The Numbers Say Democrats Aren’t Ready To Play Hardball

I don’t remember the last time polling left me quite so disoriented.  

To see progressive congressional candidates tapping into a boiling well of voter fury and shocking establishment Democratic Party candidates week after week ahead of the 2026 midterms, and then to pore over numbers saying Democratic voters are neither ready nor willing to take extreme democracy-saving measures makes no sense. And it fills me with dread that this moment of anti-fascist resurgence – call it Woke 2.0 if you’d like – will be for naught, just like its ultimately tragic predecessor.

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Recent polling from an outfit called Bright Line Watch measured how American voters and political scientists feel about the current state of representative democracy in the United States. The short answer: Not great. The slightly longer answer: The US nearly two years into the second term of our insurrectionist president is "closer to an illiberal democracy than a strong one" and continued Republican Party victories could cement the US as a plain old illiberal state in line with Viktor Orban's Hungary before he lost his grip on power.

The good news: Seven in ten political scientists polled by Bright Line Watch said the US is "likely" to have legitimate elections beyond 2028. So we have that going for us, which is nice.

Falling support for reforming (expanding) the Supreme Court was the gut punch here. The naive shitlib in me would have believed that a far-right Court majority that has done everything in its power to undermine fundamental constitutional principles in service of a larger political project to nullify the progressive gains of the 20th century would draw the ire of the American public. The Roberts Court's blatantly political approach, its bullshit Major Questions Doctrine, and its war with the rest of the federal judiciary, I thought, would prove intolerable for voters who have seen a criminal president reap the benefits of the majority's anti-constitutional actions.

I was wrong. That's on me, I guess.

Juicing the numbers for Supreme Court expansion, like anything else in politics, is about messaging, or lack thereof. Well-meaning liberals and independent voters who have been horrified by our descent into competitive authoritarianism need to be told by Democratic leaders – especially those who plan on running for president – that nothing matters if SCOTUS is not fixed.

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The stain of the Roberts Court must be scrubbed out of the national fabric. There’s really only one way to do that.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Democrats, if they have even a sliver of desire to make things work in whatever comes after Trump, need to say clearly and repeatedly that everything – every necessary reform, every attempt to hold regime members accountable – is linked to expanding the Supreme Court and ensuring it has a pro-constitution majority.

You want Medicare For All? Guess what: You can't have it with the current Court. They'll kill it as soon as the president's ink is dry on the legislation.

You want student loan forgiveness? Here's the thing: You can't have it unless the Court's Republicans are in the minority.

You want to rein in the lawless paramilitary force we know as ICE? John Roberts won't let you do it.

You want the criminals running the federal government today to pay for their crimes against the republic? You're not getting it if Brett fucking Kavanaugh is the swing vote.

You want universal pre-K and family leave and more generous food programs and a government that regulates scammers and cracks down on white collar crime? You want a government that does not actively destroy the climate? Tough shit. You can't have any of it until and unless you force those in power to counteract the destructive right-wing SCOTUS majority.

Bad Faith Times folks might recall the concept of a small-d democratic back burn, the sort of thing that's often needed to beat back an authoritarian threat that has eaten away or outright eliminated key democratic guardrails protecting civil society, free elections, and all the other shit countries take for granted until eggs get expensive and people elect a tyrant with no compunction about ignoring the constitutional order, or at least undermining it with bad-faith legal tactics (that have thankfully been snuffed out by many judges over these past eighteen months). 

A central part of a democratic back burn is countering authoritarian cheating – gerrymandering, in the American case – with more cheating, with more gerrymandering. Redrawing electoral maps to ratfuck Republican candidates is not what anyone would call ideal, but it is, I would argue, the only choice Democrats have left after the Roberts Court aimed its bad-faith legal canon at the Voting Rights Act and allowed Republican-majority state legislatures to implement wildly racist gerrymandered maps.

Virginia Democrats did the right thing this spring and countered with their own gerrymander only to see partisan Republican jurists tell them no, only we can do that shit. Now here we are, a few months removed from a real and important back burn attempt by a Democratic state legislative majority, and Democratic voters are showing precious little stomach for the fight. I don't much care that Republican support for mid-decade gerrymanders has fallen precipitously. The idea of fair districts may be popular, but until we have a Supreme Court majority that will uphold the very basics of voting rights, a gerrymander-fueled back burn is all we have. Democrats can't shame Republicans into playing by the rules; they have to force them to play nice.

What makes even less sense about declining Democratic support for expanding SCOTUS is that Democrats largely see the Roberts Court as a political actor with no interest in law and order. Two-thirds of Democratic respondents to a Marquette University poll from June said the Court's majority is motivated primarily by politics (64 percent of Republicans said the law was the Court's main motivation). So two in three Democratic Party backers see the land's highest court as a deeply compromised political actor – you might just call it a captured institution – but aren't willing to do the only thing there is to do to fix the problem.

Someone – hopefully many someones – in national Democratic politics is going to have to level with the party's supporters and tell them nothing is possible without first undoing Republicans' death grip on the Supreme Court. Why can't we have nice things, they might ask. Because John Roberts is in charge. That's the answer today and that will be the answer tomorrow unless Roberts' supermajority is decimated.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.