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September 7, 2024 - February 21, 2025
He depended on freezing the budget so that social programs suffered a death of a thousand cuts. Programs could not be updated, funding steadily shrank, and civil servants couldn’t update their policies to new needs.
In the coming years, Republicans would attempt to revise this history. They claimed that Reagan’s insistence on “Peace from Strength” was the reason an agreement was reached.
The idea of a Reagan Revolution made conservatism appear stronger than it really was, but the idea that there was a rightward revolution under way also helped to invigorate liberal opposition and activism.
As more immigrants created vibrant communities in the suburbs, white middle-class property owners became more accustomed and open to an ethnically pluralistic understanding of the country.
None of these developments surpassed the strength of conservative forces such as the Religious Right, but the Left remained a powerful presence.
The “Reagan Revolution” did not sweep through public opinion. In 1987, 53 percent of Americans thought that the government should do more to help the needy even if that meant increasing the federal debt, 62 percent believed that the government should guarantee food and shelter for all, and 71 percent stated that the government should take care of people who couldn’t take care of themselves.39
Though admired as an individual in many parts of the country, Reagan was not universally loved as a leader.
This epic electoral battle in the twenty-first century was not an anomaly. It built on a long, sordid history of partisan allegations of voter fraud: attacks, in fact, that targeted racial and ethnic minorities as well as naturalized citizens from immigrant communities.
Because the Reconstruction-era Fifteenth Amendment bans using race to disfranchise Americans, the operatives and politicians camouflaged their discriminatory intent behind the charge of voter fraud to create the illusion that their primary concern was election integrity and democracy. And by deploying the pretense of defending a significant state interest—protecting the sanctity of free and fair elections—rather than the more distasteful power grab based on pandering to racism and xenophobia, lawmakers legitimized a number of policies to disfranchise millions of American citizens.
Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, these racially targeted electoral changes were, as Alexander Keyssar notes, sanitized as attempts to “purify the ballot box,” although they were “aimed largely at particular ballot boxes and particular voters.”
Challenging Black electoral power on the seemingly legitimate grounds of stopping fraud was an effective way to deflect charges of racism and undermine the moral and legal power of the civil rights movement’s victories.
Key in this strategy to enervate the robust expansion of Black voters was the GOP’s transformation from the multiracial party of Lincoln to, as Leah Wright Rigueur recounts, “a lily white Republican Party” that deliberately siphoned away from the Democrats whites who were opposed to the civil rights movement and its resulting legislation and court decisions.
“Republican poll watchers would keep an eye out for ‘people who… are not the kind of people who would register and vote.’” Who those people would be was, at its core, a stereotypical racialized definition of who was not an American, whose vote was not supposed to count.
the racialized lie of voter fraud had proven so politically useful that it survived the civil rights movement, even the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1965), and thrived with the realignment of the parties as southern Democrats continued their migration into the Republican Party.
Ronald Reagan, former governor of California and 1976 Republican candidate for president, declared that Carter’s proposals would bring the wrong people into the voting booth.
“our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Culling the electorate and severely restricting it was the game plan because, Weyrich concluded, “elections are not won by the majority of people; they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now.”
In the end, the Republicans got just what they paid for. But it wasn’t, despite the pretext, a cache of voter-fraud cases. In fact, the Ballot Security Task Force did not uncover a single instance of voter-registration fraud. Rather, the intimidators had persuaded enough voters to stay home, which allowed the Republican candidate to win the gubernatorial election by just more than 1,700 votes.
Research studies have found that the vast majority of whites who hold implicit and explicit racial biases against African Americans strongly support voter ID laws, which are the purported legislative answer to massive, rampant voter fraud. However, researchers have also found that whites who hold implicit biases are convinced that their advocacy for voter IDs is not based on racism but rather on ensuring election integrity.
Thus, the language of election integrity created an acceptable post–civil rights race-neutral cover to allow the myth of massive, rampant voter fraud to continue to do damage.
Myths masquerading as reality do enormous damage.
