GOP canceling elections? It’s already happening. | Will Bunch Newsletter

I lived much of the first half of my life in greater New York, and all of the second half in greater Philadelphia. One cool thing about these last 36 years has been watching Philly shed its civic inferiority complex — until this weekend, when basketball’s Knicks and its bottomless bowl of cash-for-tickets New York fans invaded our city while their team embarrassed our 76ers. The past is never dead. Rinse, Repeat.

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Southern change gonna come at last/Now your crosses are burning fast

— Neil Young, “Southern Man”

The first time Louisiana’s white people took action— violent action, to be exact — to thwart any election where Black candidates might actually win happened in New Orleans nearly 160 years ago, in July 1866, or just 15 months after the war to end the enslavement of African Americans.

The last time Louisiana’s white people nullified an election that was won by a Black man was only eight days ago, on May 4, 2026. It happened the same week that the Bayou State’s governor suspended a primary election that was already underway — for the sole purpose of drawing a new map to eliminate a congressional seat won by a Black man.

Insert: William Faulkner, the past, something something something.

The last couple of weeks have been arguably among the momentous in modern American history, as the six right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and thus erased the greatest victory of the civil rights movement. It happened amid a wider battlefield of skirmishes over whether the United States can remain a democracy where the people are allowed to elect their leaders, or whether autocrats will just pick their voters.

The blows around race and redistricting just kept coming — highlighted by a madcap dash after the Supreme Court’s ruling by states of the former Confederacy to eliminate districts with Black or brown representatives — and they told two equally important stories.

First, the rapid unraveling of the Voting Rights Act proved that the civil rights era that ended legal segregation and produced leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer wasn’t the turning point in U.S. history books that we hoped it was, but just another spin in a depressing cycle that cannot fully lift the crushing weight of white supremacy.

The second grim reality involves the sanctity of elections in this flawed American Experiment with democracy. For months, there’s been a heated, endless online conversation between those fearing that an autocratically inclined Donald Trump will find a way to cancel or spoil the November midterm election, versus those who say such an extreme attack on constitutional law in the United States simply isn’t possible.

It is possible! In fact, thanks to the SCOTUS Gang of Six and some diehard Southern reactionaries, four U.S. elections have come undone already this month:

— In Louisiana, 42,000 primary voters had already mailed in their ballots when state officials got the news about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which gave them permission to draw a map that will dilute Black voting power in a state where nearly a third of citizens are African American.

The state’s right-wing extremist governor, Jeff Landry, immediately declared an “election emergency” (even though the only real “emergency” is for Louisiana’s two Black congressmen, at least one of whom will see his seat eliminated) that stopped the count, which seems to mean that mail-in congressional ballots cast in April won’t matter.

— In Alabama, it’s a similar story. On Monday night, after I’d already started writing this newsletter, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its own emergency order that also stopped a primary election where early voting was underway, to give state lawmakers time to vote to revert to an old map that had one Black-majority district, not the current two.

The High Court’s ruling shocked legal observers, because it seems a violation of a longstanding norm called the Purcell Principle (named for a 2006 voting-rights case) that rulings too close to an election must be avoided because they would confuse voters and influence the outcome. But for this court, when GOP political strength is involved, norms are meant to be broken.

— In Virginia, that state’s Supreme Court, which is nonpartisan but has a conservative tilt, just threw out a major statewide election that empowered the Democratic-controlled state legislature and Gov. Abigail Spanberger to also draw a new congressional map — this one aimed at helping their party gain seats in the redistricting wars started by the GOP.

The case hinged on some technicalities around how and when the ballot measure was sent before Virginia voters last month. Democracy advocates usually hope that the will of the people — like the majority of Virginia voters who just granted the remapping powers — is given more leeway than a technicality.

Not so for today’s conservatives.

— The fourth “cancelled” election is different from the others yet very much in the same spirit — a spirit of overt racism. This is also from Louisiana but involves the political fate of just one Black man, Calvin Duncan, with a remarkable only-in-(bad)-America story.

Duncan was just 19 and working with the Job Corps when he was absurdly charged with a 1982 New Orleans murder he didn’t commit based on a shaky eyewitness ID. He was convicted, and given a life sentence to be served in the notorious Angola state penitentiary, located at a former plantation run by enslavers. Duncan became Angola’s top jailhouse lawyer, eventually won his release and later total exoneration, wrote a book, earned a law degree, and last fall, improbably, was elected clerk of the court in Orleans Parish.

Landry, a former prosecutor who had opposed Duncan all along his journey, and the state’s Republican majority were not going to let this feel-good redemption saga stand. Lawmakers in Baton Rouge enacted a bill to abolish the position, and last week Duncan was barred from taking office.

The whole thing reeks of the 19th century unraveling of Civil War and Reconstruction gains — that racist, reactionary era they forgot to teach you about in school and tends to rattle your faith in the American narrative when you finally do learn about it.

In New Orleans — the same city where Duncan is locked out of the office he just won — a July 30, 1866 meeting of a constitution convention was marched upon by several hundred Black freedmen demanding voting and other civil rights. That triggered a long and bloody riot which saw at least 38 people — almost all of them Black — killed.

Just seven years later in the Louisiana town of Colfax, a close election for control of the county government that pitted Black and white residents against each other became the bloodiest battle of that Reconstruction era, with the murder of between 62 and 153 African Americans. Historian Eric Foner wrote that the “massacre taught many lessons, including the lengths to which some opponents of Reconstruction would go to regain their accustomed authority.”

Indeed, in 1898, residents of Wilmington, N.C. staged what today is regarded as a violent “coup” to prevent Black officials from taking city offices, in what is seen as the confirmation of the long Jim Crow cancer that persisted until that 1965 Voting Rights Act. It never really disappeared but just went into remission, waiting for its modern moment to metastasize yet again.

Neil Young had it right. Southern change’s gonna come at last. Now the robes aren’t white, but black.

This newsletter is published on the 128th anniversary of the day — May 12, 1898 — that Louisiana, emboldened by a couple decades of regrettable Supreme Court rulings, enacted a state constitution that effectively barred Black people from voting or serving on juries. Maybe that birthday is what Louisiana lawmakers were celebrating this week when the state House advanced a bill that would restore the Confederate statues taken down by New Orleans in the 2010s and proudly display them in state parks.

And now the descendants of the folks that wiped out elections in 1873 and 1898 are again doing it with gusto in 2026 to “regain their accustomed authority,” with their ultimate “redemption” still six months away. The issue is no longer whether Trump’s MAGA movement is going to cancel the election. The desperate question now before us: How can we prevent them from canceling any more?

Question: Do Americans truly understand the impact of the “war” on allies and how they perceive Americans? — Nicole the Anti-Trump (AU) (@nicciiswoke@bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: No, Nicki, not really. So much of the focus on our side of the pond has been about the war’s impact on gasoline prices, which is indeed causing the greatest domestic political fallout. But wars are always a barometer of how America is perceived on the global stage. Are we the fearsome, dependable ally of World War II, or the pitiful, helpless giant that lost in Vietnam or watched the Taliban return to power in Afghanistan? By casually starting a war in the Persian Gulf that he could never win without a substantial loss of American lives, Donald Trump has permanently ended the era of the United States as a superpower. Best case scenario is we learn to live out the 21st century as a kind of Norway, prosperous but unable to shape world events. Worst case? Don’t even go there.

Not surprisingly, the no-longer-stunning rightward political drift of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Sen. John Fetterman is a hot topic for readers of this newsletter, who provided a flurry of responses on the topic of whether he should just switch over to the GOP. Most of you are mad at Fetterman for betraying his voters but are also pragmatic; the outspoken senator does still vote with Democrats a majority of the time, and the party desperately still needs his support. “Even if he is not voting the way his constituents thought he would, being in the ‘D’ column is helpful, especially if we stand a chance to have a Senate majority,” wrote Lisabeth Rothman. Others are so furious at Fetterman they no longer care what he does. “He might as well go over to MAGA, not Republicans,” Barbara Woodin wrote. “He’s just as bad as Trump...I’m sorry I voted for him.”

📮 This week’s question: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known to all as AOC, is having a moment as many voters in the Democratic Party base move left. She’ll be in Philly on Friday to rally with the progressive candidate for the city’s open House seat, state Rep. Chris Rabb. Do you think AOC should run for president in 2028, or challenge Chuck Schumer for his New York Senate seat, or sit both races out? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “AOC in 2028″ in the subject line.

May isn’t only the month that all the laughter dies in sorrow for Sixers and Flyers fans here in Philly. It’s also college commencement season, and 2026 has the usual lineup of big names, like Conan O’Brien at his alma mater Harvard, or basketball’s Magic Johnson at Stillman College. Still, no one could have predicted that the most controversial graduation speaker this spring would be...Gloria Caufield. Who? Caufield wasn’t exactly a huge “get” for the University of Central Florida near Orlando; she is vice president of strategic alliances for Tavistock Development Company, a Florida developer with British roots and a dodgy owner.

Caufield’s speech promised to be as boring as her own selection, until she waded into a minefield: artificial intelligence, or AI. One assumes that Caufield — working in real estate — is surrounded by folks enthused by the billions that Big Tech is spending on projects like massive data centers that are needed to fuel AI. And in her speech, Caufield riffed on AI as one of the thrilling changes awaiting young 2026 grads.

“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution,” she pronounced, utterly unaware that she was speaking before a room of 21st century Luddites. The arena floor of cap-and-gown-wearing 20-somethings erupted in boos, leaving Caufield so shocked she stopped and turned sideways. “What happened?” she asked, then trying to spin the moment as, “I must have struck a chord.” Nevertheless, she persisted. “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” Caufield went on — now provoking wild cheers about the world before ChatGPT.

The roughly two-minute video clip went super viral on Monday, and it’s not a surprise why. It demonstrated the massive disconnect in American society between an elite class of overpaid tech gurus and the developers, college presidents, and politicians who service them, and a Generation Z that’s been handed the worst entry-level job market since the Great Recession. Untold thousands of 2026 grads did what they were told four years ago and learned to code, only to instead learn that someone named Claude has taken that job opening.

One recent Gallup poll found that 48% of Gen Z believes that AI poses more risk for the workplace than benefits, and those numbers are likely to be much higher at a campus like UCF. What’s shocking is how clueless business and political leaders seem about the buzzsaw they are walking into.

“This graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive,” software engineer Cabel Sasser posted on Bluesky. “When you’re inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. But everybody isn’t.” The administration at UCF probably had no idea they were booking the 21st century incarnation of Marie Antoinette.

This time 17 years ago, I was on the warpath against...the Philadelphia Inquirer. Huh? Well, remember that in 2009 the Daily News — where I worked — and The Inquirer were owned by the same folks but had separate, competitive newsrooms. Still, it was somewhat bold to criticize the people upstairs from me — but I did so when the Inquirer opinion section gave a regular column to attorney John Yoo, the architect of torture policies under the George W. Bush regime. I wrote: “Newspapers should protect free speech, but should project moral vision.” Read the rest: “Definitely not a ‘knee-jerk liberal publication.’”

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