Democrats have two choices. Only one will save democracy

The institutionalists are failing us

Welcome to a Sunday night edition of Progress Report.

First, in the words of the immortal Hall of Fame slugger and Mets broadcaster Ralph Kiner: “It's Mother's Day, so to all you mothers out there… Happy Birthday!”

I am back in the US and ready to kick swing state midterm coverage off in earnest; the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act makes this year’s legislative elections the most important in several generations. We’ll get started with a LIVE streamed interview with a top-tier, working class candidate in a toss-up seat in a toss-up state this coming Tuesday evening. Keep your eyes peeled for the invite!

Tonight, we’re taking a look at redistricting and what comes next.

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I’m not fond of looking at events through the lens of how they’ll be described one day in history books, because that overlooks the suffering of people impacted by them in there and now. But the parallels are too obvious and ominous right now, too damning and dangerous, given the consequences of the history we risk repeating, to ignore:

These past few weeks have felt like the end of Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow, a near-century of terror and subjugation, an era of extreme racial and economic inequality with little to no recourse, a dismal antidemocratic epoch that was set in motion by conservative treachery and liberal acquiescence, the political surrender of feckless, comfortable, and naive leaders who let institutionalism stand in for democracy, which almost ceased to exist.

There is no difference between today’s Supreme Court and the Court that in the 1870s used Slaughterhouse and other decisions to undermine and ultimately shatter civil rights law; both perverted the clear meaning and scope of the 14th and 15th amendments in order to permit states to pass mass voter suppression laws and essentially eliminate Black representation across the South.

The same can be said for the “good government” Democrats who instantly accepted the Virginia Supreme Court decision without even considering circumvention. Their immediate acquiescence, should they remain unwilling to pursue clear solutions would mirror the northern Republicans of the 1870s, who accepted short-term power by agreeing that President Rutherford B. Hayes would withdraw federal troops from the South and turn a blind eye to violence and subjugation.

Whether these are perfect analogies is beside the point, because the intention and impact of the GOP’s schemes could be just as disastrous as what transpired in the late 19th century. The stakes are absolutely that high. Ongoing Republican governance would turn the country into:

• A full-on police state where people of color are legally terrorized by federal foot soldiers with license to kill dissidents on the spot;

• A disease-filled dystopia where medical science has reverted to the dark ages, children die en masse from crackpot disinformation, women have no control of their own bodies, and very few can afford real treatment;

• An even more extreme plutocracy where the wealthiest few build ever-larger fortresses as they extract every last ounce of wealth from helpless workers who they’ve either marginalized or fully replaced with artificial intelligence;

• A broiling, smog-covered environmental wasteland controlled by oil companies and other extractive industries.

I’m not exaggeration, either. This is not hyperbole. these are the stakes. And we’re already en route to this nightmare future. Conservatives are seizing this moment after decades of laying the groundwork for this legal coup, choosing which laws and courts to obey and which to ignore in attempts to rig elections, seize a generational majority, and then make it a permanent hegemony. In each and every case, they are brazenly violating long-held democratic norms and/or receiving help from pliant and corrupt justices:

• Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, just gerrymandered themselves an additional four Congressional seats in direct violation of the voter-approved fair redistricting amendment;

• Tennessee Republicans repealed a long-standing law against mid-decade redistricting in order to erase the state’s only Black-majority (and Democratic) Congressional district;

• Louisiana canceled their primaries in the middle of the election, then won an unusual expedited certification of the Callais decision (which relied on faulty data from the Trump DOJ) to blow up one of its two Black districts

• Alabama preemptively eliminated its second Black-majority district with a gerrymander, in hopes that the federal judiciary will release the state from the injunction that prevented it from redistricting until after 2030;

• Utah Republicans, angry that their state’s Supreme Court rejected a gerrymander, decided to blow the whole thing up: they expanded the court, are installing friendly conservatives, and even took away its jurisdiction over voting rights issues to a newly created (and very partisan) judicial body;

• Ohio Republicans spent several election cycles simply ignoring the state Supreme Court when it ruled against the GOP’s gerrymandered districts, then installed an even worse map when they flipped the state Supreme Court.

That last example pre-dates Callais, but it’s most applicable to what’s happening right now in Virginia. A partisan state Supreme Court tossed out the results of a high-profile election on an absurd and hypocritical technicality after Virginians did not produce their preferred outcome. Democrats have a big trifecta after a wipeout general election victory last fall, but their leaders’ first instinct was to say that they “respected” the state Supreme Court’s decision and try to raise more money for elections on the old maps.

Democrats should have immediately looked to follow Ohio’s lead, telling the powerless court to shove it, but now they don’t even have to do that to get their map — the one approved by voters in a high-profile, ultra-expensive election — back in place. It’s since emerged that Democrats could lower the mandatory retirement age of their state Supreme Court, wipe out sitting justices, and then lodge an emergency appeal to a newly appointed and much friendlier court. Easy, right?

Sound extreme? Consider what multiple Republican states have done in recent years. Just this year, Utah Republicans, angry that their state’s Supreme Court rejected a gerrymander, decided to blow the whole thing up: they expanded the court, are installing friendly conservatives, and even took away its jurisdiction over voting rights issues to a newly created (and very partisan) judicial body.

Expand the Supreme Court or watch democracy die

Ohio and Utah Republicans concocted these schemes in blatant defiance of fair redistricting amendments that were overwhelmingly approved by voters via ballot initiative. If Virginia Democrats were to pursue their Supreme Court switcheroo, it would be in defense of the explicit wishes of a majority of the state’s voters. That’s far more justifiable, yet reflexive Democratic handwringing and fear of power has already reared its annoying head.

Fighting for voters’ voices to be counted, according Democratic former Rep. James Moran, would be “just a bridge too far,” an assertion based on imaginary standards measured against convenient definitions of vague concepts clung to by out-of-touch liberal pearl clutchers.

“We do have to keep our credibility,” Moran added. “We have to do things that pass the legitimacy test.”

Just who sets the criteria for the “legitimacy test” is unknowable, but shredding their own credibility hasn’t exactly hurt Republicans in the states they’ve actively rigged. Ohio, for example, is more Republican than ever, and conservatives have flipped almost every state Supreme Court seat there since their rulings against gerrymandered maps were ignored. Virginia Democrats’ margin of victory in 2025 is bigger than anything Ohio Republicans have won in recent years, and Gov. Abigail Spanberger can’t even run for re-election, yet the only real noise coming from Richmond is a bunch of whimpering.

Coalition of the unwilling

Unfortunately, Virginia Democrats are not alone in their preemptive surrender, as blue state leaders who might have the power to chip away at the massive GOP gerrymandering advantage are already shooting down any talk of doing so.

Take Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the leading candidate for governor of Minnesota, who shot down retiring Gov. Tim Walz’s suggestion that Democratic lawmakers could redraw a map that better reflects the state’s partisan tendencies than its current 4-4 Congressional stalemate. Klobuchar has been hewing to the center in this race, but that’s more her style than political necessity.

Klobuchar is the best-known politician in Minnesota, and after ICE’s violent invasion of the Twin Cities, the GOP has never been less popular in Minnesota. It’s so bad that in January, one of the leading GOP contenders for governor actually quit the race because he could no longer consider himself a Republican after the feds executed two innocent people on the streets of Minneapolis. A huge legislative blue wave would make for the perfect opportunity to gerrymander Minnesota, isolating its rural areas to the north and turning the 4-4 into a 6-2 or 7-1 map.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s bullish talk about redistricting in 2028 to create new Democratic districts has been forcefully tamped down by the party’s legislative leaders, who say any updated maps would represent mild changes; a 19-7 map might become a 22-4 or 23-3 advantage, leaving several potential blue districts on the table.

“People were walking across bridges and being mauled, and have lost their lives for these rights,” New York Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, speaking of the Voting Rights Act, told Politico on Friday. “These laws are there because there has been a real effort to disenfranchise certain people, certainly Black people, from being able to vote. So we want to protect that.”

Sen. Stewart-Cousins is a trailblazing leader, and the concern that redrawing districts would reduce or erase minority majorities in several NYC boroughs are very legitimate. But with all due respect, these districts would still have large minority pluralities, and the New York Democratic Party prides itself on its ability to control who runs in which race (and control primaries when necessary). The idea that Hakeem Jeffries or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would lose their seats to white primary challengers because their still-safe Democratic districts added some Republicans from Long Island is patently absurd.

Further, while Stewart-Cousins is absolutely right that people were mauled and murdered in pursuit of voting rights, her statement ignores the current reality: Republicans have already hijacked those voting rights, the Supreme Court has just ushered in a new Jim Crow era, and the only way to undo the damage and restore the freedoms that people fought so valiantly to secure the first time around.

It feels counterintuitive, but the future of American democracy is entirely dependent on liberal leaders finally realizing that virtue itself is not a means to an end and that norms only exist in so far as they can be enforced. Gerrymandering is not an ideal solution, but we face a stark choice: do it temporarily in service of restoring fair boundaries or watch Republicans do it on their own, for long-term election manipulation.

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