Toggle Menu

The Fight for Universal Vote-by-Mail

David Cole on defending democracy and Katha Pollitt on right-wing women.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

May 14, 2020

Universal vote-by-mail: It’s obviously necessary for our November 3 election, but Trump, of course, is against it. He said that if we were to adopt voting by mail, “you’d never have another Republican elected in this country again.” David Cole explains why it’s essential for our democracy—and why Trump is wrong that it would bring the end of the Republican party. David is national legal director of the ACLU, and legal affairs correspondent for The Nation.

Also: Katha Pollitt talks about right-wing women. We’ve never forgotten that, in 2016, exit polls showed that 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. Now there’s a TV miniseries about the beginnings of the political organizing of right-wing women; it stars Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schaffly, and it’s called Mrs. America.

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


Latest from the nation