Election key: Trump turnout

 

Election key: Trump turnout

War over ballots

Gordon L. Weil

A single factor may be the key to the outcome of the midterm elections – turnout.

President Trump gets it.  He gives signs of believing that it’s better for his Republicans if fewer people vote. 

In the 2020 presidential election, he lost by 7 million votes out of the 156 million between the two main candidates.  Four years later, he won by over 2 million votes out of about 153 million.  The Democrats shed over 6 million votes.

He asserts that he won in 2020 and could conclude that a lower turnout favors Republicans.  Because most Republicans vote at the polling places on Election Day, while most Democrats prefer early voting, often by mail, that might have led him to oppose mail voting.

Republicans want to tighten access to voting.  They say they are combating election fraud though there’s little demonstrated evidence of it.  But Trump claims his loss resulted from widespread fraud.  Massive efforts to prove that point totally failed, but the claims persist and accepting them is a required mark of loyalty to Trump.

Voter fraud is a myth. While there may be rare problems, they are so minor that they cannot influence the results.  But donning the cloak of protecting democracy, the GOP can seem to be the good guys while preventing many Democrats from participating.

The Republicans try to limit voting access and question vote tabulation (only when they lose).  Making voting access more difficult, the GOP expects to deter lower income workers and the poor from making what could be a big effort to register and vote in person.  They also try to influence how votes are counted, which aims at throwing out Democratic ballots.

Trump is currently thinking about declaring a national emergency giving him the power to reduce or eliminate mail voting and to impose strict identification rules to screen out lower income and less educated voters who won’t have time or transport necessary to collect needed paperwork.  Reducing mail voting could get some help from the Postal Service.

He has fought hard to secure passage of the SAVE act that could allow him to accomplish his goals, but Congress won’t pass his bill.  Declaring a national emergency would be a shortcut, though it would be challenged.

This year, increased turnouts for midterm primaries encourage uncertain expectations of a big November turnout.  In Texas, for example, the 2.3 million Democratic votes compared with 2.2 million Republicans ballots.  Both the turnouts and the Democratic showing were unusually high, but three-quarters of eligible voters did not participate.

In November, Republicans who are disappointed with Trump could stay away.  But if the Democrats are thought to be leftwing extremists, GOP voters are unlikely to swing to their side.  That’s why there’s so much handwringing by pundits when a Democratic Socialist wins a primary.

But, even merely by staying away, a lower GOP turnout could help the Democrats. And it’s possible that high prices caused by the Iran War and uneasiness about immigration enforcement could cause some to protest by voting for Democrats.  Turnout will depend heavily on whether the elections are a referendum on Trump.

In practice, the question is whether voter suppression will work and if so, whether it will have a partisan effect. The GOP may believe that educated, affluent people will vote and remain reliable Republicans.

But, despite the focus on the Democrats losing the blue-collar vote, they are making major inroads among what once was a solid GOP vote. If women, affluent, and better educated people continue moving toward the Democrats and show up at the polls, they could upset the GOP strategy.

If Trump aims to make it easier for those groups to dominate the electorate, he may have missed that they are moving away from the GOP.  If he believes less educated voters are increasingly Republican, he may have erred in making voting access more difficult for them.  Plus, their share of the electorate is declining, while the more affluent Republicans are defecting.

In both parties, campaigns could boil down to GOTV – get out the vote.

Rarely does an issue affect turnout to the point it can determine the election outcome.  But consumer price hikes could cause results that go well beyond partisanship.  Prices rose under Biden, and Trump won by promising to reverse them quickly.  The Iran war made the situation worse, but he tells voters that small gas price increases are worth it.

Whatever politicians claim, consumer price increases have not been small.  When gasoline shoots up more than one dollar a gallon, it can fuel the kind of turnout that flips the Congress. 

Talk of a Blue Wave, a massive Democratic win, has begun to pass the straight-face test. But it may take a Blue Wave to drown the voter suppression that Trump seeks.

 

 

 

 

Why Trump wants the SAVE Act

 

Figures don’t lie, but presidents…?

Why Trump wants the SAVE Act

Gordon L. Weil

 

President Trump stresses the three major themes of his persistent and unsupported attempt to undermine faith in U.S. elections.   They were the central themes of his primetime address.

First, he reminded us of his assertion that he won the 2020 presidential election.  Second, he worries about this year’s midterm elections. Third, Republicans must suppress voting by Democrats, because demographics suggest they will become the majority in coming years.

Trump believes that his first term had shown he was a great president, perhaps the greatest.  The logical result of such a successful presidency should be easy re-election in 2020.  Besides, he thought the Democrats put up a weak candidate.

When the votes were counted, Trump lost.  Neither more than 60 lawsuits nor investigations by Republican and Democratic state and local election officials and outside inspectors uncovered the voter fraud he alleged.

Extremist thinking often depends on conspiracy theory.  If he logically should have won, it was also logical that hidden plotters had deprived him of his victory.   Facts disproving his belief were dismissed as false, the product themselves of a hidden conspiracy.  Fury and frustration, not facts, led to the January 2021 assault on the Capitol. 

A second reason behind Trump’s push to impose new constraints on voting access is the GOP’s concern that the Democrats will carry this year’s midterms if they can’t be kept from voting.   That’s the reason for Trump’s sense of urgency.

Finally, Republicans worry that the country’s changing demographics will produce more Democrats.  A non-white majority could control, and minorities are assumed to lean toward the Democrats.

The Republican Party, with Trump’s backing, has developed techniques of voter suppression, targeting members of minority groups and those with low incomes and less education.  It places complexity and obstacles on their path to the ballot box, believing they may be unable to overcome them and simply refrain from voting.

A variety of methods have already been deployed intended to make voting access more difficult.  Aside from the pervasive, conspiratorial logic of election losers, there is no indication that access has been abused to the extent that could call election results into doubt.

Voting by mail or voting before Election Day brings out more voters.  So is the ready availability of polling places and long opening hours.  In theory, by narrowing the opportunities or simply shutting down polling places, better motivated voters, mostly Republicans, will vote but, lacking discipline, Democrats will be discouraged and stay home.

One way to evaluate the assumptions of Trump and the Republican Party is to look at the actual performance of voting groups.  Do low-income, immigrant, less educated voters depend on early voting and mail balloting compared with higher income, native born and better educated voters?

Income. Roughly 55 percent of persons with family incomes below $40,000 use early/mail voting.  About 60 percent of more affluent people use the same methods.  Not much difference.

Immigrants.  About 65 percent of naturalized citizens use early/mail voting while 60 percent of native-born citizens do.  Ditto.

Education.  Of people who have not gone beyond high school, 54 percent use methods allowing them to vote other than on Election Day.  Among those with more education, well more than 60 percent use early/mail voting.  Again, not much difference.

Region.  In the usually Republican South, 63 percent vote early or by mail.  In the West, led by Democratic California, more than 75 percent use mail.   Midwesterners, who vote Republican, and Northeasterners, mostly Democrats, are traditionalists and more than half go to the polls. 

Sex.  Women don’t vote early or by mail more than men.  Only 40 percent of each group vote at the polling place on Election Day.

Supposedly to reduce cheating or errors, Trump’s proposed SAVE Act would require voter identification that may be more difficult for lower income, less educated people to obtain.  This week, a Democratic governor of New Jersey reported on uncovering several thousand mostly inadvertent registrations for non-citizens.  A Democrat found the problem without SAVE.

Nationally, there’s no evidence of significant fraud.  Trump’s attacks on the election process undermine faith in popular control of the government.  In the absence of term limits, elected officials give the highest priority to holding onto their seats, and may find that limiting the electorate helps.

Big money wields big power in elections.  The only asset of average people is their vote. Voter suppression undermines popular influence and enhances the power of money.  Some GOP members of Congress oppose the SAVE Act.   They could put their own party’s supporters at risk or annoy average voters, while Washington ignores their more serious concerns.

His speech looks like a case when Trump not only read the data wrong, but also misread the American people.   Voting matters, and the Republic only works when the government remembers who it works for.