All posts by Tabatha Abu El-Haj

Former NJ Governors, Whitman and Corzine, Urge New Jersey Supreme Court to Lead the Way

political parties, political polarization, third parties,

Christine Whitman (R) and Jon Corzine (D) urge the New Jersey Supreme Court to lead the way in reducing the cycle of polarization. In an opinion piece, the two former Governors of New Jersey explain how recognizing the constitutional burdens anti-fusion laws place on minor parties is a meaningful path to undoing the pathologies of hyperpolarization and undercutting the appeal of authoritarianism. They write:

“Governance is failing because politics is failing, and politics is failing because our two major parties are no longer the ‘big tents’ they once were. There used to be liberal, moderate and conservative factions in both the Democratic and Republican parties, but now those are long gone. We have sorted ourselves into two distinct tribes, and, for too many Americans, the rival camp is seen as an existential threat that must be degraded and destroyed. Negotiation is for weaklings; compromise is surrender. Nothing but domination is acceptable, and that cuts at the very heart of this wondrous but fragile system known as democracy.

Litigation in New Jersey challenging the state’s anti-fusion laws could–if the Court accepts the case–help break the cycle.

By definition, fusion encourages inter-party coalitions to form, which adds stability and legitimacy to governance. It also punishes extremism, because it allows major party voters who are dismayed by the direction of their traditional party — and may currently feel they have nowhere to go — to build a new one. 

. . . .

It gives us pride to imagine that the Garden State might lead the way to a better political party system and a more representative and effective government. 

Theoretically, the New Jersey state legislature could solve the problem by simply repealing the ban. Still, as these two savvy politicians understand, self-interest makes “[d]ominant parties… generally unwilling to change the rules in order to allow new centers of power to breathe.”

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Two members of ABA Task Force highlight fusion’s potential to break political polarization and empower the center, as New Jersey Supreme Court considers the state’s ban on fusion

political parties, political polarization, third parties,

In an exceptionally clear piece in Newsweek, William Kristol and Tom Rogers, members of the ABA cross-partisan Task Force for American democracy, explain fusion voting and how relegalizing it could “break political polarization and empower the center.” The authors illustrate their argument by “imagin[ing] a new political party of ‘politically homeless’ centrists. Call it the Common Sense Party”–explaining how fusion could empower its voters and elevate their concerns (hypothetically, “the rule of law, principled bargaining and compromise, and civility in public life”).

This is an important opinion piece as the NJ Supreme Court considers whether to take up the legality of fusion under its state constitution.

“We are heartened that the ABA Task Force’s final report may encourage the states to reconsider the bans on fusion voting passed by the major parties a century ago. As we write, there is litigation underway in New Jersey, Kansas, and Wisconsin to have these bans declared unconstitutional under their respective state constitutions.”

The ABA Task Force for American Democracy assessed the most practical reforms for bolstering voter confidence in the integrity of our elections and reinforcing the importance of the rule of law.

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With the VRA on life-support, now is the time to reconsider goals and tactics

Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court’s decision to set Louisiana v. Callais for reargument next term suggests that the Voting Rights Act’s respite from the conservative Court’s attacks is likely over. It is, therefore, time for those who remain committed to the United States as a multiracial democracy to start reimagining our goals and tactics. Toward that end, I offer some food for thought and a preview from a chapter I recently completed that will appear in Race, Racism, and the Law (Aziza Ahmed & Guy-Uriel E. Charles, eds., forthcoming 2026). The chapter makes a few points.

An increasingly conservative Supreme Court and an evolving political landscape require a reassessment of our goals and tactics in the continued fight for an inclusive multiracial democracy.

The Roberts Court is not just a reluctant enforcer of the openness of the political process, but a hostile policer of congressional efforts to do so. The gutting of the VRA is a manifestation of this trend. Voting rights activist must reconcile themselves to having lost their most important political ally in the fight for a multiracial democracy as it was conceived in the mid-twentieth century.

But the need for reevaluating goes beyond the conservative Court. The VRA and the related priorities of the voting rights community are increasingly mismatched with how race continues to influence politics and with evolving conceptions of race.

Taking the latter point first. As Americans increasingly operate with broader understandings of race, there are genuine questions about how relevant the categories that defined voting rights jurisprudence under the VRA will be in the future. The twentieth-century version of race, which “divide[s] us all up into a handful of groups,” is increasingly incongruous with the fact that “American families have become increasingly multicultural.” Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181, 293 (2023) (Gorsuch, J., concurring). Americans appear to agree with Chief Justice Roberts that the typical racial “categories [on various forms] are themselves imprecise in many ways . . . [sometimes] plainly overbroad.” Id. at 216 (Roberts, J.)

This concession does not require accepting the conservative Court’s colorblind vision of the Constitution or its belief that an entirely white legislature would be legitimate so long as there were no formal barriers to electoral participation. Still, we would be remiss not to consider the evolving ways in which race matters to politics: discrete categories often matter less than shared intersectional experiences of racial and economic oppression.

Third and most importantly, we need to reconsider our tactics and expand our thinking in our fight for a more inclusive multiracial democracy. Failures to address enduring economic and social inequality, far more than the remaining formal and informal barriers to voting, are the primary obstacles to realizing an inclusive multiracial democracy.

The chapter makes the case for each of these claims—most importantly the third—and argues that, given these realities, a new paradigm for change should measure progress in terms of the policy returns to voters of color of their political participation. This means prioritizing building political power through political parties with a focus on party-centric reforms to revitalize our party system. In recognition of the skepticism with which voting rights advocates and the communities they represent are likely to approach a call that involves working with political parties, the chapter devotes significant attention to the promises and pitfalls for communities of color of more fully embracing a party-centric power-building strategy in the fight for a meaningfully inclusive multiracial democracy.

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“NJ Moderate Party and Voters Ask State Supreme Court to Take Fusion Voting Case”

ballot access, political parties,

Insider NJ reports that the New Jersey Moderate Party and voters today filed briefs with the NJ Supreme Court asking it to review the constitutionality of New Jersey’s anti-fusion laws. The party argues that the fusion ban violates its right as a political party to associate with the candidate of its choice simply because that candidate has the nomination of another party.

The Moderate Party argue that reviving fusion voting would strengthen the center of our democracy and help counter the threat of authoritarianism caused by the increasing extremism of the major parties:

“The New Jersey Moderate Party wants to reverse the trend of hyper-polarization and the danger it poses to our state and our country. To achieve this objective, we need to identify, nominate, support and help elect viable moderate candidates who will strive to protect the basic foundations of our democracy and are willing to work collegially and respectfully with people of different viewpoints, to achieve sensible solutions to the major issues facing our country. Current New Jersey law bars us from exercising our constitutional rights to do that. We are confident the State Supreme Court will right that wrong.”

Richard Wolfe, a founder of the NJ Moderate Party.

 The NJ Supreme Court will likely decide in the next month whether to take up the case.

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“Nearly a quarter of NYC’s early voters were new Democratic primary participants”

primaries

The Gothamist offers fascinating data on early primary turnout this year. It is not just that early turnout is up; it is radically up. Moreover, the uptick is among voters who, while they may have voted before in general elections, have never voted in a Democratic primary before.

“A total of 385,184 New Yorkers voted early in this primary election, compared to 191,197 in 2021.”

“Nearly 25% of early voters had not voted in a Democratic primary at any point between 2012 and 2024, according to an analysis of voter history by John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center. . . .

. . . [In] the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, . . . 3% of early voters had never voted in a Democratic primary.”

We will obviously have to see if turnout today is high, and no doubt it will still be very low compared to the general (let alone a presidential general), but this is, in my view, a good sign for the state of democracy in New York City as the Democratic primary is often the decisive election.

Gothimist won’t let me copy their graphs, but it has lots of interesting data on where turnout is up and whose turnout is up (25-34 year olds), though the group still comes up short compared to voters over 65.

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“The Myth of the Gen Z Red Wave”

authoritarian threats in US, political polarization


Jean M. Twenge at the Atlantic, using data from the Cooperative Election Study (Tufts) rather than the Yale Youth Poll, offers evidence that the Democratic Party’s immediate post-election handwringing about Gen Z conversion was overstated: “the youth-vote shift in 2024 [appears to be] more a one-off event than an ideological realignment.”

“The 2024 election might have been an anomalous event in which young people’s deep dissatisfaction with the economy, especially the inflation that hit their just-starting-out budgets, drove them to want change.

Another distinct possibility is that, going forward, Gen Z will vote for whichever party is not currently in office. Gen Z is a uniquely pessimistic generation.” 

Twenge acknowledges that CES’s “data aren’t perfect—they have yet to be validated against the voter file, meaning they are based on self-reported voter turnout. But they are still a much better source for studying generational shifts than data from just one year, like [David] Shor’s [the loudest advocate of the youth realignment theory].”

“Consistent with other reports, the CES data show that young adults (ages 18 to 29) voted for Trump in 2024 at a much higher rate than they did in 2020. The trend was especially pronounced among young men, whose support for Trump increased by 10 percentage points since 2020, compared with 6 points for young women.

. . . .

[But] the CES data [also shows] young adults have actually become less likely to identify as conservative in surveys during presidential-election years since 2008. The trend is not due to increases in the nonwhite population; fewer white young adults identified as conservative in 2024 (29 percent) than did in 2016 (33 percent).”

The same is true for issues.

What definitely has changed is the percentage of voters in this age bracket identifying as independents.

“Indeed, most of the change over the past two elections appears to have been driven by young independent voters breaking for Trump in 2024 when they didn’t in 2020.”

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“Trump undermines Watergate laws in massive shift of ethics system”

authoritarian threats in US

Washington Post article enumerates in concrete terms the post-Watergate guardrails that are under attack, including:

  • 10-year term for FBI directors created in 1976: (“Trump has forced out two FBI directors.”).
  • “The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 aimed to prevent presidents from dismantling agencies.”
  • A system of independent inspectors general in government offices established in 1978: (“Trump has fired many of them and is seeking to replace them with loyalists.”).

As the article notes, conservatives see these reforms as an unconstitutional usurpation by Congress. However, one could argue that they were the system of checks and balances at work, and most of the problems we see today are the product of the absence of checks and balances.

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Election of the Week: NYC Mayoral Primary

primaries,

There are lots of reasons to watch the NYC Democratic primary this week. It will be another opportunity to see whether rank-choice voting moderates who emerges out of a party’s primary. It is also just amusing to see the consternation that the primary seems to be eliciting among Democratic Party elites:

“Centrist Democrats are sounding the alarm that a surging democratic socialist mayoral candidate in New York City’s Tuesday primary could further set back the party’s already beleaguered national brand.”

This no doubt explains why James E. Clyburn and Bill Clinton have endorsed Cuomo, and why Bloomberg is throwing a lot of money into the race. Interestingly, as far as I am aware, Hillary Clinton has not endorsed Cuomo. Is that a sign?

Most importantly, if Cuomo wins, as is expected, it won’t necessarily be because of Bloomberg’s money. Cuomo does have significant union support that has also been driving his ground game.

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“Political Violence Is Here, and It’s Working”

authoritarian threats in US

N.Y. Times Opinion Piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom:

One critical fact cutting against the risk that “President Trump’s second administration . . . [would] fit the definition of fascism” was that “the president did not have and probably would not be able to stand up a secret police force.”

“This was a critical point. Most authoritarian regimes are marked by political violence. It’s a metric on the scales that rank freedom and democracy across countries.”

Cottom argues this is an “outdated” definition of political violence, and proceeds to offer a great phrase: “keyboard warriors.”

maybe the Gestapo won’t be jackbooted thugs but keyboard warriors. And maybe the keyboard warriors are worse.

“The online part of violent political speech makes the violence seem twee, as if it was something teenage girls do on TikTok. But online harassment ruins lives and breaks people by socially isolating them. We should have more respect for teenage girls now that the president of the United States is enforcing fealty using his own burn book.

. . .

“For one thing, keyboard warriors are almost impossible to trace. The threats can come from anywhere. When you are the victim, the threats feel as if they’re coming from everywhere. You may never know which colleague posted your address on the internet or which neighbor anonymously reported your undocumented status to ICE. But, say, when those immigration agents show up at your asylum hearing, you can bet that at least some of them will be wearing masks and hiding their identities, potentially because they don’t want to be shamed online and in person. Their behavior demonstrates that words do indeed matter. It would be a lot harder to roll over civil liberties without the comfort of anonymity and a pervasive atmosphere of fear.

I don’t know if that’s fascism. I do know that it is absolutely political violence. Those distinctions probably don’t matter.”

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Yale Youth Poll of  18-29 year-olds offers some interesting findings

Uncategorized

Yale Youth Poll

The most intriguing finding is about partisanship (framed not as party-identification but as party-vote):

  • “When asked whether they would vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in the 2026 congressional elections in their district, voters aged 22–29 favored the Democratic candidate by a margin of 6.4 points, but voters aged 18–21 favored the Republican by a margin of 11.7 points.” That said, all the Republican and Democratic figures associated with the 2024 election were net negative on favorability, and young voters are more than twice as disparaging of Trump, Vance and Musk than the general electorate.

Still, on almost all social issues, youth voters take more “liberal” positions than the electorate as a whole. I say this with a BIG caveat: It is not clear that they weighted the sample to consider college-educated/not.

  • Young voters supported allowing asylum seekers to remain by a 25-point margin compared to voters overall who oppose this by a 2-point margin.
  • Voters overall opposed the deportation of international students for protesting the war in Gaza by 36 points, while young voters opposed deportation by 65 points.
  • “Voters under 30 were nearly split on whether teens aged 13 to 17 should be allowed access to gender transition treatments, opposing it by just a 0.1-point margin in comparison to the broader electorate, which opposed it by 24 points.” 

There is lots more that is of interest in this survey.

Sample: “The poll sampled 4,100 self-reported registered voters, including 2,025 voters aged 18-29.”

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“As N.Y.C. Mayoral Primary Nears, Money Talks as Mamdani Walks”

campaign finance

N.Y. Times

Zohran Mamdani tried to get the Campaign Finance Board to raise his spending cap, given the amount of independent spending buoying Cuomo’s bid. The Board, however, has told him it is not possible within the rules.

Meanwhile, Mamdani is literally walking the streets to drum up support. “He… campaigned with Brad Lander, the city comptroller, in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, after riding there on electric Citi Bikes from Mr. Lander’s home in Park Slope. And then he ended the day with a planned seven-hour walk from the north tip of Manhattan in Inwood Hill Park to its southern tip at Battery Park, inviting his followers to join him ‘Forrest Gump’ style.”

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Montana Plan is not Without Its Skeptics

campaign finance, direct democracy,

Earlier this week, I blogged about a new initiative in Montana that seeks to rein in corporate political spending by amending the state’s constitution to limit the powers conferred on corporations. In a new article for the local Independent Record, Brad Smith, chairman of the Institute for Free Speech and a former commissioner for the Federal Election Commission, dismissed the plan as unserious: “the state cannot condition a benefit (in this case, the right to incorporate) on citizens giving up their constitutional rights.”

Meanwhile, our very own, Rick Hasen, despite his general sympathy for regulating money in politics, told reporters he was “skeptical of the legal strategy behind this maneuver, given the incredible skepticism of the Supreme Court about the constitutionality of regulating corporate political spending.” I agree.

Still, he emphasized:

“There is a political benefit in pushing such a measure and in galvanizing public support against the Supreme Court’s damaging approach to issues of money in politics. . . .

Passing such a measure and having the Court strike it down is a way of reminding the public that the Supreme Court is the entity standing in the way of achieving a fair balance between robust political competition and not allowing the ultra-wealthy to have disproportionate political power in society.”

Jeff Clements, a major advocate of both overturning Citizens United and this new plan, also sought to rein in the idea that the Montana Plan would solve all our money in politics problems (for those who agree they exist).

“While the Montana Plan would help, he said, he also pointed out that billionaires would still be able to spend huge sums of money, another feature of the Citizens United decision.”

This is a point that Rick and I have both made before.

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When will Supreme Court Further Erode Our Democracy . . . probably not until next week

redistricting, Voting Rights Act

The Court did not decide Louisiana v. Callais today.

The case involves a challenge to Louisiana’s congressional maps. In 2023, after a federal court found Louisiana had violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by failing to provide a second minority opportunity district for its black voters, the state enacted the challenged map. The new map established a second majority–black congressional district, an uncouth “shaky ‘Z’ across the state” not unlike a district previously enjoined. The new district was then challenged by the current plaintiffs as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Louisiana defended on the grounds, first, that it used race based on its good-faith and court-ordered belief that the VRA required a second minority-opportunity district and, second, that the district is the result of its desire to preserve the districts of its two most important incumbent representatives (Mike Johnson and Stephen Scalise–serving as Speaker and Majority Leader, respectively). The lower court held that the district did indeed violate the Equal Protection Clause.

My prediction: Nothing good will come of this case. The question is only how far they will go to further undermine VRA.

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