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January 3 - January 13, 2021
would it go down the road of using every means possible to fight the demographic trend of declining white voters by making it more difficult for nonwhite voters, particularly black voters, to participate in the election?
This was a fundamental battle for the soul of the Republican Party.
any chance for transformation of the Republican Party into the big tent it then espoused to be has been lost.
after its 2012 loss
Republicans across the country were also quietly but effectively taking steps to balance the electoral equation by suppressing nonwhite votes.
By analyzing specific states where Republicans passed new voting laws, one can track the cause and effect of voter-suppression efforts.
it is disingenuous for Republicans to claim they did not know exactly what they were doing.
those of us who work in elections know what the court concluded: there is almost no voter fraud in American elections.
The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin
a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin allowed the state to apply the voter-ID requirement.
black voting rates plummeted from a high of 78 percent in 2012 to less than 50 percent in 2016.
In Trump’s mind—and it sadly reflects the minds of many Republicans—the assumption is that any illegal voters would be Democratic voters
illegal Hispanic voters.
the Republican Party has invested heavily in the myt...
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I’ve worked in campaigns since 1978, and I don’t know of a single race in which illegal vot...
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The ability to rationalize the overt bigotry of “good people on both sides” has proven shockingly common among Republicans,
But voter suppression doesn’t need to rely on race-based formulas to work.
The modern political calculation of suppressing non-Republican voters is not complicated. Those at the lower end of the economic spectr...
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Implementing stringent voter-ID laws and reducing the number of polling places and/or reducing early-voter and vote-by-mail options disproportionately target voters who are less likely to be Republicans.
It took the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution in 1964 to abolish the poll tax:
State of Florida
legislation requires those who had been convicted of a felony to pay all court fees and fines that are outstanding before they are allowed to vote.
What percentages of those former felons are black?
“In 2016, more than 418,000 black people out of a black voting-age population
or 17.9 percent of potential black voters in Florida, had finished sentences but couldn’t v...
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Republicans have more often than not reacted like the white neighborhood that feared property values would drop once the “wrong” kinds of people moved in.
“working-class voters” usually means white working-class voters.
“Ordinary Americans” means non-urban Christian...
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The common thread is fear. Fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of losing power while forgetting the purpose of power.
Fear is at the heart of most conspiracy theories, and the current Republican Party is driven by conspiracy theories,
Illegal voting has long been a felony, and the idea that of all the felonies possible to commit,
someone would risk the consequences of a felony conviction to vote is one of the more almost-charming absurdities imaginable.
Donald Trump’s
merely represents the next step in a process that has been half a century in the making.
in the 1950s there were those in the Republican Party who would stand up to McCarthy, while now there are few with the integrity to confront Donald Trump.
Labeling any media you don’t like as “fake news” is an all-encompassing conspiracy theory that makes truth an enemy.
The Trump/right-wing conspiracies have a common thread of labeling truth a conspiracy.
Trump’s defense is to attack others on race.
projection:
the attribution of one’s own forbidden—and typically malevolent—motives, impulses, or emotions to others.”
in the Trump Republican view, Americans are suckers, victims, the mark for a hostile world.
The voter suppression that is increasingly embraced by a Republican Party unburdened by a watchful Voting Rights Act is not a subversion of democracy but a defense of democracy.
Republicans opted to disfranchise rather than reform.
almost half of the nonvoters were nonwhite and two-thirds were under age 50.
Republicans put up a smoke screen of reasons to try to explain why they are against efforts to
encourage voting by automatic registration, which, at base level, is a fundamentally antidemocratic instinct.
The same people who have no problem mandating reproductive choices for women cite personal freedom as an opposition to registering voters.
Republicans have fallen in love with the Electoral College because they see it as a way for the “real America” to balance the power of the “coastal elites.”
Only once since 1988 have Republicans won the popular vote in a presidential race.
some of us would darkly joke, “Anybody can
