Supreme Court rulings on voting rights, campaign money and mail ballots have reshaped the midterm map before a single vote is counted

Twelve days before the election, the most consequential campaign decisions of this cycle have already been handed down, and judges wrote them. Reuters reports that the November 3 midterms approach after an electoral cycle shaped to an unusual degree by rulings of the US Supreme Court, a run of election cases that prompted Justice Elena Kagan to voice alarm this week.

The court holds a 6 to 3 conservative majority, and the biggest rulings ran in Republicans' favor. In April the conservative justices gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law written to prevent racial discrimination in voting. In June the court threw out longstanding campaign finance limits. Together the decisions helped Republicans make the national House map more favorable to their party, through new district lines and a changed money contest.

The run did not go one way. Last month the court rebuffed a Trump backed effort to restrict mail voting, a method used more often by Democratic voters, and only the court's two most conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, publicly dissented. The split showed the majority willing to redraw the rules of elections on voting rights and money, and unwilling, this time, to follow the president's own party on how ballots arrive.

What is at stake is control of the last two years of Donald Trump's presidency. Democrats need a net gain of four seats in the House and four in the Senate to take both chambers. Losing either chamber would endanger the president's legislative agenda and open the door to Democratic led investigations of his administration. Legal victories, though, are not votes: polls indicate Democrats remain in a strong position to secure a House majority even on the friendlier Republican map. The rulings set the field. The voters decide the game on November 3, as of October 22.