Election Day
I wrote this on Monday, November 7, because I’m going to be busy today. (I scheduled it to be posted and distributed this morning.) I’m an election officer at my local precinct — you know, one of those people who have been blamed for stealing elections. I’ll be there from 5:00 am on Tuesday morning until all the ballots are accounted for (although not yet tabulated) at probably 8:00 or 9:00 at night. Election officers aren’t allowed to leave the precinct. We’ll bring in food for a snacking potluck throughout the day. My precinct captain will make sure that coffee, water, and soft drinks are available. We’re not supposed to be on our phones that day. We are supposed to be insulated from whatever is going on outside of our precinct.
Americans are constantly told that every election is important and that every vote counts. That’s always true, but it is also true that today’s election may be the most important in our lifetimes and that, more than ever, every vote counts. That’s because the Republican Party continues to be engaged in a systematic long-term effort to gerrymander, restrict voting rights, funnel massive amounts of cash into campaigns, and clog up the court system with lawsuits to challenge any races they lose in order to subvert our political process. We can’t let them do that.
There are three major issues on the ballot this year: the economy, democracy, and abortion. I don’t see these as different issues, however, and here’s why.
Saving democracy is an economic issue. The economy will continue to work against people like you and me as long as the Republican Party can maintain power and pass legislation that appeases their moneyed base. It’s no accident that Democratic Presidents always have to clean up after their Republican predecessors. (I wrote about this on October 14 if you want to check it out.) Trickle-down economics doesn’t, and it’s the middle class and the poor who are left holding the bag. The tricks that the Republicans have employed to keep themselves in power create problems for our democracy, but they also hurt the economy.
Abortion is about saving democracy. The majority of Americans want to maintain access to abortion and other aspects of reproductive healthcare (including contraception), but a cabal of right-wing judges in both the Supreme Court and lower courts has decided not to allow this decision to be made through the democratic process. In addition, Republican legislators at the state and national levels have worked to ensure that a minority of voters can elect legislative majorities at the expense of the majority of voters. One example I read last week – because of gerrymandering, Democrats in Wisconsin have to get 62% of the popular vote to gain a majority in the state legislature, whereas Republicans only have to get 44% of the vote to hold the majority. Couple this with the outmoded (and NOT originalist) filibuster in the United States Senate, where the minority can keep the majority from passing laws that the majority of the American public supports. Republicans refuse to abolish the filibuster because they know they cannot achieve a majority in the Senate but they want to remain in power anyway.
Abortion is an economic issue. The high healthcare costs associated with pregnancy shape every couple’s decision about having children, and the fear of having to bear (and then support) an unplanned child exacerbates the problem. Lack of access to reproductive health care (including abortion and contraceptives) makes it difficult for women to plan for their economic future, including continuing their education or obtaining a dependable, high-paying job. In another context, when Mao Zedong assumed power in China in 1949 (admit it — you didn’t predict that I would quote Mao in this essay), he encouraged women to join the labor force by saying “women hold up half the sky.” In the United States, 47% of the workforce is female (not quite half, but you get the point). If almost half the workforce is prevented from making a full contribution to the American economy, that’s a problem.
Saving Democracy = Rescuing the Economy = Protecting Abortion Rights. Ipse Dixit. (The thing speaks for itself). It’s all one problem.
I mentioned earlier that the Republicans have attempted to gerrymander, restrict voting rights, funnel massive amounts of cash into campaigns, and clog up the court system in order to stay in power. Let’s look at how the GOP has gone about this.
Gerrymandering: Take a look at the Republican Red Map Project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP. (I know that Wikipedia is not an acceptable academic source, but this information is fine for our purposes). This project, launched in 2010 and still ongoing, is focused on increasing Republican control of congressional seats and state legislatures through partisan gerrymandering.
A NOTE: Under the leadership of a Democratic legislature and Governor, Virginia passed a Constitutional Amendment to establish an independent commission to redistrict after the 2020 census. You can go to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to see how well Virginia (and your state) did.)
Voting Rights: Now take a look at the 2013 Supreme Court Ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. In this case, in a 5-4 decision (with Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito in the majority — all appointed by Republicans), the court struck down the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. Read about it here. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/shelby-county-v-holder. Specifically, the court struck down Section 4(b) of the act, which required states across the South – including Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and parts of other states -- to obtain a “preclearance” from the Justice Department before they could change their voting laws or practices in a way that would harm minority voters. This effectively made Section 5 of the act inoperative. These states were selected because they had a long-term and well-documented history of passing voting regulations that disadvantaged racial minorities and poor people. Many of the voting rights restrictions enacted in recent years would not have been permitted had preclearance still been in effect.
The Republican Party has been pushing the “voter fraud” narrative since at least the 1960s. By “voter fraud” they mean, generally, voter impersonation (or in-person voter fraud), in which an eligible voter votes more than once or a person who is not eligible to vote does so by boring under the name of an eligible voter. The Heritage Foundation, the party’s right-wing think tank (I use the word think in jest) has been providing academic cover for this narrative since the 1980s. Most reputable sources say that this type of voter fraud is vanishingly small, but that does not stop the GOP from catastrophizing the possibility.
In 2002, the Bush Administration directed the DOJ to investigate allegations of voter fraud in major cities (why cities? Because people who live in cities vote for Democrats.). It came to nothing after five years. Alberto Gonzales, appointed Attorney General by Bush in 2005, resigned in 2007 because of allegations of impropriety associated with this investigation. In the 2016 election cycle, The Former Guy (I don’t like to mention his name) proclaimed that the only way he could lose was if the election were stolen. Even when he “won” the Electoral College vote, he argued that he would have won the popular vote as well if it were not for cheating in California and other states. As President, he appointed a bipartisan commission to find proof of voter fraud; this commission was disbanded in disarray after seven months without having found any proof of voter fraud. Nevertheless, TFG was back at it in 2020, furiously denying that he had lost. He hasn’t stopped arguing about it. TFG has endorsed 159 candidates who are election deniers for state and federal offices this year.
NOTE: When the Democrats controlled the executive and legislative branches of government in Virginia from 2019 through 2021, they passed a state “preclearance” statute that imposed this requirement on any voting changes in the state. The federal government wouldn’t need to do this if the states would do it on their own — but states controlled by Republicans won’t do this. No Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates or State Senate voted in favor of this law. No Republicans voted for the recent voting rights act that passed the House of Representatives. Republicans know that if everyone can vote, the GOP loses. Demographics are against them. In a nation where the population is skewing younger, more urban, and less white, a political party whose appeal is intentionally focused on old rural white folks is going to have trouble winning elections. So they have to keep everyone else from voting.
Campaign Finance: Or take a look at another Supreme Court case, this time Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission. You can read about it here https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/reform-money-politics/campaign-finance-courts/citizens-united. This 2010 case overturned a longstanding FEC rule that prohibited corporations from making independent campaign expenditures. Back in the 1970s, the court had ruled that individual campaign contributions are the equivalent of political speech, and, since speech is protected by the First Amendment, campaign contributions were protected as well. What Citizens United said was that corporations are actually people (with First Amendment rights) and that their contributions therefore cannot be restricted. Which justices voted with this majority? I know you won’t be surprised that it’s the Fab Five – Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy. Republican legislatures across the country refuse to support campaign finance regulations that would decrease the influence of their cash cows. According to a 2020 book by Samuel L. Popkin, Crackup: The Republican Implosion and the Future of Presidential Politics, “the ruling weakened political parties while strengthening single-issue advocacy groups and Super PACs funded by billionaires with pet issues. The ruling made it easier for self-promoting politicians to undermine political processes and democratic norms to promote themselves.” YA THINK!?!?!?!?
Lawsuits: We saw this most directly after the 2020 election when the Sore Loser (my second favorite name for TFG) unleashed a mob on the Capitol to retain power (threatening to hang the Vice President in the process) and brought more than 60 unsuccessful lawsuits in various state and federal courts to overturn the election results.
In the current election cycle, election deniers and “stop the steal” provocateurs are running for office all over the country – most disturbingly, perhaps, seeking the Secretary of State positions in various states. These are the positions charged with running elections. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? We have seen candidates repeat that they will not accept the election results if they lose. Most recently, this position has been expressed by the noxious (although well-groomed) Republican Gubernatorial candidate in Arizona, Kari Lake, and the slime-weasel posing as a United States Senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson.
Getting rid of TFG was not enough, apparently, to rid the country of the stench that accompanied him. The Republican Party does not have any platform other than whatever it is that TFG wants, and, since that changes daily or even hourly, no one who votes for any Republican can guess what they’ll do in office. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who ran against TFG in 2016 and famously tweeted “If we nominate [TFG], we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it,” has morphed into a toadying lickspittle who is caught up in the drama of TFG and may well end up not only out of the Senate but in prison as a result.
It is not an accident that it is in the so-called swing states – the ones where the races are always tight and victory “swings” from Republican to Democrat – that the most egregiously incompetent GOP candidates are on the ballot for governor and United States Senator. Governors (at least under the GOP's warped vision of how the system is supposed to work) would have some control over how the individual states certify their electoral votes before transmitting them to Washington on December 12, 2024 (after the November Presidential election). I would prefer to have governors named Shapiro, Abrams, and Hobbs making these decisions rather than Mastriano, Kemp, and Lake.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the process in the states proceeds the way it’s supposed to – what happens when the Congress – particularly the Senate – counts the electoral votes on January 6, 2025? I would prefer to have Fetterman, Ryan, Warnock, and Kelly in these positions over Oz, Vance, Walker, and Masters. Democracy survived the attack on January 6, 2021, because the institutional structures held — barely. In January 2025, if the GOP is successful in its concerted effort to place these clowns in office, the result may be quite otherwise.
TFG plans to retain relevance by declaring himself a candidate for 2024 within the next couple of weeks – primarily because his narcissistic self can’t abide being anything other than the center of attention. He also appears to believe that declaring his candidacy insulates him from prosecution.
NARRATOR: Fani Willis, the prosecutor in Fulton County (Atlanta), Georgia, would like a word.
NARRATOR: Along with the Republican National Committee, who announced that they will no longer pay his legal bills if he announces his candidacy.
NARRATOR: And Tish James (New York Attorney General) is on hold.
I don’t know what will happen in today’s election. What I fear is that if the Republicans lose races they expected to win (and they’ve been pushing a lot of blatantly fraudulent polls over the past month or so showing them in the lead in tight races), we’ll see an explosion of court challenges that will tie up the transition to a new House and Senate (and similar transitions in state elections across the country). We have known for years that TFG is willing to blow up the country’s political institutions just for the hell of it – and his party seems willing to go right along with him. We can’t let that happen.
I think the next couple of months (and possibly years) will be ugly indeed.