If everybody voted, Republicans would lose almost everywhere. And no one knows this better than Republicans.

As we recorded this podcast -- on Tuesday, October 9th, 2018 -- it was the voting registration deadline in Michigan and 14 other states. And it could be the last voting registration deadline in this state ever if voters pass Proposal 3/Promote the Vote, which includes automatic voter registration. That is, if Republicans don’t figure out a way to get the Supreme Court to gut it.

When it comes to democracy, this truly is the worst and less worse times.

It’s the worst for so many reasons. Here are a few. Donald Trump is preparing to gut the only investigation into the conspiracy behind the attack on our 2016 elections, right as indictments are about to hit his family. A Supreme Court that represents a smaller and smaller minority of Americans, but way too many sexual predators, has legalized unnecessary voter purges and just backed a voter ID law in North Dakota that targets Native Americans. And two of the world’s worst voter suppressors of the century – Kris Kobach and Brian Kemp – are Republican candidates for governor.

It’s slightly less worse because we’re also seeing a focus on voting rights unlike anything Democrats have mustered since they passed the Motor Voter law in the early 90s. A third of Americans live in a jurisdiction that has either passed or implemented AVR. Michiganders and Nevadans will soon join that list if ballot measures pass on November 6. And perhaps the most exciting re-enfranchisement of voters in half a century could be happening in Florida.

So we had to talk to Ari Berman, the man who has spent much of this decade covering the war on voting, which became a war on democracy and is now being resisted by a war FOR voting. He’s a senior reporter at Mother Jones and the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. He’s also just been named a member of the Frederick Douglass 200, 200 Americans whose modern-day work best embodies Douglass's enduring legacy of social change. Even more importantly, he’s the most frequent guest of this podcast.

Ari Berman on Twitter: @AriBerman

Ari Berman at Mother Jones: Federal Judge Blasts Trump Administration’s “Frivolous” Attempt to Thwart Census Lawsuit

Ari Berman at Mother Jones: Federal Judge Blasts Trump Administration’s “Frivolous” Attempt to Thwart Census Lawsuit

Ari Berman at Mother Jones: New Documents Undercut Commerce Secretary’s Claims About Origins of Census Citizenship Question

The Good -- Ann Arbor's and Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn is on the “GOP is lying to cancer patients” beat, which is the biggest uncovered story of this campaign

Jonathan Cohn at Huffington Post: