Before 1965, American elections pitted two majority-white parties against each other, with significant regional variations. Black voters comprised most of the non-white electorate; there were no Latino members of Congress outside of states that had been part of Mexico, and no AAPI members outside of majority-AAPI Hawaii.
Most Black voters lived in the South, where Democrats ran every state legislature and did not draw seats where Black voters could win.
The Voting Rights Act and its legislative updates broke the stranglehold of conservative southern Democrats, who were wiped out fully during Barack Obama’s presidency. The Immigration and Nationality Act changed who came to America — Asian, Latin American, and African migrants, whose entry into the US was limited under old rules that favored European migrants.
And the decennial Census counted new arrivals to determine congressional allocations, whether or not those new immigrants were citizens who could vote. (Republicans can overstate the effects of non-citizens getting counted for congressional apportionment, but it obviously helped the party that most non-white voters support.)
By 2020, this meant that Democrats could win just 41% of the white vote, take the Electoral College, and control the House and Senate. The safest seats in the Democratic House were majority-minority districts, which even deep-red states like Alabama were required to draw to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
All of that enabled a much uniformly progressive Democratic Party — pro-choice, pro-LGBT, pro-gun control, pro-amnesty for non-citizens — to win a governing majority. The premise of the Trump-era GOP is that this majority is a mirage enabled by law.
Take away the VRA districts, Republicans argue, and the current version of the Democratic Party can’t win the House. Halt immigration and stop counting non-citizens in the Census, and its current coalition can’t get to 270 electoral votes.
“It is hard to find pertinent evidence relating to intentional present-day voting discrimination,” Justice Sam Alito wrote in his Callais opinion.
Republicans haven’t mustered the votes to undo the 1965 bills, but Alito and the conservative Supreme Court did the job they wanted on redistricting, and the Trump administration is taking a similarly restrictive approach to immigration. Liberals see what’s happening as the “death of the fourth American republic” — the one founded in 1965, the only one with fair electoral competition.
Legislators built this system, and judges are dismantling it. At the request of Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., the Justice Department is reviewing “districts created, preserved, or defended under the old Section 2 [of the VRA] regime.” His request could speed up the redrawing of seats that underpinned the last few Democratic majorities.
