Last week President Joe Biden delivered the annual State of the Union address to Congress. As has become the custom, the president declared that “the State of our Union is strong.” Notwithstanding its strength, Biden underscored the existential threat facing our country’s democracy:

January 6th and the lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election, posed the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War. But they failed. America stood strong and democracy prevailed. But we must be honest, the threat remains, and democracy must be defended. My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6th.

As I write the inaugural edition of my State of Democracy newsletter, I promise to provide you with an honest, unvarnished look at what is happening just beneath the surface of American politics and how our democracy is faring.

Let’s get started.

Washington, D.C. Republicans hate Trump…Republican insiders hate Donald Trump. Not only did Trump lose the election to Nikki Haley, but in a city of 700,000 people, Trump received only 676 votes.

So, Trump fires them from the RNC. Now, Trump has made clear the feeling is mutual. At a time when political parties usually staff up, Trump’s hand-picked hatchet man fired 60 RNC staffers across several departments last week.

Expect more attacks on mail-in voting. Trump is waging a nonstop war on mail-in voting and has made it clear the RNC needs to do its part. Who better than to carry out that thankless task than their lawyers; now led by election denier Christina Bobb. The former OANN anchor is the RNC’s new “senior counsel for election integrity.” Mail-in voting already makes up the biggest share of ongoing litigation: a third of all active voting rights and election cases in court involve mail-in voting, and the RNC has a hand in 15 of them. With their new voter suppression team, expect more RNC-sponsored litigation and more RNC losses.

The 2024 election is about democracy…There are as many opinions about what issues will dominate the 2024 election as there are people with opinions. But one thing is clear — democracy has been and remains on Biden’s mind. In the campaign’s first major rally in January, Biden defined the stakes: “Whether democracy is still America's sacred cause is what the 2024 election is all about.”

In case there were any doubts, White House Senior Advisor Mike Donilon recently put them to rest. “The focus will become overwhelming on democracy.” Mike is not just any presidential aide. He is the president’s closest political advisor and widely seen as in charge of the campaign’s messaging. If he says the election will be about democracy, it will be about democracy.

And there is a lot of democracy on the docket. As we saw in 2020, the battles over who gets to vote and which votes get counted are decided in courtrooms across the country. In the lead up to the 2024 election, we’ve already seen the pro-voting side bring multiple challenges to voter suppression laws while the anti-voting side  attempts to upend easy, convenient methods like mail-in and early voting with their litigation.

I started Democracy Docket in 2020 to help set the record straight and allow everyone to see for themselves the very important role the courts play in our elections. That is why more than 180,000 of you read our newsletters each week and why the mainstream media increasingly relies on Democracy Docket — which is tracking hundreds of voting and election lawsuits — for accurate case statistics and analysis.

With the legal challenges ramping up, it’s easy to get lost in what’s really happening in the courts. So, let’s sort out some facts from fiction.

• Fact: There are currently 129 active voting rights cases spread across 37 states and the District of Columbia. This does not include cases involving campaign finance, Trump’s indictments and potential disqualification or redistricting.

• Fact: Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have the most pending cases.

• Fiction: Only the good guys file lawsuits. While there are 78 active pro-voting cases, anti-voting groups are litigating 50 active cases to restrict voting rights.

• Fiction: The courts are hopelessly stacked against democracy. While the conservative tilt to the courts is a problem, in 2023, the Supreme Court heard two key voting cases and ruled in favor of the pro-democracy side in both. Looking at all court rulings last year, the good guys won twice as many final orders and 70% of the interim orders issued during an ongoing lawsuit.  

Here are more numbers worth knowing.

Republicans are vote suppressors…A year ago I wrote that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is “just another Republican vote suppressor.” The man once celebrated simply for refusing to commit treason in 2020 recently filed an appeal in the 11th Circuit that seeks to deny private litigants, like civil rights groups, the ability to challenge discriminatory voting laws under the Voting Rights Act. How fringe is this theory? Even the uber-conservative 5th Circuit rejected it. Yet, it is now embraced by 22 of 27 Republican attorneys general — and Brad Raffensperger.

Especially in Arizona... Of the first 15 anti-voting lawsuits filed this year, six were filed in Arizona. Since more than 80% of the state votes by mail, the voting method remains a target for right-wing vigilantes and their supporters. Meanwhile, Kari Lake, who is trying to soften her image, is sticking to her election-denying roots. She is still in court fighting to overturn the results of her loss for governor during the 2022 midterms while also running for Senate in 2024 and just gave a new interview in which she called the  2020 election “rigged.”

Because they know it can work. An important report on a recent study told us what many of us already know: suppressive voting laws work. According to the New York Times, the new study shows that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision, which struck down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act, resulted in an 11-percentage point “turnout gap between Black and white voters” in counties affected by the ruling. This should hopefully put to rest the dangerous and false arguments that voter suppression does not affect electoral outcomes.

What, no claims of fraud? Hat tip to CNN’s Jim Sciutto for spotting this. As Biden says, “You can’t love your country only when you win.” That is, unless you are Donald Trump.

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