The hours-long lines that confronted hundreds of thousands of Texans on Super Tuesday are sure to be even worse in November unless the state's new ban on straight-ticket voting is reversed, Democrats maintain in the fifth voting rights lawsuit they've filed in the state in recent months.
Permitting voters to make a single choice on the ballot, in favor of all the candidates of their political party, has been a feature of Texas elections for a century and was the way two-thirds of the state's voters, 5.6 million of them, cast ballots in the 2018 midterm. But the Republican Legislature has voted to eliminate that option starting this fall.
Doing so will "unjustifiably and discriminatorily burden Texans' fundamental right to vote" in an election where historic turnout is anticipated," the lawsuit argues. "Texas has recklessly created a recipe for disaster at the polls."
The second most populous state has been reliably red for the past quarter-century, but Republicans are aware that grip is loosening because rapid population growth is almost entirely in cities, white-collar suburbs, and Latino and African-American communities. Democrats believe that, if their turnout is enormous enough this fall, they have shots at securing Texas' 38 electoral votes, upsetting Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn's bid for re-election and picking up as many as six House seats.
Although Tuesday's turnout exceeded the 2016 Democratic primary, Texas historically has had some of the lowest voting participation rates in the country — just 51 percent four years ago, for example, when the national turnout was 60 percent.
And reversing that trend will be much less likely, Democrats say, if voters this fall are required to mark choices in several dozen partisan contests that will be on the ballots in some places — not just for president and Congress but also for state legislative, county government and judicial positions.
Democratic voters were picking nominees for all those jobs on Tuesday, not just making a presidential choice. That was one reason the lines moved slowly statewide. But a much bigger problem was the shortages of election workers and equipment, and problems with the voting systems, that created wait times as long as six hours to vote in all five of the state's biggest urban counties.
The new lawsuit, filed in federal court in Laredo, says that an end to straight-ticket voting would violate the Voting Rights Actand be an unconstitutional denial of free speech and equal protection rights to voters who will inevitably be dissuaded by such excessive wait times from casting ballots starting Nov. 3.
"We remain confident that Texas voting laws are in full compliance with the Constitution and all voters have equal opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choice," the Texas attorney general's office, led by Republican Ken Paxton, said in response.
The Democrats' legal claim is a novel approach to preserving an election option that's been fading steadily in recent years. Just seven states are sure to have straight-ticket voting this year: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. Six have done away with the practice in the past decade, most recently Pennsylvania last fall.
Republicans have led the criticism of the system. They say it makes the electorate less engaged, punishes lesser-known candidates and gives too much power to partisan organizers. Democrats and most good-government groups disagree and point to research showing straight-party voting boosts turnout.
The plaintiffs in the new suit — the state Democratic Party and the national House and Senate Democratic campaign committees — have also sued Texas in the past year for ending the use of mobile voting sites for early voting, prohibiting electronic signatures on registration forms, complicating the process for registering while getting a driver's license and requiring that the political party of the governor (always a Republican since 1995) be listed first on all ballots.
It's the most aggressive vein of the Democrats' expansive courthouse campaign to make it easier to vote in bellwether states this fall. The party has committed more than $10 million to pressing more than two-dozen suits, promoting the Republican Party to promise it will spend comparablyto defend the voting laws at issue.
"Texas is the center of our battlefield and we will not stop taking on the obstacles Republicans put in place to shrink the electorate as they attempt to cling to power," said Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, the chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
"I wish I could say that the hard work is done in fighting voter suppression for 2020. However, in many ways, the fight has just begun," said the attorney coordinating the party's effort, Marc Elias. "State legislatures are considering new voting laws that will suppress the vote. And, in many states, election officials are implementing other creative ways to block people from voting."
Attorneys from the Texas Civil Rights Project, meanwhile, pressed the state Thursday to spend generously in the next seven months to assure there are more machines in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin and that the voters there are encouraged by the state to cast ballots in the fall.
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.