There’s no way to sugar-coat the blow to short-term and long-range Democratic prospects inflicted by the recent U.S. Supreme Court and now Virginia Supreme Court decisions. But it’s important to game it all out, and I tried to do that at New York:

In a decision that caps a disastrous ten days for Democrats struggling to offset Republican congressional gerrymanders, a 4-3 majority of the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the constitutional amendment referendum that voters narrowly approved on April 21. That nullifies the new congressional map that would have given Democrats an estimated net gain of four U.S. House seats in November.

The court majority agreed with a highly technical argument from the GOP that the Virginia legislature didn’t follow the required procedures for enacting a constitutional amendment before taking it to voters. The key vote in the legislature was first taken while early voting for the 2025 general election was underway. Thus, the court reasoned, the legislature did not allow for an intervening election to begin and end before taking the proposed amendment up again. The majority opinion also addressed the obvious question: Why didn’t the court halt the referendum instead of letting it proceed and then overturning a decision by voters? The decision claimed that since Democrats had warned against a judicial intervention on the eve of a referendum, they could not now object to a post-referendum ruling.

Democrats may try to secure a federal judicial intervention to reverse this decision by Virginia’s highest court. But it’s hard to imagine it succeeding, given the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court that stands at the end of any appeal process. On April 29, a 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court majority in Louisiana v. Callais unleashed a new round of Republican partisan gerrymanders by gutting Voting Rights Act protections for minority representation in Congress and state legislatures. That very day, Florida’s Republican legislature enacted a secretly developed redistricting plan designed to flip four congressional seats, citing the Callais decision as a supporting argument for ignoring a state constitutional ban on partisan gerrymanders.

Depending on how far southern legislatures go in exploiting the U.S. Supreme Court’s permission slip to wipe out majority-Black congressional districts between now and November, what had been a national gerrymandering arms race that Democrats had largely fought to a draw is now tilting very heavily toward the GOP. The Florida map-rigging, if it stands, plus the reversal of Virginia’s Democratic gerrymander along with new gerrymanders in other southern states, could add up to a net Republican gain of roughly a dozen U.S. House seats. There could be court challenges to several of these GOP gerrymanders, particularly Florida’s. And a large enough Democratic wave in November could very easily wipe out the apparent GOP advantage: Democrats could flip two seats in Virginia even under the old maps.

But make no mistake: Donald Trump’s audacious and unprecedented effort to thwart a likely midterm loss of control of Congress by shifting the maps in his party’s favor has gained new life thanks to courts in Washington and now in Richmond. He should give his habitual judge-bashing rhetoric a break.

 

In “‘The new soccer mom’: Both parties scramble for working class voters ahead of ’28,” Megan Messerly writes at Politico: ” President Donald Trump, two years ago, won over Latino and working class voters frustrated with Democrats’ economic stewardship with promises of a brighter future…Now, many of those voters are frustrated with him, too — and threatening to stay home in 2028…Nowhere is that more apparent than Nevada, the battleground state where Latino and working class voters are largely the same people — the hospitality workers, dishwashers and bellmen who keep Las Vegas humming and who were among the most coveted demographics of the 2024 election…They’re the new soccer mom. We are literally the new persuadable voter,” said Democratic strategist and former union organizer Chuck Rocha, who served as an adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 and 2016 presidential campaigns and ran the campaign’s efforts to turn out Latinos. “But I’m not sure if either party yet treats us that way.”…Strategists from both parties are facing an uncomfortable reality: These voters, who have in recent cycles swung between Democrats and Republicans, may not come back at all. The 2024 shifts to Trump, they say, were less about enthusiasm for Republicans than dissatisfaction with Democrats. Turnout among young Latino voters fell off sharply between 2020 and 2024, according to Tufts’ Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement; even as those Latinos who did show up swung to Trump…“It’s not a realignment,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who specializes in Latino voter outreach. “It’s a dealignment — moving away from both parties.” More here.

Steff Chavez writes in “Democrats turn to working-class candidates to win back voters” at Financial Times, “Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles…
Democrats across the US know they’re in trouble. The party is still picking itself up off the floor after its brutal 2024 election loss and is struggling with relatively low national approval ratings. Even though Democrats got a boost from winning the New Jersey and Virginia governorships — and found a new energy in Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City — they still need to rebuild support and convince some Donald Trump supporters to vote for them instead in November’s midterms. The party is hoping to take control of both chambers of Congress — and deliver a strong rebuke to Trump. Democrats “haven’t talked about working-class people. They became known as the party of the elites. That’s a problem”, Bob Brooks, a former firefighter who is running in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s seventh congressional district, told the FT’s Lauren Fedor…“That’s why I have watched my members in the firehouse drift to either independents or even to Republicans.” Congressional lawmakers are much wealthier than the broader US population — just 2 per cent have working-class backgrounds, according to a University of Chicago analysis.” More here.

From “Why the Working Class Has Given Up on the Liberal Establishment” by Les Leopold at Common Dreams: “We used demographic and mass layoff data in conjunction with election results and found a statistically solid causal relationship: As the county mass layoff rate went up, the Democratic vote went down between 1996 and 2020. Year by year, voters in areas hard hit by mass layoffs were abandoning the Democratic Party…Our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found that 70 percent of the respondents have negative opinions of the Democrats…Are voters in red areas ready for working-class independents? Our YouGov survey shows they are. Looking only at rural county data in those four states (the reddest areas), there is strong support for a new party, independent of the two parties, that would run on a progressive populist working-class platform: Voter Support for the New Independent Workers’ Political Association

• Rural Republicans: 50%
• Rural Independents: 50%
• Rural Democrats“ 77%”

Leopold continues, “If the Democrats want to reconnect with working people, they need to put job security front and center. They need to stop relying on public-private partnerships, which use public funds to encourage corporate job creation that too often fails to materialize. And the Dems need to purge vacuous language, like the phrase “the opportunity society,” which promotes corporate-first thinking that adds to, rather than reduces, job precarity. In fact, they should replace their corporate-first thinking, with people-first thinking…To do so the Democrats should call for federal job guarantees. They would do well to read Jared Abbot’s review of a compendium of poll data that shows massive support for the government serving as the employer of last resort. People don’t want handouts; they want a chance to earn a fair living. (Even the new “Working Families Guarantee” agenda, put forward by the Working Families Party, guarantees just about everything but stops short of a federal job guarantee.)…But a shift to ensuring people-first job security will not come easily to a party dominated by wealthy donors, millionaire politicians, lobbyists, pollsters, and consultants. Corporate leaders will rail against the prospect of workers having access to federal jobs and thereby forcing the company to bid up wages and benefits to retain and attract employees. Heaven forbid that direct government support go to workers instead of corporations!…Until the party supports job guarantees and runs hundreds of working-class candidates, we can expect more working people to reject the Democratic establishment (and the liberal college administrators) who care so little about working-class job security.” More here.

President Obama provided a couple of  soundbites Democrats can use in unveiling GOP corruption. As Ashleigh Fields reports at The Hill:

Former President Obama on Tuesday said the president “shouldn’t have a bunch of side hustles,” signaling there should be a clear ethical standard for those occupying the Oval Office.

“A good policy that I’d like to see followed is that the president of the United States shouldn’t have a bunch of side hustles that those companies and foreign entities can invest in,” the former president told Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show.”

Obama’s comments come after President Trump’s critics have raised concerns with his decision to accept a Qatari jet with intentions to use the carrier as the next Air Force One.

During his second stint in office, others have flagged potential corruption as private companies back Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom project and his family’s cryptocurrency stock has significantly grown.

Obama said he thought it was a “pretty obvious principle” not to engage in “side hustles” while serving as commander-in-chief.

…“The idea is that the attorney general is the people’s lawyer. It’s not the president’s consigliere. …There’s a bunch of stuff that we can overcome,” he said. “We can’t overcome the politicization of the criminal justice system.”

…When asked what powers he believes the president should not have, Obama said, “Although this is in the Constitution, it’s a little hard to change, but maybe don’t pardon people who’ve given you a bunch of campaign contributions or invested in your businesses.”

Former President Obama’s way with words is still instructive for Democratic candidates at all levels. The G.O.P. has actually devolved from a party dedicated to enriching the already super-wealthy into a personality cult of groveling sycophants. It’s about boiling Republican corruption down for time-challenged voters. Obama knows how to rephrase the critiques of Republican corruption into easy-to-remember soundbites. Democratic campaigns should pay attention.

As we sort through the many implications of the horrific Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, there’s one that could greatly affect Democratic election strategies in 2026 and for years to come, as I explained at New York:

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s bombshell decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which basically eliminated the Voting Rights Act as a restraint on partisan gerrymandering, political observers mostly focused on its immediate impact on the tense 2026 midterm elections, with Republican control of the U.S. House hanging by a thread. But it’s also clear Samuel Alito’s handiwork in green-lighting (and even encouraging) Republican efforts to wipe out majority-Black Democratic districts will have a profound effect over the next few years on minority representation in Congress. That’s particularly true in the Deep South, given its robust Black populations and its lily-white Republican governors and legislatures.

But there’s an even more fundamental political change in store for us triggered by both Callais and the precedent set by Donald Trump and his allies and opponents in the current election cycle. Callais eliminated the most important federal judicial obstacle to partisan gerrymandering, and politicians (first Trump and his state-level ground troops, followed by Democrats fighting back) swept away past informal inhibitions against mid-decade redistricting. Now, suddenly, states can monkey around with congressional lines at will, or certainly every two years, so long as their own laws permit it. And it is extremely likely that the partisan gerrymandering arms race will very quickly convince states with independent or nonpartisan redistricting systems to abandon them, just as California and Virginia persuaded their voters to jettison such independent commissions this cycle — in theory temporarily, but as a practical matter for as long as it’s politically necessary.

Soon we will probably be living in a world where the two parties go back and forth, state by state, gerrymandering districts as effectively as possible, whenever and wherever they can. But in every state except two, the power to gerrymander depends on holding a governing trifecta: control of the governorship and both legislative chambers. The post-Callais world, then, will make winning and holding these trifectas a much bigger goal for the national political parties given the implications for control of Congress.

At present, 39 states are under trifecta control of one of the parties — 23 held by Republicans and 16 by Democrats. Six states (Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming) have only one U.S. House seat and are thus not subject to congressional gerrymandering. But in the other 44, all but a few are going to be vulnerable now and then to a potential “flip” of control either of a legislative chamber or of the governorship. If you doubt that, consider the situation in the largest state, California, with its 52 U.S. House districts: There is a very real possibility that the Golden State will have a Republican governor next year, in a position to block any further Democratic gerrymanders of congressional or state legislative maps.

There are, moreover, six states where one party or the other (according to their own state legislative campaign committees) is in a position to flip or maintain control of the legislature in November: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These states together hold 57 U.S. House seats. The potential harvest of House seats from playing heavily in key gubernatorial or state legislative races is immense, as national-party strategists and donors are doubtless beginning to understand. Since regular gerrymandering will likely reduce the number of good old-fashioned U.S. House battleground districts (already being reduced by partisan polarization), winning a House majority by winning state governments first could soon become a strategy of choice, or at least a big part of the equation. It’s unlikely that in wrecking the Voting Rights Act Justice Alito planned to become the fairy godfather of state political parties. But that could be part of his legacy, since he’s already blessed the states with control over abortion policy in his opinion reversing Roe v. Wade.

At The Guardian, Steven Greenhouse reports that “Young Americans have soured on Trump” and writes: “The president’s approval rating with those under 30 has plummeted as he has failed to deliver on promise after promise…Republicans rejoiced when far more young voters than expectedbacked Donald Trump in 2024, with many of them moved byTrump’s grandiose promises, such as his vow to “build the greatest economy in the history of the world”. But Republicans should be alarmed that so many 18- to 29-year-olds have soured on Trump – his approval rating with that group has sunk from 48% in January 2025 to between just 25% and 33% in recent months, according to polls by YouGov/the Economist…It shouldn’t be a surprise that millions of young Americans have turned against Trump, considering that he has failed to deliver on so many promises, most notably his vow to reduce prices on day one. For young people, inflation is the No 1 economic issue, far outpacing other issues, and they very much wanted Trump to focus on affordability, but Trump has focused on everything but affordability. He’s focused instead on his glitzy, $400m ballroom, his war against Iran (which has increased gas prices), and his tariff wars (which have increased overall inflation). In bad news for Republicans, 78% of Americans under age 30 disapprove of how Trump is handling inflation…Fed up with the status quo under Joe Biden, many young people expected great things from Trump, but 15 months into his second term, many feel let down, not least because the economy has taken a bad turn. Inflation has increased, job growth has slowed, and housing, healthcare and higher education have all gotten more expensive. What’s more, young Americans complain that the job market stinks for their age group…“Things are pretty chaotic lately,” Lizabel, a young voter who backed Trump, said in a focus group for the Bulwark. “A lot of people are struggling to find jobs. A lot of people are feeling kind of pessimistic about what things are going on.”…Beyond pocketbook issues, many young Americans are upset by Trump’s authoritarian actions and never-ending chaos: his deeply unpopular war against Iran, his sending masked ICE agents into major cities, his posting a picture of himself as a Jesus-like figure, his demolishing the East Wing of the White House, and his insulting everyone from Pope Leo to supreme court justices to other countries’ leaders.”

Greenhouse continues, “Just 13% of Americans 18 to 29 say the US is headed in the right direction, while 57% say things are on the wrong track, according to a Harvard Youth Poll released in December. In a sign of profound pessimism, just 30% believethey will be better off financially than their parents. Many young people are no doubt upset that the inflation rate now, 3.3%, is higher than when Biden left office, even though candidate Trump promised he would end inflationand reduce prices on day one. Coffee prices are up 18.7% over the past year, beef jumped 12.1%, and fresh vegetables, 7.5%. Hospital costs have climbed 6.4% and electricity by 4.6%, while gas prices have soared by over 45% since Trump began bombing Iran…In an effort to woo young voters, Trump said he’d work to make college more affordable, but since he returned to office, tuition has continued to climb, especially at private colleges. At the same time, Trump is pushing for deep cuts in student aid, a move that will hurt non-affluent students in particular…Trump also said he would lower health costs, but those costs also continue to head skyward. Making things worse, Trump’s “big beautiful bill”, along with his blocking new Obamacare subsidies, will cause 10 million Americans to lose health insurance and cause premiums to more than double on average for 20 million Americans, many of them under 30…Even though Trump promised to create “millions and millions of jobs”, especially blue-collar ones, many young Americans are worried to panicking about their job prospects. I’ve heard too many stories of young people who have sent out 200 job applications and heard back from only two or three employers – and sometimes from none. Since Trump returned to office, the US has added a puny 26,000 jobs per month on average, one-fourth the rate during Biden’s last year in office. Not only has Trump utterly failed to create millions of jobs, but in bad news for blue-collar Americans, the US has lost 82,000 factory jobs since his inauguration.” More here.

Psychologist Don P. McAdams explores “The Mind off Donald Trump” at The Atlantic, and writes: “In 2006, Donald Trump made plans to purchase the Menie Estate, near Aberdeen, Scotland, aiming to convert the dunes and grassland into a luxury golf resort. He and the estate’s owner, Tom Griffin, sat down to discuss the transaction at the Cock & Bull restaurant. Griffin recalls that Trump was a hard-nosed negotiator, reluctant to give in on even the tiniest details. But, as Michael D’Antonio writes in his recent biography of Trump, Never Enough, Griffin’s most vivid recollection of the evening pertains to the theatrics. It was as if the golden-haired guest sitting across the table were an actor playing a part on the London stage…“It was Donald Trump playing Donald Trump,” Griffin observed. There was something unreal about it…The same feeling perplexed Mark Singer in the late 1990s when he was working on a profile of Trump for The New Yorker. Singer wondered what went through his mind when he was not playing the public role of Donald Trump. What are you thinking about, Singer asked him, when you are shaving in front of the mirror in the morning? Trump, Singer writes, appeared baffled. Hoping to uncover the man behind the actor’s mask, Singer tried a different tack: “O.K., I guess I’m asking, do you consider yourself ideal company?”…“You really want to know what I consider ideal company?,” Trump replied. “A total piece of ass.”…I might have phrased Singer’s question this way: Who are you, Mr. Trump, when you are alone? Singer never got an answer, leaving him to conclude that the real-estate mogul who would become a reality-TV star and, after that, a leading candidate for president of the United States had managed to achieve something remarkable: “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”…Trump’s tendencies toward social ambition and aggressiveness were evident very early in his life, as we will see later. (By his own account, he once punched his second-grade music teacher, giving him a black eye.) According to Barbara Res, who in the early 1980s served as vice president in charge of construction of Trump Tower in Manhattan, the emotional core around which Donald Trump’s personality constellates is anger…More here.

From “The Clock Is Ticking to Secure the Midterms — Here’s What the Experts Say,” a forum at Politico. This contribution comes from Galen Sheely, research director for the Voting Laws Roundup project at the Democracy Policy Lab in University of California, Berkeley: “The Trump administration has suggested it could send law enforcement to the polls or in election certification processes — even though federal law prohibits the deployment of federal agents to polling places. Considering the very real crisis the administration would cause by carrying out these orders, however, it is imperative for states to provide as many protections against federal interference and avenues for holding violating federal officials accountable as possible…State legislators can do this by enacting legislation that reinforces existing federal protections by enshrining them in state law. The Brennan Center has provided excellent model legislation on this topic, which provides a good starting point for legislators drafting legislation to prevent federal election interference and providing accountability for potential violations. The model legislation highlights several important key provisions that legislators can address in such legislation…First, state legislation should prohibit sending troops or other federal agents to the polls except in emergencies and requested by state officials. Second, legislation should prohibit election interference by federal officials. Finally, state legislation should allow aggrieved parties or state officials to sue the government or federal agents in state court. To avoid Supremacy Clause issues — the concept that federal law takes precedence over conflicting state law — states can mimic the language of existing federal statutes and include language that applies equally to state and federal officials…Luckily, state legislators in Virginia, Washington and California have already begun reacting to this threat. Legislators in these states should vote to enact these proposals before the midterms, and more states should follow in their footsteps and enact legislation protecting against federal interference.”

From “The Real Reason to Worry About the Midterm Elections: Some worry about a November Trump coup. That’s far-fetched, but the ordinary forms of voter suppression are the greater concern” by Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect:

…Trump has been desperately trying to gain control of the election machinery, so far to no avail. His executive orders trying to assert control over electoral machinery that the Constitution clearly gives to the states have been blocked by the courts. The SAVE America Act, which would accomplish the same thing by statute, was passed by the House but died in the Senate.

Trump still hopes to use his control of the Postal Service to undermine the use of mail-in ballots, and to find a way to require photo ID, all on the bogus and discredited premise that illegal voting is rampant. One vexing problem is that even if election officials in blue and purple states reject Trump’s demands to turn over election records for federal purging, Republican officials in some states are going along. This is being challenged in court.

How far would Trump go? In the nightmare scenarios posed by some concerned groups, Trump waits until Election Day, claims that Iran has hacked the election, declares a national emergency, and suspends the election until the accuracy of polling can be assured. Delay is deadly. In some versions of the nightmare, Trump sends in ICE to seize ballot boxes and voting machines.

…MOST LEADERS IN THE “DEFEND DEMOCRACY” CAMP are more worried about the ordinary forms of voter suppression, which Trump and his allies in MAGA-controlled states will surely try to take to new depths this year. This includes not only familiar tactics such as purging voter rolls, intimidating poll watchers and local election officials, changing locations where voters may cast ballots, reducing the number of polling places, and altering the rules and procedures on mail-in ballots.

…Miles Rapoport, former Connecticut secretary of the state and the present leader of 100% Democracy (and a Prospect board member), put it this way: “We can all imagine nightmare scenarios, but they are both unlikely and unhelpful. It’s more important that secretaries of state, pro-democracy legal and advocacy organizations, the courts, and an alerted citizenry push back effectively and make the elections work.”

Whether you are more concerned about a somewhat far-fetched risk of an attempted coup, or about familiar forms of voter suppression taken to new extremes, the remedy is the same. The people need to turn out in record numbers, both to vote and if necessary to face down ICE.”

More here

Ruy Teixeira, author of major works of political analysis and non-resident senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, explains “Why Virginia Voters have Soured on Spanberger” at The Washington Post:

Abigail Spanberger’s shtick has long been moderation. When she ran for governor of Virginia last year, she emphasized her law enforcement background, her commitment to working across the aisle (“pragmatism over partisanship”) and her laserlike focus on the issue of “affordability.” She ducked questions about controversial issues, from transgender school policy to endorsing Democratic attorney general candidate Jay Jones, and stuck to her talking points. Virginians could count on her to govern and get things done, not to be a partisan warrior.

It was a successful formula in a blue-trending, Trump-disapproving state, and she romped to a 15-point victory over her admittedly weak Republican opponent. So how’s she doing?

Not too hot.

In a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll, Spanberger’s approval rating clocked in at 47 percent. Nearly as many voters, 46 percent, disapproved. Her net approval at only +1 is lower than her predecessor, Republican Glenn Youngkin, had at an early point in his term as governor (+13). Never mind that Youngkin squeaked into the governor’s mansion by 2 points in 2021 while Spanberger won by a landslide. She’s lost altitude — fast.

This has been particularly true among pure independents, the swingiest of voters. They gave her a 20-point margin in November (60-40) but have since gone negative. According to The Post, the governor is underwater with that contingent: 40 percent approve, 44 percent disapprove.

A plurality of voters also think Spanberger’s views on issues are “too liberal” (45 percent) rather than “just about right” (42 percent). They are likewise unimpressed with her efforts on affordability: 41 percent say her policies will make Virginia less affordable, 31 percent think they will make Virginia more affordable and 23 percent think they won’t make a difference.

Why have voters cooled so quickly on a candidate they thunderously endorsed only five months ago? The answer lies in her not-particularly-moderate governance style. One might expect a candidate who so strenuously cultivated a moderate image to take some opportunities once elected to demonstrate her independence from partisan dictates. Not Spanberger.

While Democrats and voting rights advocates are still in shock over the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act, it’s time to take a look at remedial actions down the road, as I wrote about at New York:

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Louisiana v. Callais, much attention has been paid to its impact on the midterms and the partisan gerrymandering surge we can expect in the last two years of the Trump administration. The decision clearly green-lights map-rigging by demolishing the legal obstacles posed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Thus it’s a huge gift to the Republicans who control the former Confederate states, where the VRA previously protected minority (and thus Democratic) voting interests to a considerable degree. The decision probably won’t be enough to let the GOP hang on to control of the U.S. House in November, but it could make the post-election landscape in Congress a lot friendlier to Republicans.

Is there anything Democrats can do to mitigate the damage from Callais, aside from attempting retaliatory gerrymanders of their own in blue states? What’s possible at the national level if Democrats flip control of Congress in the next four years and win back the presidency in 2028? Would a Democratic trifecta in Washington in 2029 make it possible to undo Callais by enacting new voting-rights legislation?

If this question sounds familiar, it’s probably because unsuccessful efforts to shore up voting rights were a priority when Democrats last had trifecta control of the federal government in 2021 (before losing the House in 2022). The House passed two major voting-rights measures that were then filibustered to death in the Senate. This happened because two Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, blocked a bid to carve out an exception for voting rights from the rules allowing filibusters. Manchin and Sinema are no longer in the Senate (though John Fetterman, who holds similar views opposing Democratic partisanship, is in the Senate at least until 2029). Might a renewed Senate majority finally zap the filibuster, either partially (via a “carve-out”) or totally, and restore voting rights to the robust protections they enjoyed before Supreme Court conservatives began unraveling them?

The answer is “it depends.” For one thing, implementation of Callais by the lower courts (under the supervision of the Supreme Court) will take a while, and there are some unanswered questions about the leeway it offers states — not to mention a future Congress — to protect or eviscerate minority voting interests. But more basically, the ability to counteract the Court’s demolition work by federal legislation will turn on what form it assumes.

Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Callais did not explicitly eliminate the VRA or any of its sections. But it did hold that the previous implementation of the VRA by lower courts and the states was unconstitutional under the 14th and 15th Amendments. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, one of the two major measures Democrats pushed in 2021, aimed to repair and restore the enforcement regime authorized by the VRA after 2013 and 2021 Supreme Court decisions gutted it as a matter of statutory interpretation. But because the Court has now decreed that any race-conscious remedies for discriminatory redistricting decisions are themselves unconstitutional (except for the extremely rare cases where racial motives underlying partisan gerrymanders are open and explicit), it’s unlikely that any VRA repair job would pass judicial muster. So bringing back the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act might be entirely futile even if it can overcome a certain GOP filibuster.

The other big 2021 voting-rights measure, the For the People Act, could be another matter. Most of this legislation focused on setting national race-neutral-but-voter-friendly standards for holding elections, allowing automatic voter registration, creating uniform early-voting opportunities, and banning suspect “purges” of voter rolls, among other protections. But it also attacked partisan gerrymandering by either party, requiring independent redistricting commissions in the states and banning maps that gave any party an “undue advantage” in the likely results. Because these provisions indirectly address racially discriminatory redistricting practices without race-conscious remedies, they might survive challenges based on Callais.

One common argument against the For the People Act Republicans raised in 2021 is that it would impose national rules on the states, usurping their traditional role in election administration. It will be hard for the GOP to revive that argument given its near-universal support for this year’s Trump-driven effort to impose national rules on states via the SAVE America Act, aimed at addressing the phantom menace of noncitizen voting while discouraging voting by mail and other convenience measures.

For Democrats to fully restore the pre-Callais Voting Rights Act, they’d need to reshape the Supreme Court, as conservatives did during the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations. Until that can happen, the best way to reverse Callais’s baleful effects is by promoting voting rights generally at both the federal and state levels and by paying close attention in their own redistricting measures to the minority interests Republicans will be racing to extinguish.

Some nuggets mined from “Polls show rising regret among Trump’s 2024 voters” at msn.com:

Polls from YouGov/UMass Amherst and Strength in Numbers-Verasight reveal a steady erosion of confidence among Trump’s 2024 voters. In April 2025, 74% were “very confident” in their vote, but that figure has dropped to 62%, with 16% saying they would change their choice if given the chance. Regret is most pronounced among younger voters and Hispanics, doubling from last year’s levels in some surveys.

Who is expressing regret and why it matters

•Regret is highest among Trump voters under 30 years old (17%) and Hispanic voters (16%)

•Between 1 in 8 and 1 in 6 Trump voters express some measure of regret

•If these voters desert the GOP in 2026, it could trigger a wave election for Democrats

…CNN polling shows Trump’s approval among working-class white voters has dropped from 63% in early 2025 to just 49% now. Disapproval is also high among his 2024 voters on key issues: 30% on the economy, 28% on Iran, and 39% on inflation. Analysts link the decline to dissatisfaction with the Iran war, economic policies, and perceived betrayals of campaign promises.

…Gallup data shows Americans rank politics, not the economy, as the nation’s biggest problem, a divergence from global trends. Analysts say political instability—driven partly by Trump’s tariffs, trade wars, and foreign policy—has worsened economic pressures. This political dissatisfaction correlates with Trump’s high economic disapproval rating, suggesting governance concerns are fueling voter regret.

What the closure of The Liberal Patriot says about a party that can’t stop #Resisting.

This article by Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin is cross posted from The Boston Globe:

John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira are the cofounders of The Liberal Patriot, an online political newsletter that was published from 2021 to early 2026.

After the 2024 election, there was a moment when Democrats seemed mildly reflective about their political situation. The reality was stark. After vanquishing Trump in 2020, the party had managed to squander unified control of government with acute policy failures on issues ranging from immigration and the COVID response to inflation and the overall economy. And Democrats compounded the problem with far-left positions on issues like crime, transgender rights, and race that turned off more voters than they attracted, contributing to a strong perception that the party was woefully out of touch with working- and middle-class values.

As much as voters did not like the prospect of a second Trump term, they despised the Biden and Harris administration even more, particularly after an aging President Biden’s highly visible decline. Subsequently, Democrats lost voters across the board in 2024, with notable declines among Black and Hispanic men (22-point and 19-point shifts to Republicans, respectively), lower-income voters (a 14-point shift to Republicans), 18- to 29-year-olds (also a 14-point shift to the right), and non-college educated voters (a 7-point shift). The only two demographic groups of note that moved toward Democrats in the last election were white women (a 1-point shift) and women 65 years or older (a 5-point shift).

The historic party of America’s working class had reduced itself to a caricature of decrepit leaders, policy incompetence, and cultural elitism disconnected from the economic needs and social desires of everyday families. You would think this situation would lead party officials to confront what went wrong and to go through a serious process of policy and political regeneration. You would be wrong. Although some party members considered the dire state of their brand and economic message among voters in the aftermath of their defeat, many party officials and activists downplayed the second loss to Trump as merely an inflation-related fluke outside their control.

The Democratic National Committee deep-sixed its official autopsy of the 2024 election, saying it would be a “distraction” from helping the party move forward. Democratic heads went firmly into the sand. “Resistance” mania took over the party as Democrats chose to unite around nonstop criticism of Trump rather than devise a popular vision for governing that could win back the working-class voters of all races they’d lost to the president. The left grew in confidence — or arrogance depending on your point of view — insisting that economic populism alone would win the day and that few changes if any were needed in the party’s social agenda on immigration, transgender rights, race, and crime. The left’s basic strategic goal remains dispensing with moderates, displacing the establishment, and bashing “billionaires” and Israel repeatedly — not reforming the party to make it more attractive to a broad swath of working Americans who hold more conservative cultural views.

Yet how can Democrats move forward and build a sustainable electoral majority if they won’t even try to understand or accept what they did wrong in the first place?

This is where our publication The Liberal Patriot (TLP) came in. Started at the beginning of the Biden administration, TLP sought to help the Democrats reform themselves to better reflect the interests and values of working-class Americans — the vast majority of voters in this country — and to reject the extreme ideas of the college-educated elites who had taken over the party in recent decades.

The Liberal Patriot warned Democrats about the political effects of their open asylum policies on immigration. We warned them about the negative consequences of spending gazillions of dollars on dubious social schemes like “net zero” climate mitigation and student debt relief. We warned them about the limitations of “Bidenomics” and the political dynamics of soaring inflation. We warned them about negative reactions to their extreme positions on transgender rights, including their support for biological males playing in female sports. And we warned them that young people and working-class voters of all races were turning from the party and toward Trump.

At every turn, party elites and activists rejected our analysis and counsel and instead chose to pretend as if nothing were wrong with the Democratic brand and its approach to elections and majoritarian politics. Others said our diagnosis of the party’s problems might be correct, but since we didn’t embrace a narrow vision of populism fervently enough, we were “old and out of touch.”

They believe that “thermostatic” opposition to Trump has put the party back in the driver’s seat and that the more “authentically” left its candidates behave, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the better the party can beat back the “fascists” and “authoritarians.”

The Liberal Patriot way of being “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America” — or economically nationalist and culturally moderate — did not find many adherents in the Democratic Party. So we recently folded the publication after more than five years and nearly 1,500 newsletters published.

We have no regrets about the analysis and political advice we offered Democrats. We grounded it all in empirical facts about the electorate and commonsense policy solutions to help Democrats rebuild a truly working-class party. Maybe they just aren’t interested in this approach. That’s how politics often works out.

Democrats will almost surely win one or both branches of Congress this fall and then will face a monumental choice in 2028: Reform the party to garner a broad mandate from the center-left and center-right of the electorate or continue to resist the current government and attempt to turn hatred of Trump into an Electoral College victory. We believe reform is the only way to fix the long-term challenges facing Democrats and begin the arduous process of regaining the trust of American voters. But we’re also realists and recognize that this advice may go unheeded by an elite political class that too often values resistance and orthodoxy over reason and heterodoxy. Let’s hope that some 2028 candidates are at least open to reconsidering Democrats’ strategic and policy objectives, for the country needs two strong and viable political parties to best represent the diverse interests of Americans.