Category Archives: political parties

Texas calls second special session for redistricting

election law and constitutional law, political parties, redistricting

Gov. Abbott called a second special session Friday morning, calling the legislature into action for a second shot at redistricting maps (and, at least in theory, other issues).

The call for the first special session asked the legislature to consider “[l]egislation that provides a revised congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

The call for the second special session just asks the legislature to consider “[l]egislation that provides a congressional redistricting plan.”

Guess they finally realized the DOJ’s pretext didn’t pass the laugh test.

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The TBD details on California’s redistricting special election

election law and constitutional law, political parties, redistricting, The Voting Wars

Justin here. Today, California Gov. Newsom announced what he’d been foreshadowing for a while now — an effort to seek voters’ approval for new congressional district lines in a Nov. 4 special election. (Rick noted the border patrol “escort” for the press conference. I can’t help note that the Japanese American National Museum – for those who haven’t been, it’s got a tremendously powerful series of exhibits on the WWII internment — is a little on the nose as a backdrop for a militarized show of force at a political event.)

The exact contours of the legislative package to make the redistricting initiative happen probably won’t be crystal clear until the legislature gets back next week. But among the pieces I’ll be watching:

  • Timing. Current law seems to say that the governor can call a special election 148 days out. The legislature, of course, can change that law — and it’ll have to in order to hit a November 4 special election target (82 days away from today). (That timing provision can be changed by statute, I believe – the date change doesn’t have to itself go on the ballot.) I’ll be looking for whether this is a one-time-only change or whether there are more general conditions for the exception.
    (Update: Derek Mueller reminds me that there’s another statute that doesn’t regulate when an election can be scheduled, but does say that the legislature can only put an initiative on the ballot for a scheduled election if that election is at least 131 days away. That statute would also need amending to run this Nov. 4 – and I’ve got the same questions as above.)
  • Funding. Part of the reason for leaving time before a special election is to give election officials the runway they need to run the thing. As Doug Chapin used to hammer home on the regular — fast, accurate, cheap: pick any two. This schedule will be fast, and the results have to be accurate. I’ll be looking to see who’s picking up the extra tab for the pre-election prep overtime.
  • Substance. The best reading of the state constitution is that maps are drawn by an independent commission, once per decade. That authority can be changed with a ballot initiative. But the reporting says that Newsom also plans to “put a new map” in front of voters on Nov. 4. The change to authority has to be in the constitution, but I imagine the map would be an initiated statute (and not itself constitutionalized). There’s nothing inherently weird about having both a constitutional change and a statutory change in the same measure — the proposition to put the commission in place in the first instance combined the two. But a single initiative to both change the process and pass a new specific map has some risks under the state’s single-subject rule. Two separate initiatives create questions about what happens if the electorate passes one but not the other. I’ll be looking to see how the package resolves those questions.
  • Additional constraints. Article XXI is the part of the state constitution that gives authority to the commission. It also has a bunch of other constraints, procedural and substantive. If the new initiative is effectively a temporary contingent carveout, how temporary? What’s the threshold of the contingency? How complete a carveout? Texas has essentially no state rules for drawing congressional districts – the only rules are the few rules in federal law. For its response, does California do the same?
  • Additional triggers. Newsom has said that California will respond to Texas in the maps he puts forward. I’m told that California and Texas aren’t the only two states in the Union. If another state says that it’s re-redrawing its maps to respond to California, does the initiative include provisions for re-re-redrawing the maps to respond to the response? Does the initiative include a provision allowing for later legislative amendment of the (presumably statutory) map?

Lots still TBD here.

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“How a U.S. Senate Race Is Shaping the Fight Over Redistricting in Texas”

political parties, political polarization, redistricting

NYT:

The standoff in Texas over redrawing the state’s U.S. House districts to a sharply tilted Republican advantage has played out before the backdrop of a contentious U.S. Senate race that may well be making the redistricting fight more contentious.

On the Republican side, the incumbent senator, John Cornyn, has set aside his often conciliatory demeanor, as he vies with his Senate primary opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, to see who can look tougher with runaway Democratic lawmakers.

On the Democratic side, State Representative James Talarico and former Representatives Beto O’Rourke and Colin Allred have used the standoff to gain publicity and rally the Democratic base around the notion that democracy itself is at stake. All three are potential rivals in the Senate race.

As the candidates position themselves, they’ve woven threats of prosecution and lawsuits with taunts and dares at the other party — and, in the case of Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton, at each other — with few incentives for compromise….

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Kang, “Party Campaign Finance from FECA to Modern Hyperpartisanship”

campaign finance, political parties, political polarization

Michael Kang’s latest, forthcoming in Fifty Years of Buckley v. Valeo (Lee Bollinger & Geoffrey Stone eds., 2025). The abstract:

Political parties grew from seeming irrelevance in campaign finance at the time of the Federal Election Campaign Act amendments in 1974 to newfound importance in national politics by the soft money era of the 1990s.  When Congress finally restricted party soft money in 2002, soft money shifted to nominally independent groups and then, in time, to Super PACs and other outside groups empowered by the Roberts Court’s de-regulation of campaign finance.  As I explain here, these changes in modern campaign finance are at least partially responsible for today’s hyperpartisan and polarized politics.  Some critics of modern hyperpartisanship and polarization, for this reason, now propose a surprising but simple new reform approach: de-regulation of party campaign finance to strengthen the major parties as counter-weights to the polarizing influence of wealthy donors through their Super PACs and outside groups.  However, I argue that de-regulation of party fundraising likely would deepen the major parties’ dependence on their most wealthy, and ideologically extreme, donors for financial support.  As a consequence, de-regulation of party fundraising would accelerate the lurch toward the polarized ideological preferences of their committed donors rather than counteract it.

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“Jan. 6 Rioters Are the New Hot Event in Town for Republicans”

campaign finance, election subversion risk, political parties

Where campaign finance meets election subversion. WSJ reports:

Former Jan. 6 defendants are the new draw at local Republican fundraisers, helping to fill seats at normally sleepy events while getting a platform to tell their version of the Capitol riot.

The Davis County Republican Party in the Salt Lake City suburbs held its annual Abraham Lincoln Day Dinner in March at $75 a plate. One marquee speaker was a pardoned defendant who federal prosecutors said knocked back a shot of Fireball whiskey in the conference room of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“This was not an insurrection,” the speaker, Treniss Evans, told the crowd. “This was Kent State. This was Tiananmen Square.”

Just, wow.

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“Musk says he wants a new political party, and many agree. Can he pull it off?”

political parties

Dan Balz in the Washington Post, on Musk’s stated interest in starting a new party:

What could make Musk’s effort different from past attempts? The obvious answer is money. He’s the world’s richest person, with a net worth variously estimated near or above $400 billion. He spent more than $250 million helping Trump get elected last year.

But just how much is Musk willing to invest to build a party capable of running serious elections up and down the ballot? …

This isn’t a one-time investment. Party-building is a day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out proposition….

Money is important, but it’s not everything. A major challenge would be finding quality candidates willing to join Musk in his undertaking. How would he build the infrastructure needed to identify, recruit and arm the people capable of running effective challenges to the existing parties?

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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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More evidence of the Trump mobilization of lower-frequency voters

election administration, political parties, The Voting Wars

The NYT headline is “If Everyone Had Voted, Harris Still Would Have Lost.” 

Which, of course, is impossible to know, unless you assume that demographics is inevitably destiny. 

But the broader point of the outcome of this new Pew study is one a few of us have been noting for a while: Trump had/has significant appeal among a set of voters less likely to vote frequently (including a larger component of racial and ethnic minorities than his previous runs).  That likely means that efforts to increase turnout may favor Republicans, at least in some areas. 

And because less frequent voters are hardest hit by new barriers, I’ve wondered quite a bit whether we’ll start to see the fact of Trump’s appeal to less frequent voters reflected in shifting incentives for election administration, fighting quite a bit of what seems to be received conventional wisdom.

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“Independent and third-party voter registration growing, largely at the expense of Democrats”

political parties, voter registration

An NBC report with the lede:

The number of registered independents and third-party members is growing as voters are breaking from the two-party system at increasing rates, according to an NBC News analysis of voter registration data.

As of 2025, 32% of registered voters across the dozens of states and territories with reported data chose not to affiliate with either the Democratic or Republican parties, up from 23% in 2000.

(As the report notes – and as political scientists have long understood – those independents still vote a whole lot like registered members of one of the two major parties.)

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“Recovering from Rucho: How States Can Create National Partisan Fairness”

legislation and legislatures, political parties, redistricting

Jamie Piltch and Aaron Goldzimer have a new piece in the Wash. U. L. Rev. Online:

Rucho v. Common Cause and the failure to pass H.R. 1 have left national gerrymandering reform on life support. At present, however, states committed to creating fair maps limit themselves to considering their own political makeup when doing so. This internal approach risks the possibility that states committed to fairness subvert that value, as their refusal to consider national political data and other states’ maps may lock in an unfair map nationwide if other states gerrymander. This internal focus therefore also creates the possibility that reform-minded states fail to protect their voters’ interests in Congress.

This Essay proposes a novel path forward: a new redistricting criterion that allows states to prioritize national partisan fairness, rather than statewide fairness. Federalisms new and old justify this new criterion on a theoretical basis, while the seeming impossibility of national reform in Congress or federal courts justifies it on a practical one. The Essay explains how the consideration of other states’ maps would allow states to make the national Congressional map fair on net and walks through the mechanics necessary for this criterion’s implementation.

As the authors note, this really works only if a state draws congressional lines after most other states with sizable populations are done, and I’m skeptical that the race to be last would be feasible in a world with mid-decade redistricting possibility. (Or, if feasible, that it wouldn’t have unanticipated consequences of its own.)  Which means I still think national legislation makes the most sense problem of national scale.  But if, as they say, national legislation isn’t available . . . .

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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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