The Supreme Court has a new playbook — and Democrats need to adapt before it's too late
Imagine that the NFL made a rule change that allowed every team to have an extra three men on the field during the game — but half of the NFL teams, protesting the new rule as “wrong” and “too much of a deviation from fairness and norms” refused to add the three players to their own lineups.
Who’d be winning almost every game? Who’d be going to the Superbowl?
This is an almost perfect analogy to what Democrats are doing today with electoral politics.
In 2013, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court changed the rules for our elections, gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They ruled, over liberal justice’s objections, that it was just fine to allow states to gerrymander based on presumed political affiliation and on race (with a tiny fig leaf required) and to throw millions of people off the voter rolls, again based on race or their living in an area that votes heavily for one party or the other.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her Shelby County v Holder dissent:
“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
This was followed by two other corrupt all-Republican decisions, Rucho v Common Cause and Alexander v NAACP, that expanded the ability of states to gerrymander their political districts to favor one political party over another to consolidate control over state legislatures and the US House of Representatives.
Additionally, the all-Republican 2018 Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute decision made it easy for states to target voters with postcards that look like junk mail and throw them off the voting rolls if they failed to return them.
As a result of this rapid-fire series of corrupt voting-related decisions Republican-controlled states have:
— Passed hundreds of laws making it harder to register to vote, particularly for poor, Black, female, disabled, and elderly voters,
— Thrown, just last year, 4.2 million mostly Democratic voters off the rolls or refused to count their votes, leading, as journalist Greg Palast documented last month, to the 2024 election of Donald Trump and Republicans seizing control of the House and Senate, and,
— Gerrymandered their states even more heavily and surgically to give Republicans a solid hold on the House of Representatives and multiple state legislatures.
Democratically controlled states, meanwhile, have done nothing.
Actually, Democratic controlled states have done worse than nothing; many, citing “fairness” and “the way it should be done” have stopped gerrymandering altogether. None have engaged in any sort of voter suppression; to the contrary, most have expanded mail-in voting and other options to make voting easier for both Democrats and Republicans.
The result is plain and reflects the obvious goal of the rightwingers on the Supreme Court: Republicans today control the House, Senate, White House, and a handful of state houses that otherwise would have gone to Democrats.
North Carolina is a great example; it’s politically a roughly 50/50 state, which is why a statewide office like Governor has repeatedly gone to a Democrat. Nonetheless, Republicans hold 10 out of the state’s 13 seats in the US House of Representatives because of gerrymanders. If North Carolina hadn’t been gerrymandered, the US House would today be in Democratic hands.
Ditto for Alabama, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio, and Utah, providing Republicans with seven additional House seats that would have gone to Democrats without gerrymandering.
Meanwhile, in 2008 California did away with gerrymanders because they were “unfair,” handing as many as 4 mostly permanent House seats to Republicans. Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Virginia are moving in the same direction.
But that’s just the beginning.
Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.
Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they rolled out a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election.
Democrats, on the other hand, generally go out of their way to allow for small variations, noting that “people’s signatures often change as they age or if they’re in a hurry.”
And then there are the voter roll purges that used to be illegal.
In multiple Republican states, particularly Georgia, Ohio, Florida, and Texas, mailing out postcards into urban areas to purge people from the voting rolls has become a routine practice. (It was Ohio that took the issue to the Supreme Court in the Husted case.)
This is because purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where Republicans find their best result. As a Demos report notes:
“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”
Additionally, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.
Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Blue cities in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be two or three times that percentage in the states where these purges were concentrated.
Remember George W. Bush’s 537-vote “victory” over Al Gore in 2000? Just a few months before that election, as the BBC documented and reported, Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris purged over 90,000 Black voters from the rolls because, Harris alleged, their names were “similar” to the names of felons in Texas.
More recently, the Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million voters in Georgia alone in 2018, leading up to his 50,000-vote win that year against Stacey Abrams.
Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted:
“Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”
It’s time for Democrats to start fighting back: They need to put their three extra men on the field.
— Democratic states, instead of rejecting gerrymanders, should start to aggressively gerrymander like Republican states have done; it could produce a near-permanent Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.
— Democratic states should start mailing postcards into rural Red areas, purging Republican voters who fail to return them from the rolls.
— Democratic election judges should, as Republicans often do, aggressive challenge mail-in voter’s signatures in GOP-heavy areas, leading to the rejection of their ballots.
None of these things are “fair” but all are “legal.” It’s called fighting fire with fire.
And if Democrats were to do these simple things, in addition to winning more seats in the House and state legislatures, it would evoke howls of “unfair” from Republicans. Those protests, in turn, may even lead to Republicans working with Democrats to reform our voting system to make it easy for everybody in America to vote. (Not holding my breath, but just saying…)
Instead, Republicans are on the verge of passing the SAVE act that will prevent millions, perhaps tens of millions, of married women who haven’t gone to court to change their names after marriage from voting in 2026 and 2028. And Democratic leadership isn’t even making a concerted effort to let Americans know about it!
As distasteful as it may be, Democrats need to suck it up and fight Republicans on the field by using the new rules the Republican-controlled Supreme Court has defined over the past decade.
Otherwise, prepare for even more losses in the next two election cycles.
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