Republicans are making four key mistakes

Voter suppression can countermobilize its targets. As he campaigned for reelection in 2020, President Trump noisily explained again and again that voter suppression was crucial to his political strategy. For example, on March 30, 2020, Trump told the audience of Fox & Friends that if every eligible American voted, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” An unpopular president told his opponents that they were guaranteed to win if they showed up—and those opponents heeded the president and showed up in historic numbers. Who could have predicted that? In the 2010s, Republicans used their dominance of state politics to raise obstacles to voting. Sometimes the methods worked. The 2014 elections were marked by the lowest turnout since the Second World War—and a resounding Republican win in U.S. Senate elections. In 2016, a decline in Black voters’ turnout in midwestern industrial states, notably Michigan, helped secure the White House for Donald Trump. More often, though, Republican efforts to discourage African American voting have inspired countermobilization, driving increased turnout. Modern voter suppression raises the sorts of petty, bureaucratic obstacles to voting familiar from Jim Crow, but does not reproduce its deadly violence. Requiring extra paperwork, imposing burdensome identification requirements, and facilitating lengthy queues on voting day are effective ways of dissuading people who are only weakly committed to the political process; they are less effective against people strongly committed to the process. But in the 2010s, Republicans repeatedly used voter suppression to elect politicians—including Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and President Donald Trump—who proceeded to convert their opponents’ weakly committed supporters into strongly committed voters.
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