But the correct conclusion from the results of the 2020 election is not that Republican hopes depend on suppressing voter turnout. It’s that the assumptions are wrong.
Republicans performed reasonably well in a high-turnout election. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post calculated that Republicans came within 90,000 votes of winning the House, the Senate and the presidency. There is abundant evidence that Democrats disproportionately voted by mail while Republicans voted in person, not least because Trump spent months criticizing voting by mail. The evidence that the shift to voting by mail led to a net advantage for Democrats is, on the other hand, scant, and countered by the Republicans’ strong, if ultimately insufficient, showing. Nor is there compelling evidence that mail-in voting facilitated an increase in fraud (although the impossibility of proving the negative will keep the conspiracy theorists in business).
The old Republican assumption about voting was based on the old structure of the parties’ coalitions. Republicans used to get most of the votes of college-educated professionals while lagging among voters without college degrees. The first group was and is more likely to show up consistently for elections, and so the GOP’s partisan interest in low turnout was, if not exactly noble, at least understandable: Regular voters were more Republican than irregular voters, so higher turnout would tend to help the Democrats.
But the old pattern no longer holds now that the class composition of the parties has changed. More of the affluent regulars vote for Democrats these days, and more of the lower-turnout voters lean toward the Republicans. Trump did a lot to bring about this shift. But his lies about his election defeat obscured one of its implications.
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