April 9: Democrats Have a Clear National Position on Voting Rights. Republicans? Not So Much.
Some of the contradictions in Republican talking points on election law and voting rights are becoming clear to me, so I wrote about it at New York:
During the intense controversy raised by Georgia’s new election law, which included a negative reaction from Major League Baseball and a number of corporations, many defenders of the law have played a game of whataboutism. What about voting laws in Colorado, the state to which the MLB’s all-star game has been shifted? What about liberal New York? A lot of these comparisons have been factually challenged, or have zeroed in on one benign feature of the Georgia law while ignoring others. But it does raise a pretty important question: What is the posture nationally of the GOP or the conservative movement on the right to vote and its limits?
Not long ago you might have said that Republicans and conservatives were firmly committed to the view that rules governing voting and elections —even federal elections — were purely within the purview of state and local policy-makers. But that was before Donald Trump spent four years disparaging the decisions made by liberal and conservative jurisdictions on voting procedures whenever they contradicted his often-erratic but always forcefully expressed views. If, for example, voting by mail was as inherently pernicious as Trump said it was, almost daily from the spring through the autumn of 2020, allowing states to permit it was a Bad Thing, right? That simply added to the complaints made by Trump after the 2016 elections that California’s alleged openness to voting by noncitizens cost him a popular vote win over Hillary Clinton, and the widespread Republican whining after 2018 that the same jurisdiction had counted out Republican congressional candidates (whining that somehow subsided when Republicans did better in the exact same districts following the exact same rules in 2020).
And that was before Team Trump and his many Republican enablers spent the weeks and months after November 3, 2020, shrieking about state and local election procedures around the country, culminating in efforts to get the U.S. Supreme Court to
overrule state court interpretations of state election laws. Indeed, since Trump, his congressional Republican backers, and the Capitol riot mob were trying to block the certification of state election results by Congress on January 6, you could say that a major segment of the GOP wanted the federal government to impose its will on the states with respect to voting and elections.
And if the prevailing conservative idea is that decision-makers closest to the people should determine voting and election rules, then it’s hard to explain the provisions in the Georgia law (and in pending legislation in Texas) that preempt local government prerogatives decisively.
So what doctrine of voting rights does the GOP favor, other than whatever is necessary to produce Republican election victories? That’s hard to say.
Yes, at the Heritage Foundation you will find experts who more or less think everything other than in-person voting on Election Day should be banned everywhere. And now and then you will get someone like Kevin Williamson who will articulate the provocative old-school conservative case for restricting the franchise to “better” voters, which was pretty much the ostensible case for the poll taxes and literacy tests of the Jim Crow South. Unfortunately, snooty contrarianism isn’t a particularly helpful guide to the development of voting laws, and most Republicans (other than those caught in a gaffe) are unlikely to agree out loud with the Williamson proposition.
Until quite recently, most Republicans agreed that the jurisdictions that had for so many years discriminated against the voting rights of minorities deserved extra federal scrutiny and some additional hoops to jump through before changing their rules. In 2006, George W. Bush signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act that did just that, after it passed the Senate unanimously and the House with scattered opposition. Then a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key feature of the VRA, and now it’s almost exclusively Democrats (via the John Lewis Voting Rights Act) who want to restore it. Where are Republicans on that idea? With the states and localities, or just with the states and localities where federal intervention in voting and election practices doesn’t inconvenience Republicans?
Whatever you think of Democratic attitudes toward voting and elections, at least they can answer such questions coherently. They have united to an amazing extent around highly detailed legislation (the House and Senate versions of the For the People Act and the aforementioned John Lewis Act) that generally expands voting rights and sets clear federal standards for procedures in and surrounding federal elections. The Republican response to these proposals has been almost universally negative. But it’s unclear what, if anything, they would propose of their own accord.
If the implicit GOP position on voting and elections is simply that such rules are part of the give and take of partisan politics and that both sides are free to play fast and loose with the facts and get what advantages they can, then I can understand why they are loathe to make it explicit. But in that case, people who care about voting rights one way or the other should simply choose sides and have it out.
So when will the exit polls finally say that Bush lost?????
(and what Joe said above)
Joe: That’s easy. For one thing, the Hispanic vote wasn’t as large as billed but it was still a gain for Bush — same with Catholics.
More importantly, Republican and conservative turnout was way up, women voted much more Republican, and upper income people both increased their turnout and voted more Republican.
There you go, Joe. The mystery of Bush’s 3 point margin all cleared up!
You know, Ruy did explain that one (look for his immediate post-election posts): we got absolutely hosed among non-college whites (evangelical and otherwise), who broke Republican more than they have before, and we didn’t improve our national performance among Latinos (although we did improve in NDN-targeted swing states like CO and FL). We need to become competitive again among non-college whites outside the Northeast, so that the “southwestern strategy” doesn’t become our only possible path to 270 next time out. And we need to improve our Latino performance, rather than patting ourselves on the back because we’re not slipping all that much. Ruy and almost everyone else here know all these things already. (Simon Rosenberg knows them backwards and forwards, which is why he’s my pick, right now, for DNC chair.)
I’ve always suspected that the hispanic vote was less Republican than those early polls showed. And looking at the county results, they aren’t significantly different than the 2000 results; in Texas, Kerry gained about 1 percent from Gore’s Texas numbers, and Bush improved by about 1.5 percent. Only a handful of counties changed sides, mostly a few western counties switching to Bush, while Austin’s Travis County switched Democrat.
And to answer the question above, the black vote is only about 19 percent of the national vote, at most, and the hispanic vote, while about the same, is not as monolithically Democrat as the black vote. Hispanics in 2000 favored Gore, true, but 1 in 3 voted Bush, while less than 1 in 10 blacks voted Bush in 2000.
The evangelical percentage for Bush was the same, but the actual number of evangelicals voting was slightly higher. Statistics can be so slippery!
And the Catholic vote was still 50/50. Frankly, I’ve always thought that it was odd to still treat as broad a religion as Roman Catholic as if it were a monolithic group. To use an anecdotal example, one of my friends is a white pro-choice Catholic Democrat, and another is an asian pro-life Catholic Democrat. One is from VA and one os from OH. All they have in common is that they got baptised the same way. I think it’s time we stopped calling “Catholic” a group the same way we call races groups.
Does this mean that Bush catered to the wrong folks with his Commerce and AG pick??
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1. Re Ruy and Steve — as I understand it, the state exit polls and the NEP are separate and autonomous; as such… while one can be used to call into question the other, I don’t understand why changes in one mean that the other number, reliable or not, is to be altered commensurately.
2. Joe — because white married Protestants without college degrees are both numerous and shifted really strongly against the Dems.
And because we ought to remember that going from +0.5 to -2.8 – the Dems didn’t do THAT much worse.
Maybe those nomination announcements were made a bit prematurely… A.G. Gonzales and Commerce Secretary Gutierrez’s days may already be numbered.
Ruy: Can you please explain how,
if the Hispanic vote wasn’t as high for Bush as previously thought,
if the African American vote still went Democratic,
if the Catholic vote for Kerry wasn’t as low as it was thought to be and
that the Evangelical vote for Bush wasn’t measureably higher than 2000,
how, in 2004, did Bush win and Kerry lose?
I’ve been saying this, the future of the Democratic land base lies in the Southwest, not the Southeast. New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and eventually even Arizona will come our way. Many years from now, even Texas may become a swing state.