Republican legislators risk impeding their own voters

If Republican had embraced virus suppression with the fervor they’ve shown for voter suppression, this pandemic would have been contained months ago.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks legislation affecting voter rights, Republican legislators in 43 states — including Florida — have filed 250 bills designed to inhibit voter turnout. (The Brennan report was issued in February, suggesting the numbers might now be even uglier.) The GOP seems to have decided that, given the party’s demographic disadvantages, the fewer voters, the better.

Their anti-democratic endeavors include stricter voter ID requirements, fewer early voting days, a reduction in voting hours on Election Day, limits on who can cast absentee ballots and who can collect and deliver those ballots to election officials, a ban on ballot drop-off boxes and a cut-back on vote-by-mail eligibility. The same political party that can’t abide common-sense limitations on citizens’ right to own firearms — even the military-style assault weapons used in the random massacre of innocents — has no such regard for citizens’ right to vote.

Most of the electorate-shrinking proposals percolating through state legislatures reflect the “model legislation” suggested by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The New York Times reported that the foundation’s political arm is spending $24 million in eight states — Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, Wisconsin and, of course, Florida — to support Heritage-inspired bills that would sabotage voter turnout.

Who can blame the Republicans, given that Donald Trump’s do-over has left their party in an existential conundrum? He harangued, bullied and insulted the old-style Bush-Romney apostates right out of the party. But his MAGA leftovers — angry, gun-toting, highschool educated, rural white guys, seething with resentment against Blacks, immigrants, gays, techies, college kids, educated elites and uppity women in general — aren’t a constituency with a long-range political upside.

How do political animals react when an expanding electorate threatens their careers? Clog up the works.

Republicans seem to be basing their anti-democracy strategies on the tenuous assumption that the constituencies most offended by Trumpian bigotry will be too dumb to overcome voting obstacles. Except the Republican base, since Trump took over the party, won’t dazzle you with their collective brilliance.

According a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, 54% of the nation’s college graduates either identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic. Only 39% identified or leaned Republican. Which was the reverse of Pew’s findings in 1996, back before Republicans disdained intellectualism, when the Republicans held a 54% to 39% preference among college-educated Americans.

In last year’s presidential election, 41% of Democratic voters had degrees, compared to

30% of Republicans. Democrats had a 63% to

31% edge among voters with a post-graduate education.

Education, of course, doesn’t necessarily equate to braininess — the Florida governor who thought that it would be a great idea to host mighty hordes of spring breakers during a pandemic has degrees from Yale and Harvard. But the new Republican voters have embraced some astoundingly ignorant beliefs. Another Pew poll conducted earlier this month found that 24% of Republicans hold a “favorable view” of wacko QAnon theories, compared to 6% of Democrats. Folks who believe that Donald Trump was God’s chosen savior to take down the Satanic-worshiping pedophiles who rule the globe, that Bill Gates is injecting microchips into our brains, that COVID is a hoax and that Trump will return to the White House on March 4, 2021 — oops — won’t give Republicans much of an intellectual edge come election day.

Donald Trump made a strategic error last year, complaining that vote-by-mail alternatives were rigged in favor of Democrats, which discouraged Republican voters who once held an advantage with mail-in voting in Florida. Instead, in the 2020 general election, Florida Democrats turned in 683,000 more mail-in ballots than Republicans. But Trump’s unproven fraud claims has forced GOP legislators to come up with a fix for imaginary problems.

But the new laws won’t just hinder Democratic voters. “When you look at the history of mail voting, it has traditionally been used at much higher rates by older voters and more affluent and more white voters — constituencies that tend to lean more Republican in their voting patterns,” the Brennan Center’s Wendy Weiser told the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the party is only getting older, less educated, more rural and more dependent on mail-in ballots.

Last week, Trump election lawyer Sydney Powell answered a defamation lawsuit filed against her by Dominion Voting Systems by claiming that “no reasonable person” would have believed her oft-repeated claims that the election was rigged.

Which says something about the Trump GOP’s unreasonable new constituents. They believed her.