By Chris
Stirewalt
Tuesday, June
15, 2021
Recent polls show that more than half of
Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Republican
officeholders feel intense pressure to match the furious outrage that the
activist core of their primary electorates has about the issue, and so they
have chosen to focus on making sure future elections are somehow “cleaner.” In
one sense, it’s a way these officials can placate the disappointed members of
their coalition who have fallen prey to wild conspiracy theories, without the
officials having to devote their energies to relitigating 2020. It’s the kind
of legislation Daniel Patrick Moynihan once called “boob bait for the Bubbas.”
Still, these officeholders and the
political professionals around them wouldn’t be so eager to sign on to the effort
if it weren’t for their fundamental belief that making it harder to vote is
good for the GOP. At the heart of the moves in dozens of states to tighten
voting requirements and methods—including such key battlegrounds as Georgia,
Florida, Texas, and Arizona—is a persistent myth that high turnout is bad for
Republicans. In truth, there is no correlation whatever between turnout rates
and partisan outcomes, even though it appears that Republican restrictionists
and Democratic populists alike believe that the correlation exists and that it
favors Democrats.
This myth is damaging to the Republican
Party itself, to its presentation as a tribune of the people, and to its own
understanding of the strength and common sense of the American electorate. And
it’s tactically unsound, because by pursuing efforts to make voting more
difficult, Republicans may be shutting out their own potential supporters among
low-propensity voters who might support their candidates if it weren’t too much
of a pain to do so. At the same time, as they pursue this aim, they are taking
a hit among persuadable voters who hear daily that GOP election rules are
racist and undemocratic.
* * *
A new Pew Research study finds that only
38 percent of self-identified Republicans support no-excuse early and absentee
voting. It was 57 percent in 2018. Over the same period, the share of
Republicans who favor revoking the registrations of those who haven’t shown up
for recent elections has risen from 53 percent to 68 percent. What all this
means is that a party that says it is going to reinvent itself as a champion of
working-class Americans without college degrees is working to shut out many of
the voters they claim to seek. While there may not be a partisan correlation
with turnout rates, there is a strong correlation between socioeconomic status
and likelihood of voting. Less affluent, less educated voters turn out at far
lower rates than their wealthier, college-educated counterparts. So why would
the new blue-collar Republican Party want to make it harder to vote?
Here’s why. The belief in the existence of
widespread voter fraud is strong among Republicans and long predates the
outlandish claims Donald Trump made in both of his White House runs. Indeed,
what made Republicans so ripe for the picking by Trump in his efforts to
redefine the 2020 election was a multigenerational legend rooted in some
reality. For while there were certainly crooked, big-city, Republican political
machines—notably in Philadelphia and Chicago from the 1870s to the 1930s—the
story of politics in the past century has often included Democratic election
fraud.
When then–Senator John Kennedy was
campaigning in West Virginia’s 1960 presidential primary, he told reporters and
admirers who had gathered at the Daniel Boone Hotel in Charleston that he had a
telegram from his rich father admonishing him, “Don’t buy another vote, I won’t
pay for a landslide.” It was a laugh line he’d used before, a self-deprecating
way to drain some of the power from what everyone knew: Kennedy’s father, Joe,
and maternal grandfather, “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, were part of the corrupt
Democratic machine in Boston.
It’s by no means certain that election
fraud cost Republicans the razor-thin 1960 general election. Kennedy won by 84
electoral votes, so stealing the presidency would have required significant
fraud in multiple states. But neither can we rule it out. The long and
unabashed tradition of Democratic political corruption in Chicago makes
Kennedy’s Illinois margin of victory of fewer than 9,000 votes out of 4.7
million cast look dubious. And the presence of “Landslide” Lyndon Johnson on
the Democratic ticket added to suspicions of fraud. Johnson’s nickname was a
joke about his 1948 Senate victory by 87 votes—a success widely attributed by
Texas politicos to Johnson and his crew paying off officials in the notoriously
crooked counties in the Rio Grande Valley. Kennedy’s Texas victory by more than
46,000 votes was stouter than the Illinois squeaker. But it’s easy to believe
that at least some of that Texas win was the work of Johnson’s machine.
Whether or not Richard Nixon got ripped
off in 1960, the idea that he did quickly became a foundational belief in
Republican politics. Nixon himself was so haunted by the idea that he tried to
be the bigger crook in his 1972 reelection campaign and ended up having to
resign for his crimes. Watergate also produced a crackdown on election fraud.
Federal and state prosecutors around the country got serious about bringing
heavy penalties against perpetrators who might have been winked at in previous
decades. The rise of automated, computerized voting and tabulation made fraud
harder to commit and easier to catch. Big-city political machines withered in
the newly hygienic atmosphere. Elections became increasingly secure.
Still, long before Trump was selling his
line about election officials “finding” Democratic votes to erase his Election
Day advantage in several swing states, Republicans harbored suspicions about
late results from population-dense urban centers. There were concerns about a
stolen Philadelphia mayor’s race in 2000 and the presidential ballot in
Milwaukee in 2004, in both cases featuring credible allegations that, in some
precincts, there were more votes cast for Democrats than actual residents. But
some of the drama simply was the result of timing differences on Election
Nights. In most competitive states, the race often came down to the differences
between quick-counting, Republican-leaning suburban and rural precincts and the
slow-counting cities. For decades, Republicans watched their early leads
disappear as waves of millions of overwhelmingly Democratic votes rolled in
from cities. This was the backdrop to the central idea of the 2020 voter-fraud
claims, which is that Trump had won and then the Democrats created votes
through various brilliant subterfuges to overtake him and seize the Electoral
College.
* * *
But conspiracy theories about voter fraud
are not limited to Republicans. Democrats had their own popular theory about
how Diebold voting machines had been tampered with in the 2004 election; The
Campaign, a political satire starring Will Ferrell, came to its climax as
voting machines owned by the “Motch” brothers suddenly changed their numbers
and gave the victory to the Republican. The only difference was that in 2020,
the villain turned from libertarian businessmen to two companies, Smartmatic
and Dominion, accused by Republicans of changing machine counts (in part, it
was said, in service to the Colombian Communist dictator).
Nonetheless, Democrats have poured time
and money into the premise that bigger turnout is better for the blue team.
Insurgent Democratic-primary candidates have often leaned into the argument
that they can mobilize low-propensity voters—in other words, that they can
generate the kind of high turnout that will overwhelm even nefarious Republican
vote-rigging schemes. Senator Bernie Sanders repeatedly pushed the claim in
2016 when he was chasing front-runner Hillary Clinton. “Democrats win when the
voter turnout is high. We can generate that,” he said. “Republicans win when
the voter turnout is low.”
It’s not true, but the idea has its basis
in an indisputable fact: Democrats tend to do better in presidential years than
in lower-turnout midterm years. A 2017 Pew study tracked the differences
between voters who showed up every two years and those who turned out only for
presidential contests. Fifty-eight percent of these “drop-off” voters were
Democrats compared with 47 percent among consistent voters. We can attribute
much of this to Democrats’ historical strength among poor voters who don’t tend
to vote at the same rates as their more affluent counterparts. Now, Democrats
have seen some smashing successes in recent midterm elections, notably 2006 and
2018, but those were more likely attributable to success with extremely
high-propensity suburban swing voters than a surge in poorer, traditionally
Democratic precincts. But these aren’t the voters we’re talking about. We’re
looking for the same kinds of voters Republicans are targeting with their new
legislation: the disengaged.
It’s not likely that a consistent voter,
even if he votes only in presidential years, would be stymied in his effort to
get to the polls by Republican rules shortening voting periods, limiting
eligibility for absentee ballots, or eliminating ballot drop boxes. There will
certainly be some effect at the margins, but there is plenty of evidence to
show that while not every “likely voter” ends up casting a ballot, Americans
who decide to participate in an election overwhelmingly do so. If you’re
civically engaged to the point of getting registered and seeking out a ballot,
you’re probably going to see it through. But what about the citizens who are
attached only marginally? It stands to reason that the less engaged one is, the
easier one would be to dissuade from voting. And these are the voters who made
2020 the highest-turnout election in modern political history. The new Census
numbers show that 2020 saw the largest-ever increase in voter turnout from the
previous presidential contest. Seventeen million more Americans voted in 2020
than in 2016, bringing total turnout to 67 percent of the adult population.
Both sides attribute President Biden’s
victory to this increased turnout, but this is probably false. In their
book The Turnout Myth, political scientists Daron Shaw and John
Petrocik put to rest the old saws about the subject. In 2006, Democrats swept
in a low-turnout vote, but they got crushed in the midterms four years later
when turnout increased dramatically. Turnout climbed from 2000 to 2004—but
Republicans performed better at every level. Like those cycles, 2020 offered no
evidence that bigger is bluer. Even as Biden was winning, Republicans defied
expectations, gaining House seats and keeping a lock on statehouses across the
country. It was not a blue wave that swept Trump from office. Rather, it was
the nudge from moderate voters in the suburbs of big cities in swing states.
Nor was it mail-in voting that made the difference. A study from Stanford’s
Institute for Economic Policy research presents very strong evidence that
mail-in voting itself did not drive the turnout surge, nor did it constitute
any significant partisan advantage.
So, what do we know about these unlikely
voters? Who are the men and women who made 2020 a blockbuster turnout year but
who usually don’t participate? It should come as no surprise that they’re not
passionate about politics. But what leaders in both parties don’t understand is
that they don’t tend to have strong ideological views or attitudes. It sounds
obvious to say, but people who aren’t politically engaged don’t care that much
about the issues that drive much of our red-versus-blue political fight club.
If they did, they’d be likely voters.
The Knight Foundation wanted to find out
why eligible voters so often don’t participate. They talked to 12,000 “chronic
non-voters” across the country and found attitudes and opinions that contradict
the conventional wisdom of both parties. What its study found was that
non-voters would have added equally to both parties had they participated last
year. Pushed to make a choice, 33 percent would have voted for Biden, 30
percent would have voted to reelect Trump. The rest would have backed a
third-party or other candidate. If every eligible voter had turned out,
according to Knight, Trump might actually have done a little better. He lost
the national popular vote by 4 points but trailed in the preferences of
non-voters by 3 points. It’s a statistically insignificant difference, but this
significant piece of data provides evidence that Republican fears about turnout
are wrongheaded or at least long out of date. These non-voters showed “slightly
more support for constructing a wall along the Mexican border than active voters,
while being less supportive of replacing the Affordable Care Act.” In other
words, a jumble.
This matches the findings of the American
National Election Studies group, a collaboration between political scientists
at the University of Michigan and Stanford. Their 2020 survey found the same
thing as in previous elections. The partisan and ideological distributions of
the least engaged, least attentive voters tend to mirror the distribution among
active, engaged voters. Indeed, as you climb down the rungs of voter
engagement, Americans may actually be more right-leaning. Voters who described
themselves as highly engaged—meaning those who “pay attention to what’s going
on in government and politics always”—were slightly more liberal than
conservative. But that six-point advantage disappeared with less engaged
voters. Conservatives made up the larger share of those who paid less or very
little attention.
What self-destructive madness it is, then,
for Republicans to waste so much of this year fighting to discourage voting.
Their mythologies about the prevalence of fraud and the value of reducing
turnout directly conflict with the goals of a party wisely intent on getting
low-propensity voters to engage. Republican lawmakers are getting it wrong when
they attribute Biden’s win to the get-out-the-vote efforts in Georgia led by
losing 2018 gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, combined with high turnout
among urban voters. In pursuing their agenda, Republicans threaten to shut out
the very working-class voters they say can make theirs a majority party again.
Moreover, in further alienating swing voters who were turned off by the
ugliness of the Trump-era GOP they badly compound the error. Devised in fear of
their primary electorate, executed gracelessly, and rooted in false beliefs,
the GOP efforts against easy voting in 2021 are nothing short of political
malpractice.
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