NYT:

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is on a mission in President Biden’s final days in office. She wants to convince him that he can rescue his legacy by adding the century-old Equal Rights Amendment, which would explicitly guarantee sex equality, to the Constitution as a way to protect abortion rights in post-Roe America.

He could do it all, she contends, with one phone call.

Both houses of Congress approved the amendment in 1972, but it was not ratified by the states in time to be added to the Constitution. Ms. Gillibrand has been pushing a legal theory that the deadline for ratification is irrelevant and unconstitutional. All that remains, she argues, is for Mr. Biden to direct the national archivist, who is responsible for the certification and publication of constitutional amendments, to publish the E.R.A. as the 28th Amendment.

The move would almost certainly invite a legal challenge that would land in the Supreme Court. But Ms. Gillibrand wants Mr. Biden to use his presidential power while he still has it to force the issue, effectively daring Republicans to wage a legal battle to take away equal rights for women….

Ballotpedia compiled some very interesting statistics on introduced and passed election-related bills in the states in 2024:

For the election geek in your life, it’s here.

I’ll be participating in this event tonight. Zoom link below.

Recent elections have generated interest in moving the United States toward a multiparty system. How does the 2024 election change this calculus, if at all? What would multiparty politics mean for Congress? How has multiparty politics worked for institutionally similar democracies?

Join the NYU Brademas Center and the Brennan Center for Justice for this hybrid event featuring Josep Colomer, Associate Researcher at Georgetown and author of, Constitutional Polarization (2023, Routledge), Cynthia McClintock, Professor of Political Science, George Washington University and author of, Electoral Rules and Democracy in Latin America (2018, Oxford), Richard H. Pildes, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU School of Law, Daniel I. Weiner, Director, Elections and Government, Brennan Center for Justice, and Jack Santucci, NYU-DC Lecturer and author of, More Parties or No Parties (2022, Oxford), who will serve as moderator. 

Zoom link here: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_S18nJv_pSXOeaHCcJDfkvg#/registration

New from Derek Clinger at SDRI.

WRAL:

North Carolina Republicans will have new powers over elections, public schools, utilities and more under a wide-ranging new law that strips control from the governor, attorney general and other incoming Democrats.

Senate Bill 382, which became law Wednesday after an override by the GOP-led state House of Representatives, is expected to have major ramifications for the future of state government — if it survives an expected legal battle over executive power.\The House voted along party lines to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of the 131-page measure. The vote — which came amid protests from Democrats and progressive groups — followed an override by the GOP-led state Senate last week.

Republicans have said some of the changes were needed to improve public confidence in government. Democrats, however, say it’s an unconstitutional, partisan power-grab that will significantly weaken the executive branch. Incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Josh Stein and his replacement as attorney general, Democrat Jeff Jackson, are the main targets of the legislation.

The law takes away the governor’s control over the State Board of Elections and gives it to the state auditor, an office soon to be held by a Republican. Seizing control of the elections board has long been a goal of Republican lawmakers, but multiple past efforts have either been ruled unconstitutional or shot down by voters at the ballot box….

[This post has been corrected and updated]

Michael Wines for the NYT:

From voter ID laws to district map-drawing to judges redeciding cases, North Carolina has long been a laboratory of sorts in ways to amass political power. In recent years, Republicans in particular have changed both state laws and election rules to hamstring Democrats’ influence.

Now, one of the closest statewide elections in North Carolina history is offering a vivid example of the maneuvering in play to gain an upper hand.

A lengthy recount of more than 5.5 million ballots from the November election that ended last week showed that an incumbent Democrat on North Carolina’s state Supreme Court, Allison Riggs, held a 734-vote edge over Jefferson G. Griffin, a Republican judge on the state Court of Appeals.

Judge Griffin has not given up. He is protesting the results of the entire election to the State Board of Elections, arguing that many voters were ineligible to cast ballots. That has been tried before — unsuccessfully, by a Democratic chief justice of the state Supreme Court who lost an even closer race in 2020.

But the scope of Judge Griffin’s protest is far more ambitious: He is calling for some 60,000 voters to be disqualified.

The issue largely comes down to requirements in voter registration applications approved by Democratic legislators in a 2004 law. The form was supposed to require applicants to list their driver’s license or Social Security numbers, but it did not — and over the years, thousands of voters, unaware of the requirement, did not provide them.

Judge Griffin’s protest argues that voters whose registration forms have no numbers should not count in this election. Among those voters are Ms. Riggs’s parents….

Who were the primary bloggers over the last few weeks as I was travelling. I so appreciate their excellent care and attention!

I wrote this column for the Washington Post on the surprising trend of depolarization in last month’s election. If it holds, this trend has enormous implications for American politics.

Here’s a shocker: One of the unnoticed themes of the recent election was depolarization. The electoral chasms between groups of voters shrank compared with four years earlier. This was true across several axes and is mostly attributable to traditional Democratic constituencies moving to the right. If these trends endure, they promise a new political era.

. . . This combination of minority voters shifting rightward and White voters staying put resulted in the lowest level of racially polarized voting in a generation. The Black-White gap in Trump support declined from 47 percentage points in 2020 to 40 points in 2024. The Latino-White gap fell from 20 points to 13 points.

. . . The gap between the youngest and the oldest voters’ choices therefore plummeted from 15 percentage points in 2020 to four points in 2024.

. . . Accordingly, after decades of divergence, urban and rural areas edged closer to each other politically. . . .

What explains this convergence? The superficial answer is that historically Democratic groups swervedto the right while long-standing Republican constituencies didn’t budge. Minority members, young people, city dwellers and women — they’ve all been Democratic stalwarts, and they allmoved toward Trump. The only major Democratic cohort that didn’t shift rightward was people with at least a college degree. Conversely, White, old, rural and male voters are pillars of the modern Republican coalition. Surprisingly, they mostly resisted the pro-Trump swing among the rest of the electorate. . . .

Yet depolarization could also benefit Democrats by facilitating the translation of their votes into political power. At the presidential level, the tipping-point state that gave Trump his electoral college majority in 2024 — Pennsylvania — was just 0.6 percentage points more Republican than the national popular vote. By comparison, the tipping-point state in 2020, Wisconsin, was 3.8 points more Republican than the country as a whole. . . .

Similarly, the House of Representatives is on track to be less skewed, in aggregate, than at any time since the early 1990s. A common measure of the House’s bias compares the election result in the median House district with the national popular vote. In the coming Congress, the median House district will have almost the same partisan slant — a slight Republican tilt — as the country as a whole. And again, some of the credit is due to depolarization. . . .

That’s me signing off as guest host, and delivering you back into Rick’s tender care.

Every time I do this for a moment, I’m reminded how much we owe Rick for the all-the-time. Rick, thank you for entrusting me with this inimitable resource. I tried to treat it as if it were my own.

On Tuesday, December 10 (one week from today), AEI is hosting an event to discuss the forthcoming book Electoral Reform in the United States: Proposals for Combating Polarization and Extremism. Details on the event, and a link to RSVP for either in-person on online attendance, are available here. (There was an ELB notice shortly before Thanksgiving, but in the aftermath of the holiday a reminder is perhaps useful.)

Justin here, and solely to blame for the blog’s week to come. Tips/references, as always, welcome.