The Republican Party Is Terrified of Voters
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The Republican Party is currently engaged in the most sweeping vote suppression campaign since Jim Crow. It’s a broad war on voting, encompassing legislation in state capitols, lawsuits in the courts, propaganda at the highest levels of the party and federal government, and a threat of thugs in the streets.
No battle is too embarrassing. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott pulled a last-minute stunt that left even the state’s largest counties with a single ballot drop-off location. In Wisconsin, Republicans are seeking to prevent professional athletes and team mascots — including the Milwaukee Brewers’ “Racing Sausages” — from appearing at sports venues that are scheduled to be used as polling sites. The logic is that attractions, such as sports stars, will “encourage people to come out to vote,” argued the state party chairman.
In Pennsylvania, Republicans recently introduced a resolution to create a state legislative committee “to investigate, review and make recommendations concerning the regulation and conduct of the 2020 general election.” Republicans intend the committee “to inform possible legislation before and after the Nov. 3, 2020, General Election.”
The mention of legislation before an election that is just weeks away sows uncertainty. The language of “investigate” and “review” creates a legislative weapon to attack election results — or vote counting — in a state where Joe Biden has consistently led President Donald Trump.
While legislators and state party operatives wage war on voters in competitive states, the courts are awash in more than 250 election-related lawsuits. In just one example, the U.S. Supreme Court this week ruled for Republicans seeking to require absentee ballots in South Carolina to be accompanied by a witness signature. As an impediment to fraud, a witness signature is meaningless. But as an obstacle to voting, it has potential. The campaign is pursuing an “unusually aggressive, hyperlocal legal strategy,” reports the Associated Press, intended to “contest election procedures county-by-county across battleground states.”
Like the party’s other efforts, the primary goal of the flurry of lawsuits is to restrict voting. But even when that fails, a secondary goal — sowing confusion, chaos and doubt that can be harvested either sooner or later — may prevail.
Trump’s disinformation campaign — aided, as ever, by Russia — has a similar aim. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany last week claimed that absentee ballots had been discovered “in a ditch” in Wisconsin. The statement was false. No such ballots were found. But neither the White House nor its network of propagandists bothers much with corrections.
In last week’s presidential debate, Trump worked hard to undermine faith in the election. “From claiming mail carriers in West Virginia are ‘selling the ballots’ to arguing that mail ballots are being ‘dumped in rivers’ and ‘creeks,’” reports USA Today, “Trump ramped up his yearlong assault on mail-in voting with misleading and conspiratorial statements.”
If lies, lawsuits and legislation fail to produce the desired result, Republicans appear poised to resort to physical intimidation. CNN reports that the Trump campaign “caused disruptions and created an uncomfortable situation for some voters” when it sent what it called “poll watchers” to early voting sites in Philadelphia. Partisan poll watchers are not sanctioned at the state’s early voting and registration sites.
In September, Donald Trump Jr. issued a call for “every able-bodied man and woman to join Army for Trump’s election security operation.” Trump claimed that the “radical left” is plotting “to add millions of fraudulent ballots that can cancel your vote and overturn the election.”
No evidence supports this preposterous claim. But the message stands as an open invitation to the paranoid and irate — the “Army for Trump” — to harass voters or election officials in an effort to forestall Trump’s demagogic fantasy. It’s yet another ugly marker in one of the more depraved political movements in U.S. history.
The cascade of derangement and failure that has put Trump on the path to defeat may simply overwhelm Republican attacks on democracy. It seems possible that the nation’s small cohort of persuadable voters is turning against Trump, and that Republican vote suppression, and the threat of intimidation, will be insufficient to keep his jagged quest for autocracy on track.
A decisive defeat would no doubt be bracing for the Republican Party. Less certain is whether it would also prompt a reversal of the party’s authoritarian course. Fixated on unpopular policies, beholden to a shrinking base marked by resentment and aversion to racial diversity, the party grows ever more fearful. The “radical left” makes for a handy bogeyman. But what truly terrifies Republicans is voters.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.
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