Saturday, October 17, 2020

It's Not About Suppression Anymore, It's Voter Subtraction

Ibrim X. Kendi writes in The Atlantic that the GOP is about voter subtraction, and the Democrats are (mostly) about voter addition. But in 2020, voter subtraction is the only thing the GOP has going for them, and if Biden loses, you can look to the vile success of these efforts by a broken Republican party to remove millions of votes.

Republicans are literally subtracting untold numbers of individual votes as they suppress the overall Democratic vote. GOP voter subtraction preceded Trump, but not as the GOP’s sole lifeline. For most of the post-civil-rights era, the Republican Party has also been attracting and adding voters, putting the Democratic Party on the defensive after half a century of New Deal dominance.

But in recent years, Democrats have been more likely than Republicans to follow the demographic and ideological shifts of American voters, moving somewhat away from the bipartisan political bigotry of fears, fairy tales, and lies that especially attracted white voters. Republicans, by contrast, have doubled down on those politics under a president who refuses to condemn white-supremacist domestic terrorists, hardly pays taxes, denies racism and climate change, bashes dead soldiers, mocks Christians and disabled people, tells Americans not to let COVID-19 dominate their lives, berates and allegedly assaults women, calls Hispanic immigrants rapists and animals, claims that Muslims hate America, and suggests that unhappy Black people should go back to their urban hells and shithole countries—all the while saying he’s the least racist person anywhere in the world, and making money off of his presidency with impunity. Trump has alienated rising numbers of young voters, voters of color, feminist voters, anti-racist white voters, and Americans who desire presidential decency. Trump has alienated almost everyone except his shrinking base.

Trump’s game of alienation has made voter subtraction the existential game of the Republican Party. Subtracting voters at any cost is all that is saving the Republican Party from political death. Trump’s Republican Party must kill votes in order to survive.
On March 8, 2019, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the For the People Act. The bill would have enacted a series of major reforms: automatic voter registration, early voting, automatic registration of felons completing their sentences, Election Day registration, and independent state commissions to redraw congressional districts. By the year’s end, House Democrats had also voted to reinstate the 1965 Voting Rights Act and federal oversight of state election laws to protect against voter subtraction and suppression.

The Democratic Party has primarily played a game of voter addition. Primarily, not totally. To maintain power, centrist Democrats have engaged in voter subtraction to fend off their primary opponents, opposing online voting and reducing the voting age to 16.

But although Democrats supported both voter-addition bills, almost all House Republicans opposed them. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, ignored them; instead of becoming law, the bills died in the Senate. In the meantime, Republican state lawmakers continued to pass voter-subtraction bills. Republican secretaries of state have been aggressively subtracting millions of names from the voting rolls, even as GOP legislators have made it harder for citizens to register to vote.

And this is the issue. The evidence exists that Trump's 2016 victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Florida were manufactured from voter subtractionWe're already seeing it happening now with rejected mail ballots, long lines at early voting polling places, and onerous burdens placed on voters by states and backed by courts. Millions of voters nationwide have been kicked off rolls, and millions more will have their votes thrown out, maybe enough to give Donald Trump the win.

And the massive majority of voters removed from registration are Black and brown, and Republicans damn well know it.

The future of the republic depends on us overcoming these barriers, but then again that's been true for 400 years.

No comments:

Related Posts with Thumbnails