Hello, and happy Thursday,

It’s difficult to figure out what to say about the kind-of-surprising-yet- not-really-surprising-at-all collapse of Democrats’ effort to pass sweeping voting rights legislation.

Yes, the defeat is a major blow to Joe Biden, who spent significant political capital over the last few weeks, pushing the bill. Yes, the defeat makes Democrats, who pledged to protect voting rights when they took control of the US Senate last year, look incapable of governing. Yes, it’s disturbing to see just one Republican – Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – voice any kind of support for sweeping protections to support the right to vote. Yes, it’s astonishing to see two moderate Democrats block the bill because of their unflinching support for an arcane Senate rule.

Yes, the defeat comes at a uniquely dangerous moment for democracy.

There are plenty of takes to go around about why this push didn’t succeed – and I expect there will be more in the coming days. Biden should have pushed harder on voting rights sooner. Democrats were too ambitious in their proposal. Democrats should have focused on a narrower fix to the Electoral Count Act.

Some of this thinking falls into what Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, calls the “green lantern theory” of the presidency – a belief that the president can do anything, persuade anyone, if they try hard enough. In the end, the reason the voting rights bills failed was simple – 50 Republicans didn’t support the proposals and two Democrats didn’t support changing the filibuster. After watching the fight in Washington play out over the last few weeks, I’m not sure there’s anything Chuck Schumer or Biden could have done to change that. Maybe I’m wrong.

That doesn’t mean that the 50 Republicans who blocked the bill should evade scrutiny. As others have noted, 16 current GOP senators voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, but oppose the current bill, which would update the most powerful part of the law. Republicans have said Congress has no constitutional role in elections, ignoring a provision in Article I that explicitly authorizes Congress to set federal election rules.

But the thing that’s stuck with me the most over the last week is an idea that undergirded the entire voting rights debate, sometimes spoken out loud and sometimes unsaid – the idea that voter suppression just isn’t that bad right now.

I saw it a few months ago when an unnamed White House adviser told the Atlantic Democrats would figure out how to out-organize new voter restrictions (“show us what the rules are and we will figure out a way to educate our voters and make sure they understand how they can vote and we will get them out to vote”). Biden made a similar comment on Wednesday afternoon, saying “no matter how hard they make it for minorities to vote, I think you’re going to see them willing to stand in line and defy the attempt to keep them from being able to vote.”

I saw it when Republican senators consistently touted that 94% of Americans said it was easy to vote in 2020 and that turnout was higher than ever.

And I saw it on Tuesday, when Joe Manchin, one of two key Democratic holdouts on the filibuster said no one was going to be blocked from voting. “The laws are there, and the rules are there, and basically the government, the government will stand behind them and give them the right to vote,” Manchin said. “We act like we are going to obstruct people from voting; that is not going to happen.”

Of course, there’s a mountain of evidence that cuts against all this. Election officials in Texas are rejecting an astronomically high number of absentee ballot requests after the state imposed new restrictions. After Georgia enacted new limits on the availability of drop boxes, the number of voters who used them dropped significantly.

Republican lawmakers across the country are also redrawing electoral districts in a way that weakens the influence of Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters, especially in rapidly diversifying places. It’s an invisible form of voter suppression, but perhaps the most powerful, because the votes of those affected will matter less.

I had this in mind when Senator Kyrsten Sinema, another Democratic holdout, argued on the Senate floor that passing voting rights legislation would not get at the underlying ills of political division in the US. It was a good line in her speech that just didn’t match up with reality. A provision in the Democratic voting rights bill prohibits severe partisan gerrymandering – something that would go a long way towards fostering more bipartisan compromise.

At almost the same time the voting rights bill was taking place on Wednesday, the election board in Lincoln county, a rural and heavily GOP Georgia county near Augusta, was meeting to vote on a plan to close six of seven polling locations. Residents there have been organizing for weeks to block the move, saying that many in the county lack transportation and would have to drive far to get to the single polling location. The county says closing the polling places will save money and make it easier to administer elections. The plan stalled Wednesday evening, but it’s the type of thing that the federal government would have more oversight over if Democrats were able to pass their bill.

“If it happens here and they’re successful, maybe we’re the pilot,” said the Rev Denise Freeman, a longtime resident who has been fighting the closures. “Maybe we’re the showcase for the rest of the world to disenfranchise voters so select people can stay in power.”

Also worth watching …

• I interviewed Martin Luther King III and his daughter Yolanda about what comes next in the fight for voting rights.

• Governor Ron DeSantis is proposing a massive new state agency to investigate election crimes, even though there’s little evidence of fraud in Florida.

• Preparations for the upcoming Texas primary are a bit of a mess as officials struggle to implement the state’s new voting restrictions. Officials have reported rejecting high percentages of mail-in ballot applications.

• The Ohio supreme court struck down GOP-drawn maps for both the state legislature and Congress, saying they were so partisan they violated the state constitution.

• Republicans in Virginia and Arizona have introduced a slew of new voter restrictions.