Why “vote harder” and other nostrums aren’t an answer for the Callais decision

Plus, a post-mortem on MayDay Strong's "structure test."

Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v Callais that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was effectively no longer the law of the land. From this point going forward, according to the court’s 6-3 right-wing majority, states may legally draw the lines for representative districts in ways that dilute the political power of minority voters if there is no evidence that they are doing so explicitly to discriminate based on race or ethnicity. Doing so in the name of partisan advantage, it said, was totally fine, as long as everyone has an equal right to vote.

For anyone who has been paying attention to this Supreme Court and its prior rulings on voting rights, the Callais decision was a foregone conclusion--the only question was whether the Court would throw out the whole Act or just leave it hanging by the narrowest of threads. Democrats, civil rights organizations and their allies have had plenty of time to prepare for it. Which is why the response from so many of them is a bit troubling. Call it a crisis of political imagination.

“Vote harder” is not a useful response, yet it is the one urged the most, though the prospect of winning a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate along with the House and the White House is a distant dream. Nor can Democrats somehow win majority control in the states now rushing to tilt elections further away from them. “Sue harder,” isn’t that much better, though lawyers may be able to stave off some state level changes for a little while by doing so.

“Counter-gerrymander harder“ to match all the seats Republicans are now going to gerrymander away is the only obvious move in the short run, but it not sufficient. There’s also a practical limit to how far Democrats can go to match Republicans with this tactic, because if they gerrymander the states they control to the absolute extreme, districts that currently elect minority Democratic representatives will also disappear. One suggested map that could turn all 52 of California’s districts blue would eliminate seven Hispanic majority seats along the way.

One group, United for Democracy, had an astonishing response to the Callais decision, pushing out an online petition titled “It’s time to take our power back.” How? By demanding “a plan” from Congress. I kid you not. It even made the top of Jess Craven’s “Orgs to support in light of Callais ruling” list.

Norman Eisen, one of the deans of the pro-democracy advocacy school, tapped three civil rights leaders from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Fair Fight, and LULAC for their thoughts and then offered “15 Ways to Fight Callais” in a post for The Contrarian, where he’s the publisher. If I may summarize them, they come down to:

• Build a bigger coalition for multiracial democracy;

• Find fresh ways to connect with not just current voters but also nonvoters;

• Protect the principle of one-person/one vote;

• Talk candidly about racism;

• Make it more painful for the GOP to redistrict now by making noise in the frontline states;

• Force votes on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act (even though they won’t make it into law as long as the filibuster stands);

• Pass state voting rights laws (even though this won’t affect federal elections or red states);

• Litigate harder;

• Coalition-build harder; and

• Get more people to vote in November (aka “vote harder”).

Oh, they also suggested we invoke the glories of the past, which for anyone steeped in the history of the civil rights movement are indeed inspiring, but which are as far away in time from today as the invention of the airplane was to someone living in 1965.

All this in service of maybe winning enough elections (Congress and then the White House) with a big enough majority to push through a renewed Voting Rights Act (which is embodied in the legislation cited above) plus an expanded Supreme Court packed with more liberal justices.

None of these esteemed advocates explained how they’d keep all of this in place in 2030, when there would be a likely GOP backlash in the midterms followed by yet more losses by blue states as population shifts move seats toward more red states. Beyond vote harder, again!

Time for a fresh approach

Like I said, we’re dealing with a crisis of political imagination. Though here and there, there are signs that some are inching towards a different paradigm that would free us from the gerrymandering wars and make good on the promise of fair representation for all. Thursday night, speaking in the lead slot on a rapid response mass call organized by No Kings, Janae Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued Callais before the Court, said that perhaps it was time to explore “alternative voting systems” like cumulative voting and proportional representation. She didn’t put any emphasis on those ideas, though.

So far, only one Member of Congress, Rep. Jamie Raskin, has shown that he’s thinking afresh about the problem. In his statement denouncing Callais as a “catastrophe for American democracy,” he declared: “I call for congressional establishment nationwide of nonpartisan independent redistricting commissions to permanently take map-drawing out of politicians’ hands, and for Congress to authorize multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation systems to prevent partisan shut-outs and drown-outs across the country. Congress must act, right now, to pull the country out of the abyss of constitutional double standards and partisan authoritarianism.”

Understand what Raskin is suggesting here: with multi-member districts, gerrymandering goes away as a problem, since each district elects members in proportion to their vote. According to my friend Lee Drutman, another important proponent of PR, “The larger the district, the more proportional the outcome. At three members you get modest proportionality. At five you get solid proportionality. States with at least five seats account for 89% of the House. States with at least three account for 96%.”

As Lee notes, shifting to proportional representation also has the merit of defusing the two-party zero-sum warfare that is now threatening to take us all into a black hole of “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries has been saying. Since PR only works for multi-member districts, we would need a different mechanism for insuring minority interests get a seat at the table for single-member offices like Senator and Governor, and the best answer is to bring back fusion voting, which gave smaller parties a way to constructively participate in politics throughout the 1800s in America. Protect Democracy, the anti-authoritarian group that has led much of the legal and intellectual work behind the pro-democracy movement, has argued that if we want to ultimately get to proportional representation in American elections, reviving fusion voting – which would foster stronger minor parties than the fringe ones we have today – would build the political demand for PR most effectively.

So as we stand in the wreckage of the Voting Rights Act, we face a choice. Do more of the same in the hopes that banging our heads against the wall will yield a different result? Or try a new path to democracy instead?

—See also: Dan Cantor, “After the Voting Rights Act,” Center for Ballot Freedom, April 29, 2026, Michael Latner, Guy-Uriel E. Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, “The best response to the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling: proportional representation,” MSNOW, May 2, 2026, and David Callahan, “Toplines,” InsidePhilanthropy.com, May 2, 2026.

MayDay Post-Mortem

According to an email sent by May Day Strong late last Friday night, “millions of people took action in over 5,000 events across the country” on May 1. This is almost certainly an exaggeration.

Yes, there was some disruption of business as usual. Young activists with the Sunrise Movement held sit-ins in hotel lobbies where ICE agents were known to be staying, while others blocked roads near offices of major carbon polluters, interfered with access to the Oakland and San Francisco airports, got arrested chaining themselves to the entrances to the NY Stock Exchange, marched near Amazon warehouses, and tied local strikes and labor actions in places like New Orleans, Raleigh, Minneapolis, and Chicago to the larger national push.

But there is no way that millions took action, because if they did, we’d have pictures of big rallies in major cities showing such numbers. According to the Union of Social Service Workers, more than 10,000 people hit the streets in Raleigh. Thousands, but not tens of thousands, rallied at New York City’s Union Square where they heard speakers like Mayor Zohran Mamdani express their support for labor organizing. The same was true in places like Los Angeles and Washington, DC. This photo-montage of rallies in six major cities made by Indivisible is underwhelming.

Interest in MayDay was also a fraction of the attention seen a month earlier for No Kings, judging by this chart of Google search trends.

It’s also worth noting that of people who searched for MayDay, the second most likely follow-up after “Mayday parade” was “What is mayday,” a sign that most Americans have little fluency in the symbols of the old Left.

Dana Fisher, a professor at American University, worked with MayDay Strong to survey event hosts and participants, tapping the people who had signed up via Mobilize.us, and found that of all the day’s calls-to-action, “no shopping” was by far the one that survey respondents were most likely to say they were doing (see her chart below). If indeed people didn’t shop last Friday, we’ve seen no evidence that it had any impact on retailers.

Fisher also found that “Like participation in the big days of action against the Trump Administration and its policies (including the three No Kings Days), participants in May Day were majority female (76%), predominantly White (94%), older (the mean age of participants was 68), had voted for the democratic candidate in the previous presidential election (97%), and were highly educated (78% of participants reported having a university degree or more).” So, at least for the people who brought themselves to a MayDay action via MayDayStrong’s website and distributed organizing platform, this was not a rising of the working class.

As a “structure test” that the No Kings coalition endorsed as the first major call to action after “eight million” marched on March 28, what did MayDay Strong demonstrate? I think it showed that the movement against authoritarianism and oligarchy is a mile-wide and only a few inches deep in most of America. It also showed the limits of what unpaid volunteers can do compared to what unions with staff can do. How is that going to be addressed? No one is saying. There’s a “what’s next” zoom meeting tonight, but if it’s anything like all the other mass zoom meetings that organizers have led, it will focus on the lowest-common-denominator: keeping morale up with rabble-rousing speeches about all the things that outrage folks with few details about anything else.

I get that movement organizers want to play up the aspects of MayDay that were more courageous and disruptive and want to skate past the very modest numbers of physical participants. In an age where everything is spin, go ahead and claim big numbers. But count me among the people who find this whole approach deeply confusing. Leaders of the pro-democracy side stress that they want accountable government, but when it comes to how they make decisions, there isn’t even transparency, let alone accountability.

Duly Noted

—Mark Engler and Matthew Miles Goodrich think that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new “Organize NYC” initiative, the first major project to come out of the city’s new Office of Mass Engagement, is a big deal. Eric Blanc, who is closer to the NYC-DSA world, thinks it’s not enough. My two cents: Given all the challenges Mamdani is facing moving his agenda forward, he’s doing well so far. And community organizing is an ongoing process.

—If you’re working at the intersection of local community civic renewal and technology, then the Trust for Civic Life’s new report “Online for Offline” is a must-read. Connector readers already know this, but it’s great to see research reaffirm this core truth: “There is no silver bullet in digital form. Generative AI, the latest public good platform, and niche apps all risk irrelevance without the right community conditions in place…. The same principles that make community-led organizing work apply directly to how we should think about funding digital: relationships first, locally-led decisions over outside-imposed tools, and connections built through real participation that online platforms can rarely replicate on their own.” (h/t Matt Stempeck)

—The most interesting revelation in the Wall Street Journal’s May 2 story about changes at ActBlue since Regina Wallace-Jones became its CEO in 2023: “Wallace-Jones also has grown increasingly worried that Democratic presidential candidates will have their own fundraising platforms unaffiliated with ActBlue on their campaign websites, and has focused on acquiring other political tech startups to diversify ActBlue’s offerings, describing her vision as “campaign in a box. The CEO began discussions in mid-2024 to acquire Universe, a campaign-management platform, without bringing in top staffers until months into the discussions. Later, the organization abruptly decided not to move forward with the acquisition. ActBlue ended up having to pay $250,000 to walk away from the deal.”

—Kudos to Debilyn Molineaux, former CEO of the Bridge Alliance and a longtime leader in the cross-partisan field of political bridge building, for sharing how she is rethinking the value of such work. She writes: “I’m proud of this work of organizing, creating and inspiring coalition building. Yet the work itself was insufficient to strengthen democracy in the United States. We’ve seen the continued erosion of respect, trust and healthy engagement across differences. The theory of change that if we just understood each other better, healing would happen organically has been debunked. Thoroughly…. What we missed were the effects of toxic polarization that dialogue alone cannot fix. A workshop is not enough time to “correct” our misperceptions about others when we return to our in-group and social media feeds…. the heat we are feeling is not a glitch in the system; it is what mobilization for structural change looks like. Treating that heat as the problem—rather than the conditions that produced it—mistakes a symptom for a cause. Bridging often seeks to smooth over that conflict instead of addressing it.”

One Long Read

--Give yourself some time to read my friend Panthea Lee’s personal essay about her experience doing the nine-day, 300 kilometer Baishatun Mazu pilgrimage across Taiwan. At a time when we mostly live alone together, Panthea suggests that the pilgrimage showed “human beings living their fullest humanity.” On the pilgrimage, she writes, “eye contact had been constant.” Back in Taipei, “eyes stayed lowered—towards phones, to the ground, to somewhere I couldn’t reach. Nothing passed between us.” And yet another world is possible.