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The Supreme Court’s April decision to (VRA) has triggered another round of meant to shore up an unpopular president and his political party. Outrage and despair are appropriate responses to Louisiana v. Callais. The ruling effectively eliminates compliance with the VRA as justification for race-conscious redistricting to protect minority groups’ voting power. Now, unless plaintiffs can produce tough-to-gather evidence of blatant, intentional discrimination, that protection is gone. But that shouldn’t distract us from the reality that the VRA hit its limits long before the court’s knifing.Ìý

Race still matters in our democracy, but it shapes politics differently today than it did in 1965, when the VRA was adopted. Then, access to the vote was the primary barrier to full political inclusion. Today, the fundamental obstacle is a failure of policy responsiveness. Despite remarkable gains in minority voter turnout and legislative representation, policies on , , and wages remain woefully inadequate and unequal.Ìý

However misguided, Callais offers an important opening for a broader conversation about democracy in which an essential thread must be how best to rebuild our political parties. As I cover in depth in a recent Â鶹¹û¶³´«Ã½ report, the major U.S. parties are struggling to fulfill their most basic functions—developing cohesive policy programs that respond to voters’ needs, recruiting and supporting high-quality candidates, and delivering effective governance. But there is hope in a different approach. As exemplified by the success of the Working Families Party of New York, associational party building offers a forward-looking path to multiracial democracy at this moment ofÌýpolitical despair.Ìý

The Limitations of the Voting Rights Act

The Roberts court’s conception of racial discrimination is unjustifiably narrow, and its lack of concern for its impact on voting rights is stunning. Still, despite its undeniable achievements, the VRA operated with a simplistic and static us-versus-them notion of race that reflects its white, male architects. Designed to remedy the racial discrimination of the Jim Crow South, it focused on political enfranchisement for Black voters, a crucial goal. But it did much less to advance representation for , and communities—electoral groups that tend to be smaller, more geographically dispersed, and often more diverse in their political preferences.Ìý

It similarly struggled to adapt to changing politics. Although there remain places in the country where white voters vote en masse against candidates of color, cross-racial political coalitions can effect legislative representation for racial minorities in many areas. Yet courts have bristled at demands to draw districts to . This has fed the treatment of district maps as a zero-sum game pitting racial minorities against one another and left the act increasingly mismatched with contemporary intersectional experiences of racial and economic oppression.

This is where political parties come in. The ultimate measure of our progress toward multiracial democracy is not simply how many voters of color turn out and how many of their favored candidates are elected. It’s how their participation leads (or does not) to the passage of policies that address their needs and preferences. Such policy responsiveness depends on building political power, and parties are the only civic associations capable of doing this at a large enough scale.

The Promise of Associational Party BuildingÌý

Communities of color have every reason to distrust political parties given their historical failures to serve these voters’ needs. But the parties of the past need not be blueprints for the future. The Working Families Party of New York offers a model of an associational party: a political organization rooted in membership-based civic groups and committed to year-round, face-to-face engagement. Anchored to membership-based unions and community groups, including Citizen Action and ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), and grounded in local chapters whose members have a meaningful role in candidate selection, the WFP institutionalized political power—as reflected by to vote for himself on the WFP line in the New York City mayoral race, which he won. It also has built a track record of real policy wins for its supporters, such as raising the minimum wage and repealing draconian drug laws, all while holding together a multiracial coalition.Ìý

Associational party building allows existing or new minor parties to build power within the two-party system by relying on genuine community engagement and fostering healthy party affiliation. In New York, the WFP built power through fusion voting under laws that allow parties to cross-endorse candidates, making visible a minor party’s true electoral strength.Ìý

Unlike New York, the Southern states most likely to be impacted by Callais do not permit fusion. They are, however, uncompetitive one-party states marked by . Ken Paxton’s nomination as the Republican candidate for Senate was decided by fewer than of Texas’s approximately . Voter turnout is lower still in state and local elections, where the returns of associational party building are greatest. Even without the boost from fusion voting, an under-mobilized electorate in a one-party state offers an opportunity for an entrepreneurial minor party committed to associational party building, especially if it attracts resources once spent on litigating district boundaries.

The WFP’s success is also directly relevant to growing enthusiasm for and the adoption of with new voting rules. This approach promises many virtues: increasing racial diversity of elected officials, allowing third parties and independents to obtain legislative seats, and making gerrymanders obsolete. But reform probably won’t happen until the major parties experience serious competition from a third party. Moreover, a system of proportional representation is unlikely to realize its full potential without a healthy party ecosystem, just what associational parties can provide.

The WFP story shows that political parties, including the two that dominate our politics, can transform into the party associations Americans deserve. It offers a blueprint for the kinds of parties that are likely to represent voters of color well and to achieve electoral rules that better represent us all. Importantly, it offers hope—that Americans can have parties they actually believe in.Ìý