This experiment in popular sovereignty depends on it
Once sleepy state legislative races are important as hell. Democrats lost over 900 state legislative seats during the Obama years. There is a lot of ground to make up. It matters.
The Dobbs decision left reproductive rights to the states. But a Republican Congress would just as soon pass a national abortion ban if the GOP takes the federal executive and legislative branches in 2024. And if it doesn’t, there is plenty more mischief for Republicans to do at the state level. Voting rights, gun laws, health and education are at stake, as well as whether this country remains a democracy, or just one in name only.
If the Roberts Supreme Court rules to endorse the independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper (thank North Carolina’s Republican legislature for that case), “state legislatures could have a pathway to overrule the popular vote in presidential elections by refusing to certify the results and instead sending their own slates of electors,” The New York Times reports:
While that might seem like a doomsday scenario, 44 percent of Republicans in crucial swing-state legislatures used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a New York Times analysis. More like-minded G.O.P. candidates on the ballot could soon join them in office.
Republicans have complete control over legislatures in states that have a total of 307 electoral votes — 37 more than needed to win a presidential election. They hold majorities in several battleground states, meaning that if the Supreme Court endorsed the legal theory, a close presidential election could be overturned if just a few states assigned alternate slates of electors.
Democrats’ chances of bringing Republicans’ total below 270 are narrow: They would need to flip the Michigan Senate or the Arizona Senate, and then one chamber in both Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in 2024, in addition to defending the chambers the party currently controls.
Democrats and Republicans have set their sights on half a dozen states where state legislatures — or at least a single chamber — could flip in November. Democrats hope to wrest back one of the chambers in Michigan and the Arizona Senate, and flip the Minnesota Senate. Republicans aim to win back the Minnesota House of Representatives and take control of one chamber, or both, in the Maine, Colorado and Nevada legislatures. They are also targeting Oregon and Washington.
But the vagueries of the independent state legislature theory do not actually inspire people to get off their couches. It’s too far removed from frontal-lobe concerns about how to pay for groceries. The crank theory is not a topic that comes up in conversations candidates have on potential voters’ doorsteps.
Many of those doorstep conversations occuring right now involve state legislative seats that will influence not just how presidential races are decided. They will decide, indirectly perhaps, whether this experiment in popular sovereignty survives MAGA madness.
Republicans as a Trump-inspired minority cult have abandoned democracy as a principle. Power is a stronger narcotic. Equality under law is for suckers. Fair elections are for losers. Strongmen are role models. But so long as Republicans can control election and legislative outcomes, wherever they maintain their grip they will perform democracy theater. They will hollow out the constitution they claim to revere until it is as insubstantial as Marley’s ghost. Scrooge was not beyond saving. It’s not clear the GOP is.
The graphic above is the national scorcard as of June 1. Take making it bluer as seriously as you might U.S. House and Senate and governors’ races. Parties in the majority get to set the rules. At least for now.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us