If men and white people were the only voters, Donald Trump would have won the 2020 election in a landslide. These plain truths underscore the political dynamics in America today.
This is not a new story, nor is it unique to Trump. The last time Democrats won a majority from either of these groups was in 1964 when voters, fearful of Barry Goldwater’s extremism, delivered Lyndon B Johnson his own mandate.
Never mind the myth of meritocracy. America has always been ruled by white men. Business, politics, economics and culture cater to their needs above all. The modern Republican Party is their standard-bearer. Trump didn’t reinvent the GOP. He simply lifted the veil. He dispensed with the pretence.
Republicans know that maintaining white supremacy is getting harder in an increasingly diverse America. Their party has won a majority of voters in a presidential election only once in the past 30 years.
Luckily for them the popular vote doesn’t determine the winner. But it does reveal a changing nation.
Since 1980 the share of the non-Hispanic white population has declined from 80% to 58%. This is an extraordinary shift in just four decades — from a dominant monoculture towards a multiracial, multicultural, pluralistic society. The trend shows no sign of abating.
After Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, the GOP conducted a comprehensive post-election review that stressed the need to expand its appeal. Trump ignored that plan, and doubled down on white voters. To everyone’s surprise, including his own, his strategy worked in 2016. Despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million, he eked out a narrow victory in the Electoral College.
However, the strategy failed in 2020. Joe Biden won 7 million more votes than Trump, and not even the Electoral College could save him. Trump refused to yield. Instead he leaned in and launched the Big Lie, which at its core rests on the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory that America is being stolen from its rightful white owners. “You’re not going to have a country any more,” he spat.
The Republican Party has followed his lead. It doesn’t believe it can win if all eligible citizens cast a ballot. So it has chosen to rig the rules.
Elections are a maths puzzle. You can win by adding voters to your column. Or you can win by subtracting voters from your opponents’ column. By tipping the scales a point here and a couple of points there, you can compile a winning margin.
Both parties play this game. But the Republicans play it much rougher. They do whatever it takes.
This is the backstory to last week’s voting rights showdown in the United States Senate. On Monday the national public holiday in honour of Martin Luther King Jr, Republicans joined Democrats to laud the slain civil rights leader. On Wednesday they rejected everything he stood for by blocking two voting rights bills — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — designed to ensure uniform federal election standards in every state, and equal access to the ballot box for every eligible citizen.
In America, federal elections are not managed by a national agency. Instead all 50 states have distinct rules. But it’s worse than that. Local officials in 3243 districts scattered across the country administer the actual voting. The largest, Los Angeles County, has more than 10 million residents. The smallest, Kalawao County in Hawaii, has fewer than 100. This jigsaw democracy has enabled wide disparities of election procedures and discriminatory voter access. Imagine Bendigo having different voting rules from Dubbo.
These were the loopholes exploited by the Jim Crow South to disenfranchise Black Americans until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 after Selma’s Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The law was enacted to enforce the rights granted by the 15thAmendment 95 years earlier. Most Republican politicians supported the bill in 1965, and again when it was renewed in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006. In 2006 the Senate voted 98-0 to reauthorise it and 16 current Republican senators voted for it.
However, in 2013 the Supreme Court declared that key provisions of the act were unconstitutional. Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, a staunch opponent of voting rights legislation, the court’s conservatives voted 5-4 in Shelby County v Holder to gut the law. They argued that the country had changed, and that the law was “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day”.
Republicans wasted no time in proving them wrong. In state after state they began to reimpose spurious laws and regulations surgically targeted at voters less likely to support them. These are primarily non-white and younger voters. They closed some polling stations and understaffed others, purged voter rolls, mandated identification laws tailored to their base, limited voting hours and mail ballot applications, and a raft of other measures all designed to chip away support for their opponents.
Their aim is to create friction in voting by putting sand in the machinery. Remember, elections are a maths puzzle.
In 2021, terrified by historic voter turnout and emboldened by Trump’s Big Lie, Republicans stepped up their attack. In 19 states they passed 34 new laws to stack the deck in their favour. They reduced ballot drop boxes, eliminated same-day voter registration, restricted polling hours, and outlawed assisting others to vote. In Georgia they made it a crime to give food or water to voters waiting in line. More laws are on the way.
As a failsafe, they have also facilitated partisan supervision of election counts and granted themselves the authority to override voters’ choices.
They piously parrot that these measures are essential to ensure “election integrity”. They provide no evidence to sustain these claims, because there is none. Every word is a lie.
In less than a decade, Republicans have unleashed an avalanche of voter suppression designed to create disincentives and fear of voting among specific citizens who don’t support them.
All this led to last week’s Senate stalemate. Democrats wanted to restore the Voting Rights Act by addressing the Supreme Court’s objections, and to establish minimum federal election standards that would apply consistently in every state. These included rules for early and mail voting, voter identification, a ban on gerrymandering, ensuring no one waits more than 30 minutes to vote, and making election day, always a Tuesday, a legal public holiday.
It also provided for automatic voter registration for all eligible citizens; 63 million Americans — one quarter of the electorate — were prevented from voting in 2020 because of arbitrary registration rules. The constitution makes no mention of voter registration, yet this bureaucratic hurdle is routinely used to limit who can vote. The obstacle is so embedded that few think to query it, or ask why the onus should not be on government to ensure every adult citizen can vote. Since 2015, 20 states and the District of Columbia have implemented automatic voter registration, which confirms it can be done.
Republicans decry these measures as a “federal takeover” of elections. Their language is instructive. It is the same used by Jim Crow politicians to defend their pernicious system. They elide the truth that Article 1 of the constitution empowers Congress to regulate the “times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives” at any time.
This fight is about raw power. Who wins it, who wields it, and who benefits from it.
Republicans are waging a multi-front battle to reinstate Jim Crow 2022 and preserve white supremacy in America. They want to control who can vote, when they can vote, where they can vote, and how they can vote, with a veto over the final count and criminal sanctions against anyone who violates their rules. Right now, they are winning.
