The recent decisions in Colorado and Maine to exclude former President Donald Trump from the ballot exemplify a distinctly American tendency to look to the judiciary to resolve political questions.

Colorado’s Supreme Court decided for the voters that Trump is disqualified from holding the office of the president, and while Maine’s constitution requires petitioners to seek a ruling from the secretary of state, now that she has issued a finding, her decision will also undoubtedly find its way into the courts.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the most astute observer of American democracy, wrote, “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”

Decades later, as the country was reeling from one of the Supreme Court’s most dreadful decisions, Dred Scott, President Abraham Lincoln highlighted a key concern regarding this habit of deferring to “that eminent tribunal.”

“If the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole of the people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” he wrote in his First Inaugural Address, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

Over the years, the validity of Lincoln’s perspective has been reaffirmed several times, most recently when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs, overturning Roe v. Wade’s long-standing interpretation of rights.

Edward Lazarus, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and loved him “like a grandfather,” recognized that Roe was as hard to justify as the infamous Lochner v. New York decision of the early 1900s. In both cases, justices read into the Constitution protections for controversial rights they deemed crucial but which are not explicit in the Constitution. In the former case, it was the right to privacy, in the latter to contract.

In a representative democracy, relying on unelected justices to read rights into the Constitution is dangerous business. Just as they giveth, they can taketh away, and they did, in both cases. For Lochner, the reversal came almost 30 years later in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, for Roe half a century later in Dobbs.

After the years they spent fighting unsuccessfully to retain Roe, Democrats should have learned the lesson that in a representative democracy, it is more prudent and effective to win at the ballot box rather than the bench. But the liberal celebrations that followed the Colorado court’s decision and the ruling by the secretary of state in Maine suggest that old habits die hard.

How quickly Democrats seem to forget that Roe’s reversal has proven to be a debacle for Republicans. In the nearly two years since the Dobbs decision, ballot initiatives supporting the right to abortion access have been endorsed in seven states, including ruby-red ones such as Kentucky and Ohio.

Looking ahead to the presidential election, while the polls have not been favorable for President Joe Biden or his party, abortion remains a consistently positive aspect. Should Democrats overperform next November, it will be due in part to Republican overreach on abortion.

Liberals could not have been surprised by Dobbs because it was their fear of this eventuality that drove them to fight as hard as they did against Republican appointments to the court. It is not an overstatement to say that in the absence of Roe, the confirmation process to the bench would not have become as politically charged as it has. But in the years since Roe was decided, conservatives worked doggedly to fill the bench with justices who found fault in Blackmun’s decision, whereas liberals worked equally hard to ‘Bork’ each one of them in succession.

These appointments only carried the weight they did because instead of working to secure abortion access legislatively, liberals sought protection in court. As opposed to doing the hard and critical work of politicking, they asked a handful of unelected justices to find support for a contentious right within the vague wording of the Constitution.

There is a world of difference between a case such as Roe and the current efforts to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot, but one thing they have in common is the tendency to look to the judiciary to resolve conflicts that are best addressed at the ballot box.

For advocates of reproductive choice, as I am, achieving the protection of this right through democratic processes, rather than judicial rulings, is a more sustainable strategy. It is decidedly more prudent to undertake the challenging yet essential task of persuading the electorate and thereby ensuring the establishment of policy through democratic means from the outset. This approach underscores the fundamental principle of a representative democracy in which lasting legal and social changes are best achieved through public consensus and electoral processes rather than relying solely on judicial interpretations.

In Colorado, Maine, and Michigan (the latter unsuccessfully), we see liberals’ intent on seeking solace in the courts as opposed to taking the fight to the people. This reliance on the courts is particularly alarming given the heightened stakes in this situation. As polarizing as abortion is, it does not pose a direct threat to the structural integrity of the democratic system. The same cannot be said of state courts and officials wading into electoral politics to remove a presidential option from voters.

If there was ever a time Democrats should be fighting for the hearts and minds of the people, ever a time they needed to win at the ballot box, it is now.

Rather than petitioning the courts to disqualify Trump from the ballot, it is incumbent upon those opposed to him to reveal his true character. This involves reframing the narrative to portray him not as a victim of a politicized judicial system, a casualty of the Biden administration’s Justice Department, or the so-called Washington swamp. Instead, they should depict him as what he is — a conventional, old-fashioned, garden-variety politician of the populist variety who is prepared to employ any rhetoric and strategy necessary to get reelected, a run-of-the-mill, everyday politician who they are not frightened to take on directly at the ballot box.

To counter Trump effectively, Democrats must adopt a similar strategy of directly engaging with the electorate. This approach necessitates a focus on grassroots mobilization and persuasive public communication, mirroring the tactics that have proven effective for Trump.

Now is not the time to debate the meaning and intention of the 14th Amendment. Save that for the pages of the law reviews. Instead, Biden and the Democrats should publicly and vociferously disavow all efforts to remove Trump from the ballot. Rather than seeking protection in the judiciary, they must get out and fight for the hearts and minds of the people.

Jeanne Sheehan Zaino is a professor of political science at Iona University, political contributor for Bloomberg News, and author of American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government.