Famartin via Wkimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
David Daley’s (“Ratf**ked” & “Unrigged“) and Sister District co-founder Gaby Goldstein’s Monday offering at Salon speak exactly to what I try to draw progressive attention regularly: down-ballot races.
The trigger event was last week’s Brnovich decision by the Roberts Supreme Court. That 6-3 decision on two Arizona voter suppression laws that banned ballot collection and limited out-of-precinct voting all but neutered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Lowering barriers to voting for Black, Latino, and Natives American citizens in the heavily rural state is not the court’s concern. That was clear with the 2013 ruling in Shelby County that killed preclearance requirements in Section 5.
Preserving white voting power has long taken precedence for conservative state lawmakers, Daley and Goldstein write (emphasis mine):
That means this decision must serve as a last chance, five-fire alarm bell to progressives — indeed, all Americans who care about protecting the foundational right to vote and perhaps the most valuable piece of civil rights legislation in our history—about the urgent need to invest in state legislatures, which are ever increasing in power. State legislatures are the final boss in the Republican quest to vanquish democracy. We cannot cede this fight to them.
Too much progressive energy and attention focuses on marquee races at the gridlocked federal level. In the states Republicans still make disenfranchisement sausage in party-line votes that don’t provoke handwringing by the national media. After failing to retake one branch of the state legislature last November, North Carolina Democrats are bracing for another ten years of litigation over Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression laws that caused great confusion and multiple redraws of congressional districts. Even when they lost in court, Republicans won by running out the clock on the last decade.
The key to quashing that as well as stopping voter suppression laws where they gestate lies not in the Supreme Court but in Democrats taking back control of Republican-held legislatures, argue Daley and Goldstein (again, emphasis mine):
As Rick Hasen has explained, Alito’s opinion in the 2018 Abbott v. Perez case makes it essentially impossible for a court to find racially discriminatory intent in voting laws when race and party categories overlap. But, obviously, given long-existing patterns of racial voting polarization, they will often overlap. This means that state legislatures can use this naturally-occurring circumstance to shield discriminatory intent to their heart’s content, without concern for violating Section 2. They can discriminate based on race while pretending they’re simply using partisanship. This has been the recent GOP strategy on gerrymandering. It will now be the go-to move in red state legislatures nationwide on voter suppression. This Court won’t stop it. They’ve rolled out green lights and eliminated any speed limit.
The bottom line is that the Brnovich decision must serve as a loud warning: The Roberts Court cannot and will not protect voting rights. And the truly breathtaking deadlock in the Democratic federal trifecta over a new federal voting rights law makes clear that we absolutely cannot wait for Congress to act either. The answer is clear: On voting rights and so much more, the buck does and will continue to stop with state legislatures. We must elect legislators who will fight to protect voting rights — down-ballot, where it matters most and is too often overlooked — or risk becoming a nation filled with democracy deserts, where your right to vote depends on where you live and your access to the polls depends on the color of your skin.
Democracy deserts to go along with those spread via climate change. Terrific.
Down-ballot state legislative races are not sexy, but they are bite-sized. A little bit of campaign money and good organizing can go a long way. But those red districts are tough nuts if you wait until the last months before the elections to make friends and build capacity. Prospective candidates, especially first-timers, need local to see local infrastructure in place to support them or they won’t run.
I do try to help with that.