Why Republicans Should Lose. And Lose Bigly.

Set aside most Republicans’ embrace of divisiveness, violent militias, Qanon and its wacko conspiracy theories, and their head-in-the-sand approach to the climate crisis. The reason you should spurn the entire Republican Party is its blatant attempts to deny millions of American citizens the right to vote.

For more than 20 years, the party has launched an all-out attack on the voting rights of people of color and the poor. It began by raising questions about the integrity of our election process on the heels of the party stealing the 2000 election in Florida. Yet the GOP had the audacity to claim that there was widespread voter fraud throughout the nation. Acting on that claim, the Bush administration ordered an investigation which found that intentional voter fraud was non-existent.

Nevertheless, many GOP-controlled legislatures began limiting voting rights to only those who had a photo ID. And, rather than make the IDs free and easy to obtain, the legislatures not only set fees for them. They limited access, often forcing poor Americans without drivers licenses to take time off from work and travel many miles to obtain the IDs. The IDs had the effect of denying voting rights millions of Americans.

In 2013, a Republican-driven lawsuit against the federal government (Shelby Co v Holder) led to a US Supreme decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965, claiming that federal oversight of state election rules was no longer necessary. Almost immediately following the decision, GOP-led states dramatically reduced the number of voting centers in areas that are predominately black. At the same time, they reduced early voting periods and voting hours. That caused voters in those areas to wait in lines twice as long as their white counterparts.

In Arizona, Georgia, and other Republican-controlled states, the legislatures have ordered a purge of registered, but infrequent, voters. That act alone almost certainly put a Republican in Georgia’s governor’s mansion, instead of the more popular Democrat.

More recently, Donald Trump his Republican Party, in an attempt to undermine the 2020 election, have argued that the election is rigged and raised concerns about the safety of mail-in ballots, saying that mail-in voting is an opportunity for Democrats and China to commit election fraud. At the same time, Republican-appointed members of the governing board of the United States Postal Service and Trump’s Postmaster General have delayed mail service by removing dozens of mail sorting machines and hundreds of mailboxes. They have called for armed militias and white supremacist supporters of Trump to show up at the polls in large numbers as “poll watchers” – an obvious attempt at voter intimidation.

In Florida, the Republican Secretary of State has defied a voter-approved referendum by refusing to restore voting rights to felons who have served their sentences until they pay all costs associate with their crimes while making it almost impossible to determine what those costs might be. The Republican governor of Texas has ordered that there can be only one voting drop-off box per county, thus making voting even more difficult for those living in large cities.

In Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and other states, Republicans have resorted to extreme gerrymandering which allows Republican officials to choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives. Administration attempts to rig and cut short the Census are also intended to impact redistricting in order to create more districts that are safe for Republicans.

As if all that isn’t enough, Republicans have continued to bombard voters with disinformation to create fear and confusion. They have embraced Russian interference and disinformation campaigns. And, I believe, Trump’s performance in the first debate was intended to cause numerous voters to become so disgusted with politics that they stay home on Election Day due to the reality that voter suppression always benefits Republican candidates, since the majority of Americans support Democratic policies.

The only solution to such tactics is to vote. Vote as if the future of our democracy depends on it. Because it does.

The GOP’s War On Democracy.

The dismantling of the US Postal Service by Trump’s campaign donor and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has garnered deserved attention from the media and a large cross-section of Americans. Certainly, the impact on mail-in and absentee voting by slowing down the mail will disenfranchise tens of thousands of American voters. But we must keep in mind that it’s not the only GOP attempts to prevent large segments of Americans, especially black and Native Americans, from voting.

Over the past five decades, Republicans have instituted extreme gerrymandering in the states where they control the governorship and legislature. For example, Austin, Texas is the state capital and the state’s 11th largest city. It is also a bastion of liberalism. Yet the state has been so gerrymandered its residents have no representation in the state’s legislature or the US Congress.

Other states like North Carolina and Wisconsin have also resorted to such extreme gerrymandering to guarantee that Democrats cannot easily obtain majorities in their legislatures. And they have taken matters a step further. When the two states elected Democratic governors, the Republican majority legislatures and the lame-duck Republican governors signed into law measures that would take away much of the new governors’ powers.

There is more.

Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed laws to require voter IDs. Then they made it difficult for the poor to obtain the IDs by specifying they could only be obtained at certain DMV locations. Those locations are often located far away. And they have limited hours which forces the poor to take time off from work to obtain them.

Moreover, Republicans have closed many polling places in Democratic-leaning districts, reduced early voting periods, and limited voting hours forcing voters to stand in line for hours. They have purged tens of thousands of voters from registration lists for not voting in the past two general elections. They have passed laws to prevent college students from voting in the districts where their colleges are located forcing them to drive or fly back to the districts where their parents live in order to vote. And they have passed laws that make it illegal for felons to vote, even after they have served their sentences and paid their debt to society. And when a voter referendum restoring felons’ voting rights passed in Florida, the Republican legislature passed a law requiring the felons to pay court and legal costs for their trials. The same state famously prevented thousands of registered voters from voting in the 2000 elections because they had the same, or similar, names as felons.

Many Republican-controlled states adopted untested and unreliable electronic voting machines, some of which can be easily hacked. As a result, many voters have reported that the machines actually changed their votes when they pressed the button to record their votes. And because many of the machines have no paper trail, the voter theft is impossible to uncover. Many believe the 2004 presidential election was stolen from Senator John Kerry when Diebold voting machines recorded votes for Kerry as votes for George W. Bush.

And, despite Trump’s statements that absentee ballots are safer than other mail-in ballots, there is little evidence of voter fraud involving votes by mail. Indeed, the only examples involve Republicans. A GOP operative in North Carolina was charged following the 2018 election. And an investigation by an independent consortium into the 2000 Florida presidential election uncovered hundreds of absentee ballots counted for Bush – enough to sway the election results – that sported the same signature.

As if all of this isn’t enough, the Trump campaign solicited and embraced election interference from Russia during the run-up to the 2016 election. If you doubt that, I refer you to Section One of the Mueller Report. Though Trump’s Attorney General characterized the report as an exoneration, the campaign’s blatant cooperation with Russia was clearly documented by the Mueller investigation. That didn’t seem to matter to Republican senators. Even when Trump was impeached for his illegal attempt to coerce Ukraine into providing election help in exchange for US foreign aid, they refused to remove him from office saying they believed Trump had learned his lesson. Yet, afterward, far from being cowed by his impeachment, Trump openly solicited election help from Russia, Ukraine and China during the 2020 campaign.

In an effort to intimidate voters, particularly in minority areas, the GOP has recruited up to 50,000 “poll watchers” for election day. So when you arrive at the polls, you will likely be greeted by armed members of rightwing militias and the “alt-right” who may be spoiling for a confrontation. And, of course, we can’t forget that the GOP called upon the conservative majority Supreme Court to undermine the Voting Rights Act of 1964 allowing the most racist states to, once again, engage in a variety of tactics to prevent people of color from voting.

Given all of this, one has to ask: Do Republicans believe in democracy? Obviously, the answer is a resounding “No!” It’s clear that we now have less to fear from foreign rivals than we do from one of our two largest political parties.

It’s Now Clear That One Of Our Political Parties No Longer Believes In Democracy.

For most of our history, the US has been dominated by two political parties. Though they have been fiercely competitive, they have always seemed willing to agree on the relative infallibility of the Constitution. And they have been willing to put their faith in the electorate. But over the past few decades, something changed.

The Republican Party – the Grand Old Party that led the fight to end slavery; the party that staked its future on holding the nation together following the secession of the South; the party of Abraham Lincoln – has seemingly abandoned its faith in democracy. Instead of fighting for the right of every American citizen to vote, they have falsified claims of widespread voter fraud as an excuse to create numerous obstacles for college students, the elderly and minority voters.

Prior to the midterm election, North Dakota’s GOP-controlled legislature passed a law requiring voters to have IDs with street addresses knowing that those living on the state’s Native American reservations have none. In Georgia, the GOP gubernatorial candidate who held the office of Secretary of State used his office to purge legitimately-registered voters, to shutter polling places in predominately minority areas, and to stall roughly 53,000 voter registrations based on alleged inconsistencies with their voting registration information.

In Texas, there were accounts of electronic voting machines changing votes from Democratic candidates to Republicans. In Florida and numerous other GOP-controlled states, the voting rolls were purged of tens of thousands of voters for failure to vote in previous elections or failure to update their voting information following a move. Many students were not allowed to vote where they attend college, instead being required to vote in their parent’s state of residence.

Want more evidence of the GOP’s contempt for democracy?

Consider the fact that, as a result of extreme GOP gerrymandering, Republicans were able to elect more candidates to legislatures despite Democrats receiving substantial majorities of votes. Or consider that, as Arizona, Florida and California continued to count legal votes following Election Day – many of them absentee and mail-in ballots that were dropped off at polling places – Republicans screamed fraud. They demanded the counts be stopped. They even claimed that election officials put in place by Republican governors and legislatures were attempting to steal the election for Democrats. Meanwhile, Democrats insisted that every vote count regardless of party.

And, in at least three states where Democrats were elected governor, GOP-controlled legislatures have pushed laws to diminish and restrict the power of the governor’s office before the governors-elect can be sworn into office! Can there be any greater affront to the will of the voters? To democracy itself?

Republicans must be held accountable for their actions. Voters should demand that all states commit to automatic or same-day voter registration such as Minnesota. They should demand an end to gerrymandering through the implementation of independent redistricting commissions such as those in Arizona, California, Idaho and Washington. They should demand modern, reliable and tamper-proof voting machines that create a paper trail for recounts. And they should punish any political party that tries to undermine the will of the people.

Why Democrats Lose Despite Having A Majority.

The 2016 presidential election again demonstrated that a majority of US voters align with Democrats. Hillary Clinton did, after all, win the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. Had she not lost 5 key battleground states by a total of approximately 100,000 votes, she would be president. And Combover Hitler would be relegated to an ugly footnote in American history.

In fact, in 2 of the last 3 elections won by a Republican, Democrats received a majority of the votes cast. That was made possible by a combination of voter suppression, Republican gerrymandering and the antiquated Electoral College (a vote in the sparsely populated state of Wyoming is worth many times that of a vote in California or New York).

Further, Republicans have a structural advantage when it comes to the news media, especially in rural areas. Since the end of the Fairness Doctrine, right wing conservatives have been able to spew their lies, conspiracy theories and anti-government hate with impunity on AM talk radio and Fox News Channel. They have also created numerous websites that cloak ideology in the guise of news.

Moreover, Republicans have unified while Democrats bicker among themselves. If elected Republican officials dare to vote their conscience against the wishes of the Party, they are labeled RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) and they are faced with well-financed candidates who are even more conservative during the primaries. Democrats, on the other hand, have difficulty keeping their members in line. Indeed, they have long taken pride in describing themselves with a line by Will Rogers – “I’m not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

In addition, when in office, Democrats have been unwilling to do anything that will cause substantial harm to the nation. Unlike Republicans, they have not used the filibuster to block every initiative of a presidential opponent. They have not shut down the government. And they have been far less likely to use parliamentary tricks in order to get their way.

Far too often, voters are left with the feeling that Democrats do not have the courage of their convictions.

Of course, Democratic voters are not blameless for the mess we now face. For decades, they have been willing to turn out in large numbers for presidential races. But many have failed to vote in local and state elections – a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by Republican leaders who for decades have focused their attention on such races with the knowledge that candidates who are successful at the local level eventually become successful in more important races.

It is this strategy that has allowed Republicans to control statehouses and governorships across the country. And, in turn, that allows Republicans to pass laws to gerrymander districts and to pass laws that suppress the votes of minority voters who traditionally vote against them. In these efforts, they are aided by greedy corporations that use ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) to pass one-sided legislation that undermines working class voters.

During such assaults on our democracy, the leaders of the Democratic Party have remained relatively silent, choosing to believe that the future is in their favor; that the growing numbers of people of color, especially Latinos will turn the tide.

Don’t count on it. Because of the structural imbalance in the media, far too few people understand what Democrats stand for. They can tell you that Republicans stand for “smaller government and lower taxes.” But if you ask 100 people, even 100 Democrats, what Democrats stand for, you’re likely to get 100 different answers. Worse, the most common answer will be the label created by Republicans – “tax and spend Democrats .”

Given these obstacles, what are Democrats to do?

First, quit apologizing for your beliefs whenever you are confronted by conservatives. You are on the side of working people – the largest group of American voters. You also have a great track record. After all, it was Democrats that passed Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. It was Democrats that rescued our economy from the Great Depression and the Great Recession. It is Democrats that have been the party of fiscal responsibility while Republicans have blithely rung up huge deficits and debts.

Second, show that you have the courage of your convictions. Show that you are willing to fight for the people who elect you.

Third, vote! Don’t sit out any election. And don’t let any Republican candidate go unchallenged. Don’t concede a single federal, state or local office to a Republican just because you think you might lose. History is filled with accounts of long shots who have won elections and gone on to accomplish great things.

Fourth, stop bickering among yourselves. Support those who will support the majority of your beliefs. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good. You may not think a particular Democratic leader or candidate is perfect. But they’re almost certainly better than the Republican alternative. (How many of those who voted for the Green Party now wish they would have voted for Clinton?)

Fifth, police the candidates who run under the Party banner. Don’t support a candidate who doesn’t, for the most part, toe the Party line. You don’t have to agree with everything a candidate says, but you should be able to agree with a majority of what the candidate says.

Sixth, and most important, communicate your beliefs. Make the label Democrat stand for something. Make your message succinct, clear and memorable. Then plaster that message everywhere. In other words, create a brand!

Then, and only then, will the Party that represents the majority of Americans control the majority of elected offices.