7 Since it was passed
in 1965, the Voting
Rights Act has been
reauthorized five
times, in all cases
during Republican
presidencies and twice
when Republicans
held a majority in the
Senate. The most recent
reauthorization, a 25-
year extension passed in
2006, was unanimously
approved by Senate
Republicans and signed
into law by President
George W. Bush.
8 Of the 15 states that
before 2013 required
preclearance, it is
estimated that the act
would have released
seven: Arizona, California,
Michigan and New York,
which voted for Biden in
2020, and Alaska, Florida
and South Dakota,
which voted for Trump.
Among the states
with continued or
expanded preclearance
requirements, six were
Trump states and
two were Biden states.
9 In his influential
2008 book ‘‘The
Big Sort,’’ the journalist
Bill Bishop described
the increasing
self-segregation of
Americans, with people
of similar religious
and political views
and education levels
growing more
geographically
concentrated since
the 1970s.
in eff ect, about the whole fi ght over voting — which is to
say, over race — in America? Or were the Republicans never
going to go along with this anyway?
Benjamin Ginsberg: The elections bills the Democrats pro-
posed included the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act,
which had historically gotten signifi cant Republican support.^7
For whatever reason, the Democrats layered their propos-
al extending the Voting Rights Act into a massive bill with
numerous provisions that, from a Republican perspective,
were all designed to gain them partisan advantage: taking
redistricting away from legislatures by mandating commis-
sions, after failing to fl ip any state legislative chambers despite
spending many millions of dollars; public funding from the
U.S. Treasury for political candidates; endorsing statehood
for the heavily Democratic District of Columbia to off set the
party’s decline in rural states; changing the makeup of the
Federal Election Commission; and trying to create a one-size-
fi ts-all set of voting rules in all 50 states. Including this political
wish list with the Voting Rights Act provisions was a political
miscalculation and a huge disservice to the Voting Rights Act.
By making it all such a partisan power play, Democrats poi-
soned the well for Republican support, which meant they also
couldn’t win over Democratic senators who did not believe
the fi libuster should be broken to pass a partisan bill.
Ifill: Ben is right that the Voting Rights Act had long been a
bipartisan bill and had received overwhelming Republican
support of each reauthorization. But the John Lewis Voting
Rights Advancement Act was a proposed amendment to the
Voting Rights Act that was decoupled from the other provi-
sions that Ben talked about, which, I agree, were much more
likely to draw partisan resistance. But the only Republican
senator willing to vote for just moving that bill to debate was
Lisa Murkowski. Just one.
Ginsberg: But I think there were reasons for that. The John
Lewis act did not fi x the coverage formula of which juris-
dictions would be subject to preclearance of their votingchanges in a way Republicans could embrace as not tar-
geted at them and designed to give Democrats an electoral
advantage.^8 Democrats made the Voting Rights Act part and
parcel of a partisan bill that was never designed to win any
Republican support.
Ifill: I did work on the bill, and there was a lot of attention
to making sure the bill was in fact not targeted at any par-
ticular state. I think the truth is, having been freed from the
preclearance provisions, why would you want to now be back
under them if not being under them is working for you and
your party? I was in a meeting with about 13 Republicans
talking about these bills last summer, and I remember one
Republican senator said: ‘‘Well, we’ve never been covered by
the Voting Rights Act. So why would we agree to a bill with
nationwide coverage that would now suddenly cover us? Why
would I impose on my constituents something that they’ve
never had to comply with before?’’
I think we in this country tend to think of civil rights legis-
lation as being about advancing the fortunes or the power of
particular groups of people and not as pro-democracy legis-
lation. I started out as a civil rights lawyer in 1988, and one of
the lawsuits I was involved in was a voting rights case against
then-Gov. Bill Clinton. The fi rst case that I put together myself
that went up to the Supreme Court, the person who argued
it with us for the Justice Department was the then-solicitor
general, Ken Starr. So this is something of a new phenomenon,
where it’s impossible for Republicans to imagine that they
have something to gain in a piece of legislation that is really
pro-democracy legislation, because what they’re counting on
is whether it would disadvantage them in the next election.
That’s not how Republicans voted in 2006, when the Senate
voted 98 to 0 to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.
Lilliana Mason: The important thing is to remember that
the parties are not static objects. They have been changing
consistently and gradually in a single direction since the
civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Republicans and Dem-
ocrats had to work together to pass that legislation, but the
legislation itself was a signal to Southern white conservative
Democrats that this was maybe not their party anymore.
But because partisanship is such a strong identity, it took
a generation for those people to not just leave the Dem-
ocratic Party but join the Republican Party. That process
happened so gradually that it was sort of hard to see for a
lot of people. What Trump did was to come in and basically
solidify that trend.
For a recent article, I worked with co-authors to look at
data from interviews conducted with people in 2011 and then
again in 2016, 2017, 2018. You can predict who’s going to like
Trump in 2018 based on their attitudes in 2011 toward Afri-
can Americans, Latinos, L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and Muslims.
And those are people coming not just from the Republican
Party; they’re also coming from the Democratic Party, they’re
independents. Trump basically worked as a lightning rod to
fi nalize that process of creating the Republican Party as a
single entity for defending the high status of white, Christian,
rural Americans.32 3.20.22