Let's talk about the demise of democracy and how Republicans are trying to save it.
Wait. Republicans? I meant Democrats, right?
That's certainly how I see it. It's also how nearly all of you see it. But it's not the way everyone sees it. Republicans, in particular, have been convinced for a very long time that Democrats routinely steal elections. I wrote about this ten years ago in "The Dog That Voted and Other Election Fraud Yarns," and the following ten years have done nothing except cement this belief even further into the Republican psyche.
Do Republicans really believe this? Among party leaders, I don't know. Some always have. Some have convinced themselves just from saying it so often. And some probably don't but play along cynically.
Likewise, among the rank and file, some are believers and some aren't. But as time has passed, and both Fox News and party leaders have unceasingly hammered on this, more and more conservative voters have turned into believers. Trust in elections went down to a dismal 60% in 2008 and stayed there throughout the Obama years even as Republicans won landslide victories in congressional elections. It rebounded a bit during the Trump presidency, but by 2020 trust had already fallen back to about 60%. After the election it fell off a cliff:
The story behind the chart is a simple one: What do you do if Democrats routinely show disdain for fair voting? What if you've tried and tried to get them to clean up their corrupt ward bosses, fake voters, and laughable urban vote counts, but none of it has worked? Answer: You fight back harder. Because American democracy is on its last legs and someone has to do it.
So the stage was all set for Republicans to go ballistic after the 2020 election. They'd known Democrats were cheating for a long time, but never had it been this brazen. Never had Democrats managed to steal the presidency. It was time for war.
If the only way to ensure a fair vote was to restrict early voting and mail voting and other easy targets for cheating, so be it. If Democrats refused to get rid of crooked precinct counters, then Republicans would have to dive into local politics and do it themselves. And if even that wasn't enough, they'd have to reserve the right to let Republican legislatures intervene to make sure that votes were counted accurately.
Naturally, Democrats would fuss and fume and insist that it was Republicans who were playing dirty. But nobody outside their lackeys in the press actually believed that. It was all just pretense. The truth was simpler: Democrats had been all but open about their corruption for years, and in 2020 they finally went too far. Democracy—and America itself—was at stake now. If they wanted war, it was war they'd get.
We don't actually have to accept the framing that the poor benighted Republicans truly believe elections have been stolen from them. It's pure bad faith. They would like to steal elections from us and this is simply cover. It's fine to just say that.
They have stolen elections. Florida 2000. NC9th US House 2018. Quite possibly Michigan in 2016.
Yep, they did indeed. Also possibly Ohio 2004.
of course they do. they watch fox news, listen to righty radio telling them so. they hang with friends and family who think like they do. they believe the majority of voters in this country are just like them, so it's impossible that dolt 45 could possibly lose an election.
We don't actually have to accept the framing that the poor benighted Republicans truly believe elections have been stolen from them. It's pure bad faith. They would like to steal elections from us and this is simply cover. It's fine to just say that.
Some genuinely believe the Big Lie narrative. Some don't. It's clear that actual, heart-felt belief that Democrats steal elections is widespread among the stupider members of the MAGA/right wing movement. Though far from universal. Many, of course, are merely cynical, as Kevin has suggested.
>Do Republicans really believe this? Among party leaders, I don't know.
Oooh, oooh, I know this one! No, stupid as a lot of Republican officeholders are, they know that elections are conducted and observed by members of both major parties, and that their party controls more state governments than Democrats do. And they know how few cases of actual fraudulent votes have been found by Republican Secretaries of State and state Attorneys General, because all of those efforts were loudly hyped by Republicans, until they failed utterly. So they are (gasp) lying sacks of shit who are cynically pushing a phony issue for political advantage, and they don’t care that they are destroying a democracy which until the late 20th century was becoming more and more just and free. It is malevolence, not gullibility.
Exactly. If the GQP leadership thought elections were crooked, Eric Cantor, no. 3 House GQP, never would have conceded to Dave Brat.
Yes, yes, yes. The vast majority of Republican leaders know there is no significant voter fraud. There will always be some gullible people - now more than ever since the advent of Fox News - who will believe weird and unlikely things. A few of them are elected leaders. Who knows if Ron Johnson really thinks Listerine kills Covid? He just might as he appears to be a moron. But most of the leadership ?
They know this stuff, including election fraud, is nonsense. They are who the press need to keep hammering on. Keep asking Mitch and Roy and John Thune
about the election and about Trump's ongoing lies and don't allow them to say they think it's time to move on. We can move on when the Trumpist lie has been put to rest forever.
how do these clowns (with apologies to real, actual clowns) square the idea that the election was "stolen" when the democrats won the white house but fell far, far short of expectations in the house and senate and in the various statehouses? seriously. especially in florida and texas, where THEY basically control the election mechanisms. when nine zillion post election lawsuits provide zero evidence of fraud. i mean seriously ...
The Democrat Party didn't want to make the theft too obvious. One Saddam Mugabe in joebiden was enough to gum up the populist works, anyway; rig too many Congressional races, & the Red part of the Red-Brown coalition might have actually been able to combat the ( ( ( cosmopolitan corporatists ) ) ).
In the end, the rigging wasn't to screw just the GQP of El Jefe Maximo, but as with the smaller scale shithousery at the Iowa Caucus 2020, to screw Bernie & his true believers.
yep. the dems are so clever that they made it nearly impossible for themselves to govern. very, very clever!
And dems are so clever that they could pull off massive election fraud in multiple swing states and not a single operative got caught! Devious master criminals!
... oh, it's just that the Deep State won't pursue them. Or something.
AREPA 2020: A Venezuelan Journey into Electioneering.
This is but one specific example of a vastly larger phenomenon. Generally, Democrats and Republicans accuse each other of the same things. The symmetry of what Democrats and Republicans accuse each other of is so extensive that a naive casual observer would conclude that both side are just flinging mud. The underlying reality, however, is very different. To a some extent, this symmetry arises simply because it is a Republican tactic to accuse Democrats of what Republicans are doing. But I digress.
On this specific issue...do Republicans REALLY believe it? Sort of, but I don't think Republicans believe political things in the same way Democrats do. For example, Democrats really believe that partisan gerrymandering is unfair, undemocratic, and wrong. How do Democrats act on this belief? They enact nonpartisan schemes for drawing district boundaries where they can. This costs Democrats dearly, because Republicans do no such thing where they are in control. On the other side, Republicans believe that voter fraud is rife and must be addressed with voter ID laws while Democrats complain that these tend to disenfranchise marginal voters. How do Republicans act on this belief? By enacting voter ID laws that place burdens on marginal voters. It would be possible to enact such laws with provisions that make sure that all eligible voters get an ID, but they do not do that. They also have some curiously different ideas on ballot access depending on whether a district is rural or urban.
I think it would be more accurate to say that Republicans truly believe they are the real Americans, they are the real patriots, and thus they should be in charge. Democratic victories are prospectively illegitimate because they are anti-American/Constitution/Christian. Hence, anything that helps keep Democrats out of power is presumptively legitimate and necessary. Republicans and Democrats have very different concepts of fairness and justice when it comes to elections. For a Democrat, fair is when every legal voter gets to vote. For Republicans, fair is when the Republican wins.
Well said. I agree entirely.
It occurs to me that the history of voter fraud claims made about the 2020 election definitively answer this question. In the past, these claims have been made casually, but in the absence of any real evidence were not acted upon. This time, with Trump screaming "fraud!", was different. REPUBLICANS ran multiple "audits" of the election, something that as far as I know is unprecedented. They did this in Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan (if I recall correctly), and most famously, in Arizona. All of those Republican-run investigations found negligible fraud and reported that. So tell me, did Republican belief in "voter fraud" go down in the aftermath of those investigations? The answer to the question "Do Republicans really believe in pervasive electoral fraud perpetrated by Democrats?" is "wrong question."
The Wisconsin fraudit was overseen by elections management amateur Michael Gabelman, late of the Wisconsin Supremes. He is also one of the more prominent recent alumni of my alma mater -- & with Al Jarreau dead, Dick Bennett retured from coaching basketball, & Harrison Ford old as dirt, Gabelman will likely vault to most notable &/or notorious, period, soon enough -- but I have yet to see any of my more famous fellow Redhawks give Mikey the old whatfor in print.
Concur on both counts. They believe in "democracy" as they define it, to wit, not rule by the people generally but by the people who deserve to rule, i.e., them.
And as to believing in "fraud," yes I think they do believe in it, but only as a consequence, a corollary, of their belief that the election was "stolen." They believe it was stolen, therefore there must have been some mechanism for stealing it, ie "fraud," and the exact nature of the "fraud" is of minor importance. This is why there's no point in arguing evidence with them, and why they flit from theory to theory like butterflies on meth; they don't reason from evidence to conclusion, but from foundational belief to the implication that there must be evidence to support it.
+1 Slurpee with Sarah Palin
...thus they should be in charge. Democratic victories are prospectively illegitimate because they are anti-American/Constitution/Christian. Hence, anything that helps keep Democrats out of power is presumptively legitimate and necessary.
Bingo. It's been increasingly clear for years now that large swaths of right wing America genuinely believe standard-issue Democratic Party policy prerogatives (safety net spending, redistributive taxation, firearms regulations, anti-discrimination policies, worker/consumer/environmental protections, etc) are ipso facto unconstitutional. Because in their (unfounded, and idiotic) view, the constitution mandates right wing and/or economic libertarian outcomes. ERGO preventing victories by Democrats by any means necessary is identical to defending the constitution. So, anything and everything is justified. Because in their view, it's a war against the enemies of the constitution.
"If the only way to ensure a fair vote was to restrict early voting and mail voting and other easy targets for cheating, so be it."
It would have been nice if you had supplied a "Republicansplain" with the post. Something along the lines of:
fair vote = Republican win
easy targets of cheating = easy targets for preventing Democratic win
early voting and mail voting = often the only viable voting options for minorities and the poor
Much as they never produced any evidence of significant fraudulent voting, they never explained how voting procedures meant to make voting more accessible, were particularly vulnerable to the fraud they could never find …
Has anyone examined how well Republican trust in voting results correlates with Republican election wins?
Excellent question! (Besides that comment, I got nuthin')
Well, this is consistent with what the Republicans I know believe. They (weirdly, in my opinion) accuse Democrats of doing what they and their party regularly do; in support of this, they claim "politicians are all alike", and refuse to believe the contrary.
It's a neat, clean logical box, composed of false assumptions. But these folks will never examine their assumptions nor look at any evidence to the contrary because they've programmed themselves to trust only their own Rightwing Noise Machine sources.
Moreover, the news media, in its moral-free search for clicks because news needs to be a profit center, just like advertising, amplifies all the right wing lies and distortions. So digging out from this ever-deepening pit is going to be hard, and will take a long, long time.
I hear Josh Duggar has had a longtime sideline as silent partner in a Papa John's pizza franchise.
I believe most of it is performative but if its real then the only alternatives are capitulation to authoritarianism or civil war. Since covid has clearly demonstrated that Republicans have no problem with lots of dead bodies if it furthers their goals, we have a problem.
i don't trust republicans' self-reported belief in election fraud, to be honest. my guess is many simply lie to pollsters to justify their actions.
To be honest, I was entertained by some of the Powerpoint slides in that alleged presentation (that Meadow may or may not have given to the Jan 6th committee) because as far as I could see, this would be an excellent way for election votes to be counted (with teams of checkers at every stage) anyway; the only reason it isn't would be because it would be so insanely expensive.
But all the evidence from the places where this sort of checking was done on the 2020 results has merely proved that the original votes were counted correctly, give or take a tiny margin of error.
(Mind you, that's actually a bit depressing because it suggests that the massive surge of Trump supporters were real, but it's also not clear if they are actually Republicans or not.)
You do know that there are election observers allowed (and in) all precincts? Both parties get running tallies directly back to their own offices and can compare them to the official state counts.
In every election I've been involved, there are ALWAYS, as a standard practice, people from both parties observing any hand counting. When the voter checks in to get their ballot, it's done with reps from both parties.
The fact is, Republican-following voters are clueless about how elections work. They may never even vote, or be suitably unobservant. They'll swallow any lie, if it comes from the right mouths. And the news media amplifies their ignorance.
+1
And I agree with kahner, because "Republicans" know that they are outnumbered - after all, some of the white supremacists complain about the US having too many POC & that they have lost their place in society - & they are lashing out with the most outlandish, flagrant lies to counter known facts. They have no shame. Even Cheney, knowing full well how the civil rights legislation of the sixties turned southern Democrats into Republicans, counts Abraham Lincoln as their hero - despite the fact that most others in her party seem to reserve their adulation for Andrew Jackson, Robert E. Lee, & Stonewall Jackson. They're just unashamed bigots & liars, which is why they demand sanitized histories in schools. Just more unashamed "alternative facts" from those who profess a belief in a religion & its commandments.
I don't pretend that they believe their constant lies.
Since the end of the civil war conservatives have always tried to curtail minority voting using myriads of pretexts. This pattern has followed in the entirety of my lifetime.
There's a big difference in the north and south. In the south, in 1952 only 8% of southern blacks voted in the presidential election. Southern conservatives were in a whole different league when it came to curtailing minority voting. (In 1968, black turnout climbed to over 50%.)
In the 1950s and 1960s, voter turnout in presidential elections was higher for northern blacks than southern whites.
I believe that at some level they know there's no evidence, but that only makes them insist harder.
Kevin does not get this quite right. Th reality is quite a bit simpler: What Republicans believe is this: Democracy is when the GOP wins. The very fact that Biden won is evidence of lack of democracy.
There is also this: Republicans have won almost with no interruption since the Reagan years (it is true that Clinton was president but they still got their disastrous welfare reform for example). The more they have been winning the more they felt entitled.
I think the evidence of every presidential election cycle after 1988, save 2004 (thanks, Wally!), proves the GQP has, in many ways, blown it worse than Nancy Reagan.
So easy to forget, but so important, that they never accepted Bill Clinton's election as fully legitimate. That was really the basis for Gingrich's Contract on America in 1994, which imo was the first substantial step on the gop's current path that's now gotten us to where anything except iron-bound control of all institutions of government at all levels is proof that sinister Dems and sinister interlopers and sinister foreigners (and probably sinister ETs) have somehow rigged it all against them.
The "reasoning" then was that Clinton never won a popular-vote majority, even though he beat Bush senior by 5-1/2 points and Dole by 8-1/2 and won massively in the EC. But Perot took big vote shares both times so they said Clinton wasn't a "real" president and only they could truly embody and represent the nation.
Evidence is the basic problem here. We all know how these sham election audits will end-- "their cheating was so good we can't figure out how they did it. But we know they did."
This is the land of ultimate derp and no amount of evidence can penetrate those shields. The true believers have failed the Enlightenment, and the craven can dissemble their way past anything.
More importantly, they've never paid any lasting price for getting ever more extreme in their conservatism. Obama and the Democrats hammered them pretty hard in 2008, but by 2010 they were back in power in Congress. Trump got a pretty stinging defeat in 2018 and 2020, but they'll probably have the House again in 2022.
I remember a good argument that Republicans had basically "solved" American national elections, and not in a good way. When you're not in power, just do everything to obstruct the people who are in power - they'll take the blame for it even if it's you. Then win big in the next election.
The whole voter fraud thing is a scam of course, but there are Republicans who truly believe it. The question isn't about calling them morons, as satisfying as that might be, but finding ways to allay their fears without preventing people from voting.
Democratic resistance to voter ID requirements has fueled their worst suspicions. I actually don't think showing some form of ID to vote is all that draconian. There are plenty of places where you need to show ID to enter or make a purchase. It should not be out of bounds to require voters to show ID to cast a ballot. I think if the Democrats use this issue as a trade off to get Republicans to eliminate some truly onerous restrictions to voting, there is a compromise to be had, and it might just alleviate some people's fears by removing one of the talking points from conservative media.
The question isn't about calling them morons, because they certainly are. As far as trying to engage with them, I offer an observation by Mark Twain: “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
The concern is mostly that poor people won't be able to get the idea, or their idea won't count. It doesn't help that Republican state governments often deliberately choose IDs that will privilege them but not others. Gun owner permit counts as legit idea, student ID does not.
Given the prevalence of showing IDs elsewhere, it seems like a small price to pay for something as serious as voting. The key isn't to reject the IDs but to make them as inclusive as possible. Otherwise you're just handing a gift to conservatives who say that it's the Democrats who are being unreasonable, and that allows them to be unreasonable themselves.
Well, in your world. (Mine, too.) However, there are lots of folks living in, shall we say, less civilized venues? You know, places where people pay cash. Where "the gig model" isn't something new and so 21st century.
Plenty of folks in my socioeconomic class keep arguing that "well, everybody has a driver's licence!!" No, they don't.
No, but there are plenty other forms of ID out there, and you can always create another form of easily obtainable ID that allows people to vote. Again, the solution is not to oppose IDs, but to make IDs as inclusive as possible. The benefit from eliminating a major conservative talking point far outweighs the risk of losing the few people who would want to vote yet refuse to take any steps necessary to do so.
There is no way eliminate this as a Republican talking point. They will just say that the ID was fraudulent. Trying to appease them is pointless. Remember this is a party that would rather have Vladimir Putin as “President” to any Democrat.
Also, read Kevin’s link.
For sure. If it were up to me, everybody would get a free national ID card with their picture on it.
Closest thing to that now is if you have a passport.
Republican legislators don’t need their fears alleviated. They know how elections work, and they know it is a practical impossibility to steal an election by in-person fraudulent voting. The choices of which IDs to allow often are clear evidence of bad faith - Brett’s example of gun permits vs student IDs is Texas law; not even IDs from state colleges and universities are accepted. And there is no evidence that Republicans are at all willing to compromise; instead, when existing methods of voter suppression don’t guarantee GOP wins, they add new restrictions. I agree only that that it is bad PR for Democrats to simply attack voter-ID laws. Democrats and good-government groups should support broadening the range of acceptable IDs, and removing cost and administrative barriers to obtaining ID, but Republicans will oppose any reforms that make voting easier in urban areas and among groups that tend to vote Democratic.
Joe Manchin tried to put together a compromise voting bill that required voters to show ID. He couldn't get Republican legislators to support the bill.
I pulled up a random right wing take on this, and it said that the voter ID provision was the one good point in an otherwise unacceptable bill. Someone like myself, who tends to be suspicious of Republicans, will wonder why the writer didn't describe the provisions of the bill that made it unacceptable, but someone who is already suspicious of Democrats is likely to accept this explanation without question. So my guess is that the embrace of voter ID by Manchin (and by Stacy Abrams, who endorsed the bill) didn't do much to relieve people's fears.
They do believe it, but it's at least in part because they WANT to believe it. The alternative--accepting that fair elections will reduce representation for white people--is more than they can handle rationally.
They believe what they want to believe. They don’t wait for proof.
I don't know what Kevin wants us to get from posts like this. Yes, Republicans believe there is a lot of voter fraud. Interestingly, they never seem to actually find it. How are the rest of us supposed to respond to this? How are we supposed to take seriously a claim that has no supportable evidence? One conclusion seems to be the one that Kevin doesn't want us to draw. This is all an elaborate myth that allows Republicans to believe whatever they want to believe despite the lack of any supporting evidence. How are we supposed to respond to nonsense? Does taking it seriously help or harm finding a way back to rationality? I think it harms us.
So do I.
Republicans have been brainwashed by Trump and Fox News.
That chart shows 55% say Trump's claims helped lead them to believe voter fraud is rampant.
45% say Fox, but also 33% Tucker Carlson, 30% Sean Hannity, 19% Dan Bongino - who are on Fox.
Simply put, Murdoch supports replacing democracy with dictatorship.
All of the debates involves **unproven** claims of fraud. There's lots of MAGA chaff flying about with hundreds of affidavits (which are not "proof"), worthless statistical analysis by John Lott, Shiva Ayyadurai, and Charles Cicchetti, and bald assertions of conspiracy by Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.
These people, those making the claims and those that believe them, are insane.
We've got to start using that word in a (for real) non-pejorative way. They are not sane.
Insane people aren't all bug-eyed, wearing tattered clothes & living in the shadows. Some wear nice suits and are successful in business.
I think this is right. However, calling someone insane doesn't usually promote a continuing discussion. I would like someone on TV after listening to one of these people simply look at him/her and say--"you are insane" and then cut to a commercial break.
I agree it pretty much stops the discussion, but we're at a place where there are two radically different world views. One, conventionally rational / empirical. The other a mix of tabloid sensationalism and conspiracy theories. How can there be a discussion when there is no common basis for start from?
I know someone who is repeatedly scammed by an organization but doesn't see it.
I say to them, "Don't you see that they're taking advantage of you when they try to get you to pay for additional hypnosis courses, when you're already taking three of them *right now* at great cost?
They might nominally nod their head, or even say yes, but you can see in their eyes that it hasn't registered. And a few months later discover that they are still getting conned by the same people - who make promises of a great future - and they believe the same old sales pitch. It's puzzling and remarkable at the same time.
A friend of mine, contemplating a discussion with a MAGA-head, would make the following remark: "We have nothing to say to each other."
You forgot "union thugs".
But yeah, I do think at least some of this is true. If your main source of news is an endless sludge pipe of Fox News and Facebook stuff, then you probably would end up thinking that all the stuff Democrats say is lies, that even if maybe Republicans are doing stuff it's just in response to Democrats, etc.
That's where it gets scary. If they try to steal it in 2024, it's not going to be surprising when Democrats and progressives rise up in huge protests against this. Fox News and the other conservative media outlets will go full five-alarm fire on this, urging police, Republican governors, etc to call out the national guard and shoot to kill. Where does it escalate from there?
Odds are pretty good the Democrats roll over and admit defeat in that scenario, especially if the economy is good. But it is the type of situation that could potentially escalate. My guess is that the US breaks up before we get any sort of massive constitutional reform or replacement that affects all of the US. There's no amendment that would pass enough states or get through Congress with support, no constitution produced at a convention that would win enough support.
The fact that a bunch of Republicans choose to be stupid doesn't make their beliefs something that we should respect.
Republican legislators and their advisors have been caught time and again admitting their true purpose in writing new voting restrictions. Let's not pretend they have any other motive.
Wasn't there a blogger who, earlier this year (around January?) claimed that American Democracy would not fall so easily? 🤔
The GOP is a delusional bunch of cultists now.
Thank you, Mr. Drum. Very nice overview, really clarifies things. Now - so what? So this - this is the pattern of every authoritarian shift in the history of human civilization. It is blindingly obvious what this is, where it's going, and where it will end up. The parallels are crystal clear. The undercurrents of our own particular brand of anti-majoritarian, ant-democratic sentiment, traceable through the 20th century, have emerged from the cover of commonality and deference, sentiment born of and desperate for entitlement and power, using any and every means necessary to keep and aggrandize both.
Trump is not the exception to American 'conservatism,' i.e., authoritarianism. He is the rule, the distillation, the essence of our society's darkest impulses. At some point every society, like every human, must face the parts of itself it is most afraid of, the shadow side of our self inflation. In the person this process is rending, with the outcome uncertain;; at war with ourselves until we accept the reality of who we really are, all of us, fundamentally imperfect, deeply flawed but doing what needs to be done to put the shadow to rest. To paraphrase Graham Greene, in order to remain human, sometimes you have to choose sides. American democracy will not survive if our shadow side is allowed, accommodated, or given deference in any way. It is us, who we really are, all of us; we are at war with ourselves, as people and as a society, and if we don't see this and act accordingly we are toast.
This has been Republican dogma since Kennedy/Nixon. From that comes the idea that has held solid in their party ever since that a little Republican cheating is all right considering the obviously massive cheating the Democrats do. Even if investigation after investigation uncovers no evidence of it. That just shows how good the Democrats are at cheating!
Good observation! It's that logical box again, wherein all the false things that one believes prevents him from seeing anything that would contradict the underlying solid belief. "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", and all the rest.
The Republican Party hit upon a winning strategy and has been riding it for decades. Maybe forever. I'm not seeing how Democrats can break through the Big Box o'Bias.
Uh, huh. Kevin, please keep in mind you’re talking about a group of people that also “believe” BENGHAZI was an Obama administration plot (conveniently orchestrated by HRC) to kill ambassador Stevens (for what purpose, only they know). I’m sure HRC being the likely 2016 Democratic front runner was purely “coincidental.”
They also “believe” in The Perfect Call, Alabama was in Hurricane Dorian’s path, Covid-19 = flu, Ivermectin is a game changer, and on and on and on……..
The base always falls in line, believing whatever absurd shit they’re told to believe, and leadership (together with propaganda outlets) is cynical enough to exploit them.
This is precisely what a close friend of mine believes: that Democrats always cheat and they cheated in the last election in spades -- though he does concede that the results were legitimate, not enough cheating to matter.
He thinks the Republican measures are necessary to preserve fair elections.
He's not stupid. Just blinkered.
Republican politician's are following their voters, not leading them, Fox news does the same. If the voters didn't buy it, they wouldn't be selling it. It's actually kind of a mutually beneficial bullshit cycle.
One solution to the problem is to partisan gerrymander New York and California. Wipe Republicans off the map in those places. Democrats want to win elections too, right? Gavin, sometimes gets it right, like he's proposing with the new gun law. He should propose a partisan gerrymander that's never been seen before and it could be done in California.
Throw it right back in their face, force the Supreme's to face their hypocrisy, and admit that they are just partisan hacks and not non-partisan umpires of the law. Republican voters won't care but once it's in the open the gloves can come off and it'll get fixed.
But, once again, Democrats sitting on their lazy, fat, corrupt asses (paging most of the California delegation) doing nothing because they don't have to do anything to win.
Republicans have been increasingly, if not suddenly, devoted to the idea that Democrats cheat in elections. There has certainly been corruption in the past by Democratic ward heelers in the north and courthouse rings in the South, but there is actually much less of this now. Actual corruption is not a cause of the increasing polarization or fanaticism on the part of Republicans. And voters in the South and elsewhere did not switch from Democrat to Republican about 50 years ago because they suddenly saw the merit of plutocracy and voodoo economics. These things and other attitudes are consequences of the deliberate support of Republicans for racism and more recently racist xenophobia as well as militant religion. The more people are aroused by these tribal instincts, the more they are willing to believe anything bad about their partisan opponents and the less evidence they need. Although Fox News and other rightist media are important tools for Republicans, they do not cause these beliefs in Republican voters - they cannot dictate basic beliefs. The success of Republican strategy is also not a result of Democrats' failure to advertise or communicate. Republicans just appeal to the tribal instincts which can take precedence over other things, notably individuals' own economic welfare as well as overall community welfare.