politics, from county prosecutor to lieutenant governor, before joining the court in 2002 and becoming chief justice in 2011. She was known for her blunt manner and maverick streak, bucking her party on issues like abortion and criminal justice reform. “When I first met her, I was a bit scared of her, too,” joked former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Yvette McGee Brown, “and the reputation is well-deserved.” In a concurring opinion in the gerrymandering case, O’Connor made clear her disappointment with the GOP-led redistricting commission and outlined how Ohioans could reform the process. “Having now seen first-hand that the current Ohio Redistricting Commission—comprised of statewide elected officials and partisan legislators—is seemingly unwilling to put aside partisan concerns as directed by the people’s vote, Ohioans may opt to pursue further constitutional amendment to replace the current commission with a truly independent, nonpartisan commission that more effectively distances the redistricting process from partisan politics,” she wrote. At the end of 2022, O’Connor was forced to retire from the court at age 71 due to term limits. A more conservative justice replaced her, shifting the court’s Republican majority well to the right and ensuring that the gerrymandered legislative maps would not be struck down again. Days after leaving the bench, O’Connor channeled her anger into action, leading a new group, Citizens Not Politicians, in a bid to create what she had called for in her opinion—a citizens redistricting commission divided equally among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. Citizens Not Politicians submitted 535,000 valid signatures in July to qualify for the ballot, and this November, Ohio voters could finally end gerrymandering once and for all. “This is the most important thing I’ve ever done,” O’Connor says. Supporters of the initiative argue that it will bring Ohio’s legislature and US House delegation more in line with the rest of the state, which leans toward Trump and hometown running mate JD Vance, but is more purple than deep red, with a few Democrats, like US Sen. Sherrod Brown, still able to win statewide office. “It would change the state in a huge way, not because it means Democrats are going to have some guaranteed majority,” says David Pepper, former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines. “What it will mean is a majority that generally leans Republican, quite close, reflecting Ohio’s closeness, but most importantly, because you have the safety valve of fair districts and competitive races, the driving force of Ohio politics will not be the extremists in the statehouse.” The pushback against direct democracy has been just as fervent as the push for it. In August 2023, Republicans in the Ohio Legislature forced a vote on a ballot initiative, known as Issue 1, that would have made it much harder to pass future initiatives. It called for changing the threshold for passing a ballot measure from a simple majority vote to a 60 percent supermajority, and it required organizers to gather signatures from 5 percent of voters in all of the state’s 88 counties instead of the 44 currently needed. Republicans scheduled the vote in the dead of summer, when many people were on vacation and students were out of town, to try to sneak it through with little public scrutiny. That move was part of a larger trend. In 2017, BISC tracked 33 bills seeking to alter the ballot measure process. In 2023, lawmakers in 39 states introduced 165 bills to change the process, 76 of which sought to restrict or undermine initiatives. “After the Dobbs decision, conservatives in Republican-trifecta states have doubled down on trying to undermine the will of the people,” Fields Figueredo says. > “You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot > of young people come out and vote,” former Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick > Santorum complained. Republicans claimed the 2023 Ohio initiative was meant to stop “out-of-state special interests,” but one legislator admitted privately that it was designed to preempt passage of an abortion-rights measure that had qualified for the November 2023 ballot, as well as O’Connor’s redistricting reform effort. And, in fact, “out-of-state special interests” were the very people behind the GOP effort. The largest individual donor to the Issue 1 cause was far-right Illinois megadonor Richard Uihlein, who helped bankroll the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection and has funded scores of candidates and groups promoting election denialism. When the bill received a ­hearing­ in the legislature, the only person who testified in favor of it was a representative from a little-known think tank in Florida, the Foundation for Government Accountability, that received nearly $18 million from Uihlein. The foundation, which has led the behind-the-scenes push to limit direct democracy around the country, is affiliated with the State Policy Network, an alliance of conservative think tanks, and it has received more than $5 million from the dark-money network led by Federalist Society Co-Chair Leonard Leo. The Republicans’ gambit in Ohio backfired spectacularly. The anti-initiative initiative was defeated with 57 percent of the vote, and that November, Ohioans passed new measures enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution and legalizing recreational marijuana by similarly decisive margins. “You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote,” former Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum complained afterward. But the popularity of direct democracy in Ohio hasn’t stopped Republicans from continuing to try to undermine it. After the Citizens Not Politicians initiative qualified for the ballot this year, the Ohio Ballot Board, which like the redistricting commission has a Republican majority, grossly misrepresented the intention of the measure. The summary of the ballot initiative adopted by the board implied the measure would encourage partisan gerrymandering rather than curb it, claiming the initiative would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and “manipulate the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.” Shortly thereafter, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) came to Ohio to raise money for the campaign working to defeat the anti-gerrymandering initiative. Citizens Not Politicians immediately sued the ballot board, asking the Ohio Supreme Court to block the “biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional ballot language.” The board’s chair, GOP Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who lost the GOP primary for US Senate in 2024, is a member of the redistricting commission that repeatedly voted for the state’s gerrymandered maps and previously voiced support for impeaching O’Connor. He was also a leading proponent of the effort to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution, which he admitted was “100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.” > Republicans are using the initiative process to undermine voting rights in > other ways, too. Republican-controlled legislatures have placed initiatives on > the ballot in eight states mandating that only US citizens can vote in state > elections. “The self-dealing politicians who have rigged the legislative maps now want to rig the Nov. 5 election by illegally manipulating the ballot language,” O’Connor said in a statement at the time. On September 17, in a 4-3 decision, the conservative majority on the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the bulk of the board’s ballot summary. That’s indicative of how Republicans across the country are responding to citizen-­initiated measures they don’t like. Take Arizona, where voters will consider an initiative that would repeal the state’s near-total abortion ban and establish a constitutional right to the procedure. The Republican-led legislature put 11 of its own initiatives on the ballot, which supporters of abortion rights call a “voter exhaustion tactic.” Some of them are particularly egregious. After the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated an abortion ban dating back to 1864 earlier this year, abortion-rights supporters targeted two of the justices for removal at the ballot box. So the legislature placed a referendum on the ballot that would eliminate six-year terms for Supreme Court justices and allow them to serve indefinitely if they adhere to “good behavior.” It would apply retroactively to October 31, meaning that if voters decide not to retain the anti-choice justices but also approve the initiative eliminating fixed terms, the judicial election will be effectively nullified. At the same time, Arizona Republicans are trying to impose new obstacles to getting future citizen-led initiatives on the ballot, like Ohio Republicans attempted last year, following the playbook developed by the Foundation for Government Accountability and the right’s dark-money network. Currently, voters must collect signatures equal to 10 or 15 percent of the vote in the last gubernatorial election to place a statute or constitutional amendment on the ballot. But another referendum advanced by the legislature would require organizers to collect that number of signatures in all the state’s 30 legislative districts, essentially allowing voters in just one district to veto the wishes of the other 29. A similar law passed in Arkansas last year, increasing the number of counties in which initiative supporters must collect signatures from 15 to 50 of the state’s 75 counties. Voters rejected a nearly identical proposal in 2020, introduced after initiatives raising the minimum wage and legalizing medical marijuana passed over the objections of GOP lawmakers. Arkansas Republicans also blocked an initiative this year that would have overturned the state’s near-­total abortion ban, with the state Supreme Court disqualifying it from appearing on the November ballot because it said organizers did not properly submit an obscure bit of paperwork. Utah Republicans have gone even further, asking voters to give the legislature the explicit power to undermine the will of the voters. In 2018, Utah voters, like in Ohio, passed a measure creating an independent redistricting commission to draw new legislative maps and ban partisan gerrymandering. But Utah Republicans passed a new bill that effectively repealed the initiative and drew a map that divided Salt Lake City among all four of the state’s congressional districts to prevent Democrats from winning any of them. After the Utah Supreme Court ruled in July that the legislature had violated the state constitution, Republicans authorized a new ballot initiative asking voters to grant the legislature the authority to amend or repeal citizen-led initiatives. Democratic leaders called it a “blatant power grab.” Republicans were hoping to convince voters to side against their own interests by including a provision banning foreign entities from donating to initiative campaigns, even though legislative leaders could not cite any evidence of that occurring. But as in Ohio, the move to erode direct democracy backfired on Republicans. On September 25, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the measure violated the state constitution and votes for it would not be counted in November. Republicans are using the initiative process to undermine voting rights in other ways, too. Republican-controlled legislatures have placed initiatives on the ballot in eight states mandating that only US citizens can vote in state elections. The proposals, developed based on model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which connects corporations with conservative state legislators, furthers Trump’s lie that noncitizens are illegally voting in US elections, and could lay the groundwork for future restrictions on ballot access. When voters have used the initiative process to expand voting rights, Republicans have frequently gutted those efforts. The most notable instance occurred in Florida, where 65 percent of voters in 2018 approved Amendment 4, repealing one of the country’s worst felon-disenfranchisement laws, dating back to Jim Crow. But months later, the GOP-controlled legislature passed another law requiring ex-offenders to pay off all fines, fees, and restitution before casting a ballot, which prevented about 700,000 people from voting even after they had served their time. Voting-rights advocates called it a “modern-day poll tax.” In a highly publicized crackdown on voter fraud that seemed designed to have a chilling effect on voter participation, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ election police force arrested 20 ex-offenders, even though some had no idea they were ineligible to vote. (More recently, the election police force has gone door to door questioning the signatures of people who supported putting an abortion­-rights referendum on the ballot.) The Amendment 4 fight showed how passing a ballot measure is one thing, but successfully implementing it is another struggle altogether. State and federal supreme courts regularly rule on their constitutionality, and state legislatures often seek to undermine or repeal them. “Republicans voted for a number of these ballot measures and then went on to vote for candidates that don’t support reproductive rights,” Fields Figueredo of BISC says of abortion-rights initiatives that have passed since Dobbs. “This year, folks are having to do more work to make that connection. To make sure the will of the people is heard, we need to have people in governing power to follow through on what voters did.” Democrats plan to draw attention to ballot initiatives in 2024 as a way not just to boost turnout for the top of the ticket, but to emphasize the importance of down-ballot races that tend to receive little attention but go hand in hand with the initiative process. That’s a tricky balancing act, because if Democrats promote the initiatives too aggressively, it could limit their bipartisan appeal. In Ohio, supporters are bullish that the anti-gerrymandering initiative will pass—and survive legislative and judicial attempts to kill it. “Would you rather have citizens draw the maps than the politicians?” asks Pepper, the former Democratic Party chair. “That contrast strikes a really strong chord.” While top Republicans in Ohio view O’Connor as a Liz Cheney-esque figure, a former leading light of the GOP establishment who became an apostate, she has no regrets about taking on powerful forces in her own party for the good of democracy. “I’m not going to let these misguided, self-serving politicians define what kind of Republican I am,” she says.