This is my eighth presidential election as a voter.

I still got excited when I saw my ballot in the mail. I still love filling it out. It’s an incredible, simple civic moment. It’s ours. And it’s here.

This year is an intense, important election — and the coming days are going to come fast and go hard.

But, before they do, I just wanted to stop and let you know a bit of what I was thinking about — within my areas of some expertise — when I cast my ballot for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. This will be, of course, a woefully incomplete list, but even that goes to show how much is at stake on Tuesday.

Donald Trump and JD Vance must be defeated, and the more soundly they are defeated, the better for democracy and Americans’ lives.

To that end, in the comments, tell me what you were thinking about when you voted or will be thinking about when you vote.

For me, here’s my list of 10 things I thought about when I voted for Harris and Walz — 10 topics that you’ve been reading about at Law Dork and will be reading more about once the new administration begins:

The U.S. Supreme Court: As Kristy Parker from Protect Democracy put it back in August, “If Trump wins, [Justices Sam] Alito and [Clarence] Thomas will retire, solidifying radical right-wing dominance of SCOTUS for generations to come.” This is almost certainly true — and that’s the best-case scenario if Trump wins. Should one of the Democratic appointees leave the court in the next four years — because they need to do so or if there is a death — and Trump confirms a successor, we would be living under a 7-2 far-right court. What’s more, if Trump wins, because of the above, the odds are good that before the next presidential election, Trump would have appointed a majority of the court’s justices.

If Harris wins, on the other hand, she might get one or two nominations — although it’s almost certain that Thomas and Alito wouldn’t voluntarily leave the court under a Democratic president. She also has shown an appreciation for the need for court reforms. How far she will go is yet to be seen, but she would be starting her presidency with an understanding — unlike when Barack Obama or Joe Biden took office — that the court is a problem.

As I’ve written time and time again, this is a contingent term — but now that contingent moment is almost upon us. In other words, beyond changes in personnel on the court, the election outcome is going to affect the current court in many ways, big and small. It’s here.

Lower courts: I’ve already written about this, but it’s worth highlighting how central this is to my voting for Harris. We need another four years of Democratic appointees in the lower courts, and we cannot afford another four years of Trump appointees. Please, don’t make me deal with another court becoming another Fifth Circuit. Seriously, though, if Harris wins and the Democrats keep the Senate majority, four to eight years of Democratic appointees would be so important to re-balancing the federal courts and then making it possible for a progressive vision to begin more forcefully developing within them.

Abortion and other reproductive rights: This is key. In its way, this relates back to the Supreme Court, but it obviously is also a standalone issue that is central to this election — and every election since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022. When the three Trump appointees joined Thomas and Alito to end the constitutional right to an abortion, they unleashed the current — and sometimes deadly — horrors that women and other pregnant people are facing. As I wrote recently, we know that the anti-abortion forces are not done — with right to travel and IVF questions stirring, in addition to Project 2025’s Comstock Act aims. And, we know that they will have a voice, likely many voices, in a Trump administration, regardless of his muddled claims during this campaign.

We know that abortion is directly on the ballot in many states on Tuesday, but it’s more than that. It’s also been in the news elsewhere, too, in states like Georgia, where the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision has forced state courts to weigh in in the aftermath of Dobbs. And in Iowa, where it might bring the state to Harris. Stepping back, I don’t think we should ever forget the message the Supreme Court sent when it took away a right that people fought for and lived under for nearly 50 years — and how Americans reacted to such a move.

Transgender and other LGBTQ rights: A month after Election Day, the Supreme Court will be hearing arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti, the case over Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming medical care for minors. Other cases are percolating up in the courts, with challenges to Biden administration efforts to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination on the one side and challenges from LGBTQ people to many anti-LGBTQ state laws on the other. It is not overstating things to say that a Trump win could make LGBTQ people’s lives significantly more difficult in many ways. This is not solely about transgender people — although the attacks they face would doubtless be the worst and merit our attention as an independent harm — with the effects ranging from health care to schools to queer people’s actions in public life.

Democracy: This both speaks for itself at this point given all that has been said by Trump himself and said and written by others, but Trump clearly does not like democracy, pluralism, or choice. He likes authoritarianism, and, in a second term, he would do all that he can to bring America close to his ideal. The Supreme Court already made that easier next time around with its immunity and Fourteenth Amendment rulings. Vance is certainly no better and could be worse — if only because he’s younger.

Voting rights: Harris needs to win — and Democrats need to take both chambers of Congress — so that we can actually do something to protect voting rights. In addition to that, and I’ve written much about this already and will certainly write more, the current Supreme Court majority does not want to protect voting rights — and is open to entreaties from the right making voting more difficult. This is an area where this election is unbelievably important.

Racial justice and racism: It’s been dispiriting watching all of the opportunity to create a better America that I feel we mostly lost in the wake of 2020’s protests. Bad-faith opposition, aided by lazy reporting, didn’t help, but it’s also difficult to make any substantial policy changes — let alone to make such complex ones as would be involved in addressing racial injustice. But the contrast between electing Harris and Trump could not be more clear. As Adam Serwer wrote in September, Trump and elements of his campaign, have been explicit about their race-baiting, often tying it in with anti-immigrant cries. This effort reached a crescendo at the Madison Square Garden hate rally, and it just cannot be said enough how better off America will be if Trump loses and Harris has the opportunity to lead the nation.

Criminal justice and the Justice Department: This is, admittedly, the area right in the middle of my expertise where I am least confident — on a domestic front — in a Harris presidency. That said, I am far more comfortable with her on this front given her time in the Senate, as I think it gave her additional perspective beyond that as a prosecutor and improved her policy ideas on that front. Nonetheless, I’m sure this will be an area where persuasion will be needed. And yet. Those concerns almost disappear when compared with the absolute horror of Trump’s personally expressed aims for our criminal justice system and for the Justice Department — let alone those expressed through Project 2025. And, given our current Supreme Court, who is going to stop him?

Stephen Miller, Gene Hamilton, and Jonathan Mitchell: A Trump win is going to empower these three. And, yes, I was thinking about them, specifically, when voting, Although Miller is not a lawyer, he currently runs America First Legal with Hamilton serving as its legal director. Both men served in the first Trump administration. Mitchell is on his own, but previously was Texas’s solicitor general and represented Trump in the Fourteenth Amendment case at the Supreme Court. All three have advanced extreme right — anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant — agendas from their perches outside of government. I do not want to live in a country where they might be a part of or, in Mitchell’s case, a judicial nominee of a second Trump administration.

Governing: It’s a through-line of my reporting here, but I don’t think I can properly describe how difficult another Trump administration would make governing. Between judicial appointees and the actions their agencies would take, it would be a nightmare. The project is already well underway, but it could get so much worse — something that the discussion of the roles Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk would potentially play in a second Trump administration highlight.

There they are.

There is, as I wrote above, so much more that will turn on how the election turns out. Among the topics that I think are extremely important but largely outside of my expertise, foreign policy is front and center along with the related questions about immigration policy, as well as our approach to the climate crisis and guns. I have some coverage here of those topics — generally, when immigration or gun policies hit the courts — but those four are huge policy areas where there are others who are the experts.

I’ll be online nearly constantly this week, as called for, writing and posting about everything relevant happening, but those are — from my vantage point — 10 of the central issues of this election and the stakes of the outcome.

Vote — and vote carefully.

Closing my tabs

This Sunday, here are the tabs I’m closing:...