Harris is deputy communications director at Stand Up America.
In 2023, voters demonstrated a firm commitment to defending our democracy in races up and down the ballot. Once-obscure elections burst into the mainstream. Americans turned out in record numbers to vote in state supreme court races that will determine their right to abortion access, whether their votes will be counted and how their voting districts will be drawn.
The election of Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April and Dan McCaffery to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in November underscores the importance of state courts in safeguarding our fundamental freedoms and democratic processes in 2024.
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were focal points in the anti-democratic efforts to challenge election results in 2020 and 2022. In 2022, only Arizona saw more election-related lawsuits filed than Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Similarly, in 2020, the vast majority of election lawsuits were in six pivotal battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The election of Protasiewicz and McCaffery sends a message that voters want justices who are vocal about protecting fundamental freedoms and rejecting baseless challenges to election results. By electing pro-democracy justices to their respective state supreme courts, voters built a critical firewall against efforts to subvert the will of the people in 2024.
On April 5, “Judge Janet” won with the highest-ever turnout for an off-year Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Spending on the race exceeded $42 million, nearly triple the previous national record for a court race. It was unusual that a state supreme court race would capture voters’ attention the way it did, but after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, voters turned out in force to protect abortion rights and their freedom to vote. And Wisconsin was just the beginning.
In November, Dan McCaffery defeated Carolyn Carluccio in Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court race. McCaffery was vocal about defending democracy and Pennsylvanians’ access to health care, voting rights and other issues. While McCaffery’s election doesn’t change the partisan balance on the seven-seat high court, a loss would have heightened contentious fights on redistricting, abortion and voting rights in the coming years.
Voters’ increased attention on state supreme court races is a direct response to Republican-led efforts to restrict access to the ballot and overturn the will of the voters in 2020. Americans are also paying closer attention to the courts after key U.S. Supreme Court decisions left reproductive justice and voting rights in the hands of state legislatures. Right now, the electorate is demanding justices who uphold the democratic process and rule on cases without a partisan agenda. Americans are beginning to understand that state courts can serve as a firewall for our democracy and our freedoms.
At Stand Up America, we saw voters’ enthusiasm for these races firsthand. Our members sent 1 million peer-to-peer texts to voters, joined hundreds of volunteer shifts and wrote 22,000 handwritten letters to educate Wisconsin voters about the importance of the Supreme Court election. In Pennsylvania, our members mobilized volunteers to text over 130,000 voters to turn out the vote. The excitement around these races also helped us engage pro-democracy celebrities including Bradley Whitford, Chelsea Handler, Andy Cohen and Alicia Keys to encourage their fans to vote and volunteer in judicial elections.
In 2024, state supreme court races will continue to be a key battleground in protecting democracy. Voters in 33 states will cast ballots for their courts’ top judges in 2024. Races in Ohio and Michigan – and beyond – will be critical to defending our freedom to vote.
Americans can’t afford to elect judges who are unwilling to state their position on democracy issues, or risk further assaults on our right to vote and our right to reproductive health care. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania voters have set a commendable example, highlighting that the strength of our democracy rests in the hands of those who actively engage in its preservation.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.