Voters weren't suppressed in 2022. Or 2020. Or 2018.

For the last several years, Democrats have been consumed by panic about voter suppression, and not without reason. The conservative Supreme Court rolled back the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Republican governors and state legislatures kept passing laws designed to make it harder to vote, mostly through voter identification requirements. Some loose-lipped Republicans said their intent was to make it harder for Democrats to win.

Nevertheless, Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, after the first wave of voter identification laws. More recently, Democrats won the House in 2018, then the presidency and Senate in 2020.

The election results were a strong signal that the narratives of both Democrats and Republicans were wrong. As I wrote in early 2021, strict voter identification laws have been shown in academic research to have no significant impact on turnout and registration. At the same time, measures to expand the franchise, such as early voting and vote-by-mail, do not inherently tip the scales to Democrats. For example, in 2020, when the share of mail ballots jumped from the prior presidential election from 24% to 44%, Republicans gained 13 House seats. Florida is a pioneer in early voting, yet it keeps getting redder and redder, as evidenced by Republican Ron DeSantis’ blowout gubernatorial reelection last week. Soon after Virginia Democrats enacted some of the most liberal voting rights laws in the country, Virginians elected Republican Glenn Youngkin to be their governor.