One issue will dominate election coverage in both red and blue states

Move aside, debate about horse race coverage vs. substantive policy differences. An even more existential issue will dominate coverage of the 2024 election in newsrooms of all sizes, in every corner of the country:

Will a multiracial democracy survive an assault without precedent over the past 60 years? Have we ever really had an even playing field in access to voting and political representation?

In the two years following Donald Trump’s re-election defeat and a full-court press of “Big Lie” propaganda undermining the pillars of one person-one vote democracy, 26 states — all controlled by Republicans — made voting less equal for people of color and younger voters.

It came in response to a flashing neon sign invitation from a right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court that has dismantled the Voting Rights Act and the democratic norm-destroying tactics of Trump and the people who set the stage for his ascension.

It’s about a demographic shift that will put non-Hispanic white Americans in the minority, and how they maintain their grip on power. More acutely, it’s about issues like corporate economic interests and assaults against the bodily autonomy of women that face deep opposition from a majority of Americans across the country. The only way to put these policies into law and practice is to prevent enough people who oppose them from voting, to gerrymander the power of their vote into oblivion, to make it impossible for them to go directly to voters with a referendum in the face of that gerrymandering.

That’s why anti-abortion groups in Kansas were backing legislation that made it more difficult for young people to vote. It’s why special interest groups opposing welfare programs that shift even a tiny bit of wealth from the 1% to the poorest Americans were promoting copycat legislation to ban philanthropic support for voting machines and poll workers in communities struggling to pay for the basic administration of elections.

In red states, the journalistic mandate is obvious. Sixty years after the country turned away from a violently racist Jim Crow era where civil rights organizers were arrested for registering Black people to vote, state legislatures have made League of Women Voters registration drives illegal.

But the threat has also been a wakeup call to journalists in blue states. When you start to unpack why these red-state disenfranchisement tactics are such an affront to democracy, it leads to all kinds of questions about whether the playing field is and ever has been level in any one of the 50 states. Why is there a line long enough to keep people from voting in a majority people of color blue state city but easy breezy in the white town next door? What about the more than 4.6 million people in 48 red and blue states prevented from voting in 2022 — more than enough to swing multiple U.S. Senate elections in that cycle — due to felony disenfranchisement laws that originated solely to keep Black men from voting after the end of slavery?

Access to voting and political representation is deeply unequal in all 50 states. This attack on the fundamental pillars of a multiracial American democracy will make it the central focus of journalists’ coverage of the 2024 election.