The Callais decision is a watershed moment. Latner argues the only path forward runs through “party-system” reforms: PR w/ a side of Fusion.

The Supreme Court didn’t just rewrite the rules of redistricting in Louisiana v. Callais. It effectively ended, after more than forty years, the regime of legal protection for minority voters that the Voting Rights Act had built. The decision stripped away the tools that voting rights lawyers have relied on since the 1980s to identify and remedy racial vote dilution, leaving what Justice Kagan called, in dissent, “a dead letter.”

The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Michael Latner, professor of political science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and director of research on democratic reform at Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Latner co-authored Gerrymandering in America: The House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Popular Sovereignty, and a major article in the Yale Law Journal (co-authored with Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer and Carlos Algara) titled “Callais Confusion, Power Sharing, and the Inevitability of Proportional Representation” — published shortly before the Court issued its ruling.

Host Micah Sifry puts that article, and its central argument, to the test over the course of a wide-ranging, substantive conversation.

Latner walks through the mechanics of the Callais decision with admirable clarity. It isn’t just that the court made it harder to prove discrimination; it’s that the majority essentially declared that the only permissible approach is “racial blindness” — that courts can no longer rely on racial data to identify whether district maps dilute minority voting power. The catch: in a country where 90 percent of Black voters in Louisiana vote for the Democratic Party, the idea that race and party affiliation can be cleanly separated is, in Latner’s telling, “empirically not possible.” States can now gerrymander with impunity as long as they claim they’re doing it for partisan, not racial, reasons.

The fallout has been fast. Louisiana suspended an ongoing primary to redraw its maps and remove one of its two majority-minority districts. Tennessee eliminated its Black congressional district. Alabama, Mississippi — and maybe others are moving. As Latner puts it, states are “acting on the decision even before the ink is dry.”

What does all of this tell us about American democracy more broadly? Latner doesn’t soften the diagnosis:

“We are the only major democracy in the world that seats only two parties in its legislature… many U.S. voters were understandably upset at the Democratic Party in 2024. It was a poorly performing party. There was a leadership crisis. These are things that in normal democracies you would see the governing party replaced with an alternative. The problem in the U.S. is that the only alternative was an authoritarian one.”

Most proportional systems, he notes, have contained or constrained their authoritarian movements — through coalition governments that collapse when one party overreaches, or through vote-share constraints that limit how much power any single faction can accumulate. The United States is one of the rare cases where a major party has been fully taken over by authoritarian forces and handed unilateral control of government. That is not a coincidence. It is a structural consequence of our electoral system.

This brings Latner to the central argument of his Yale Law Journal article: that proportional representation (PR) is not merely desirable but, given where the courts have taken us, inevitable.

“The short answer hearkens back to Winston Churchill — that the Americans will do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.”

The logic runs as follows. If the Supreme Court demands racial blindness, and if the only system that can achieve fair representation without relying on racial data is one where the threshold for winning a seat is low enough that any coherent organized coalition gets seats proportional to its votes — then proportional representation isn’t just a reform preference. It is the only legally defensible path to minority representation in a post-VRA world.

“If the Supreme Court is serious and we are now in an era, a post-VRA era where … the use of racial data in order to protect voters of color is not going to be used in operation of protecting voting rights; and if in fact racial blindness, which is what the court refers to as an appropriate approach to protecting voting rights, if that’s actually the only option, there’s only one type of electoral system where you can truly be racially blind. That is, you don’t take account of race when you’re designing the rules and the system, and that’s proportional representation.”

The contrast with the old VRA framework is sharp. Under the Voting Rights Act, the state had to carve out specific districts, count citizen voting-age population, use racial data at every step. Minority representation was protected, but it was also dependent on continuous federal oversight and a sympathetic court. Under PR, you simply set a low enough threshold of exclusion — and then let voters organize themselves.

Micah pushes back, usefully, on the political economy of this shift. The longstanding voting rights community isn’t necessarily ready to let go of the VRA framework. The instinct, understandably, is to try to win back Congress, pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and restore what was lost. Latner is sympathetic — but skeptical.

He is candid that the political reform movement has historically done itself damage by acting independently of the civil rights community, and that the voting rights groups he works with regularly are rightfully cautious about new frameworks that haven’t proven themselves. But he thinks the moment has forced a practical reckoning. “The legal community is not just skeptical,” he says. “They’re also pragmatic.” Nobody understands what has happened to the VRA better than the people who have spent careers enforcing it. And they are, increasingly, looking for alternatives.

Where does fusion voting fit in this emerging picture? Latner makes an argument that should resonate with readers of this Substack: fusion isn’t just a stopgap for single-seat offices that can’t be carved into proportional districts. It’s a structurally important complement to PR in a country like ours — and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the U.S. Senate.

Even in a world where the House moves toward proportional representation and more state legislatures follow, U.S. Senate races will remain single-winner affairs. That is not going to change. Still, it is possible to inject proportionality into U.S. Senate races via fusion parties and fusion voting. And in doing so one almost surely strengthens pro-democracy forces competing against anti-democracy or authoritarian actors.

“My view is that fusion voting is actually a really important part of an effective reform movement in the U.S…. The U.S. Senate is the clearest case of where, once you’ve got multiple coalitions competing in a state, whether it’s a right wing and a center right party or a green party or multi-dimensional politics… you’re still going to have a single candidate and you want those smaller parties to have an influence.”

He points to New York City as a living example where third-party lines play a real role in electing candidates from single-member districts. Fusion, in that sense, is already doing part of what PR does: translating organized political identity into real electoral leverage.

At the end of every episode of This Old Democracy, Micah asks guests the same question: how do you cope? For Latner, the answer has a certain pleasing literalism.

“Getting punched in the face and punching other people in the face helps me both release tension and keep me humble.”

He’s a regular at the gym, he explains, and does kickboxing. But beyond the stress relief, he returns to something more durable: a sense of calling. Every generation, he argues, has been required to fight for democracy — it has never arrived or sustained itself on its own. This moment is simply the version of that fight that belongs to us.

“We stand on the shoulders of giants,” he says. “We stand on the shoulders of those who’ve come before us and we’ve just got to keep pushing.”

It’s a dark time. But the argument Latner is making — that the destruction of the VRA framework, however painful, may finally force the reform movement to reach for something structurally durable — is at least a reason to think clearly about what comes next.