Illustration by João Fazenda

One of the unsung heroes of the civil-rights legislation of the nineteen-sixties is a Republican congressman from Ohio named Bill McCulloch. Representing a nearly all-white district north of Dayton, McCulloch reflected the values of what was then still justifiably called the party of Lincoln. McCulloch preferred the term “equal rights” to “civil rights” because, as he put it, “the Constitution doesn’t say that whites alone shall have our most basic rights, but that we all shall have them.” In that spirit, and in partnership with Senator Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, a fellow-Republican, McCulloch did as much as anyone—apart from President Lyndon Johnson and those involved in the movement itself—to create and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As Todd Purdum notes in his book “An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” when McCulloch announced his retirement, in 1971, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sent him a handwritten note, saying, “I know that you, more than anyone, were responsible for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.”

This year’s midterm campaign demonstrated just how thoroughly the Republican Party, under the leadership of President Trump, has repudiated this heritage. As usual, Trump himself set the tone, by tweeting, shortly before Election Day, “Law Enforcement has been strongly notified to watch closely for any ILLEGAL VOTING which may take place in Tuesday’s Election (or Early Voting). Anyone caught will be subject to the Maximum Criminal Penalties allowed by law.” It’s easy to trace the lineage of this threat to the Jim Crow era, when African-Americans were threatened with arrest and worse if they tried to register to vote. Many persisted in doing so anyway. Today, the methods employed may be less harsh, but the goal remains the same—to prevent certain Americans from exercising their rights.

The Voting Rights Act was designed to redress intimidation and discrimination, but since the Supreme Court effectively neutered the law, in the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder, Republicans have embraced voter suppression with enthusiasm. In nearly every state where the G.O.P. has controlled the governorship and the legislature, it has tried to limit access to voting, most onerously by establishing such unnecessary requirements as having to produce a photo I.D. in order to register. (In a new twist this year, Native Americans in North Dakota were required to show a street address, which many people in that rural state do not have.) The stated justification for these actions has been to thwart incidents of voter fraud, such as non-citizens attempting to cast ballots, which is a nearly nonexistent problem. Trump and other Republicans turned voter fraud into a sort of all-purpose epithet, which they have also used to make spurious claims about the legitimate counting and recounting of votes in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona.

Nonetheless, there were several important victories for voting rights this year. Florida voted overwhelmingly to rid the state of a vestige of its Jim Crow days—a law that forbade former felons from voting—and thus to reënfranchise 1.4 million citizens. In Kansas, Kris Kobach, the secretary of state, who was the architect of many of the worst voter-suppression schemes in the past decade, was defeated in the governor’s race. North Carolina, which became a graveyard for voting rights after the Shelby County case, added a Democrat to the state supreme court, who will help protect the right to vote from the Republican-dominated legislature. And, in New York, Democrats won a majority in the state senate, where, together with Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Democratic majority in the assembly, they have promised to reform the state’s appallingly restrictive rules on early and absentee voting.

Even the good news from the election comes with a caveat, however. According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, Democrats won the over-all popular vote in the four hundred and thirty-five races for the House of Representatives by about nine per cent, but they managed to capture only a relatively narrow majority of seats. This is because the district lines are so egregiously gerrymandered, especially in states fully controlled by Republicans. Victories across the country will likely give Democrats a seat at the table when the lines are redrawn after the 2020 census, but gerrymandering deserves less a level playing field than a burial. Unfortunately, the only institution that could end the partisan practice, the Supreme Court, ducked its best chance to intervene when, earlier this year, it declined to upset the Republican redistricting of Wisconsin. Now, with the replacement of Anthony Kennedy by Brett Kavanaugh, it appears virtually certain that the Justices will not take up the issue in a productive way. And since Trump has effectively outsourced his judicial appointments to the Federalist Society, the incubator of far-right thinking on the law, recourse to the federal courts on voting rights may be a fading notion.

Still, November brought some cause for optimism, and not only in the results from the first Tuesday. Just before the Federalist Society’s annual conference, a dozen prominent members, led by George T. Conway III, the husband of the White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, announced that they are forming a group called Checks and Balances, which will seek to encourage conservatives to speak out whenever the President violates constitutional principles. “We believe in the rule of law,” they wrote. “We believe in the Constitution.” Coming from conservatives in the Trump era, such modest statements sound almost revolutionary. But this flicker of conscience offers the hope that more Republicans will try to reclaim the mantle of their predecessors.

It is clear, at least, that the new crop of legislators—many of them women, many of them people of color, and all of them elected thanks to the engagement and the power of women voters—will do what they can to protect the right to vote. There’s also a lot of creative thinking going on about how to make elections fairer, with ideas like multiple-member districts and ranked-choice voting, which went into effect in Maine this year, getting serious consideration. As civil-rights heroes have known since the country’s founding, in a democracy all rights begin with the right to vote. Or, as Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “The right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights.” He started out as a Republican, too. ♦