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.
