Josh Marshall makes an important point about Democratic priorities. If they don’t move to protect democracy, everything else will be lost:
On Wednesday I noted how critical it is that Democrats go on offense to protect democracy in this country. This is not only a critical policy imperative. It is also good politics. The critical point, as I argued, is that Democrats need to go on offense now – pushing a broad array of reforms to secure civic democracy in this country – because Republicans will certainly use this election as another excuse to impose further restrictions. And here we have one of the first of what will certainly be many examples:
Conservatives and neo-confederates have been suppressing the vote for decades. Centuries, actually. And they are more desperate to do it than ever now — they’ve lost 7 out of the last 8 popular votes in this country. That’s once in 32 years. In a normal democracy they would have been in the wilderness for more than a quarter century. But because our our undemocratic system that allows minority rule, they have managed to capture the presidency anyway, half of that time and control the congress even more. (They have also lost the popular vote in the House and Senate during that period, including this last election.)
Their only option at this point is to continue to find ways to keep people from voting and gaming the system with things like controlling the census and gerrymandering and holding on tight to the courts in the hopes that they will protect them and allow them to retain power undemocratically. Since they are now almost entirely a non-college educated working class party, dominated by white men, we have to look at what those people are after and it isn'[t good for women, racial minorities, immigrants, science, the arts, cities, LGBT people etc.
This is unsustainable. Having this minority retain power (with the help of wealthy interests that don’t have their best interests at heart any more than the rest of us) our country remains under serious threat. As Marshall writes:
What we have is a spectacle in which virtually the entirety of the Republican party showed its willingness to impede voting to stay in power. Faced with defeat, when everything was on the table, they were happy to say, throw out of the votes of African-American voters in major cities in swing states. We have all just been witnesses to a grave crime against the republic, spearheaded by the President but supported by virtually every Republican officeholder in the country. It is no less grievous for appearing to have failed in its primary goal. It failed mainly because Joe Biden’s victory was simply too decisive. It required too much tinkering in too many different parts of the country to undo.
This latest degradation of democracy may end up being Trump’s most important legacy. The Democrats had better take it seriously. We’ve had two elections in the last 20 years give us presidents who didn’t win the popular vote but slipped into the White House due to the archaic vagaries of the electoral college. If they are successful in their plans to make voting even harder, this may end up being a permanent situation.