The Washington Post spreads the conventional wisdom about the GOP’s vote suppression strategy and it’s just wrong:
The continuing claim by Republicans that some states violated their laws in expanding ballot access may have helped foster the belief among many in the party’s base that the election was stolen.
A CNN poll released in April found that 70 percent of Republicans said that Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to be elected. The survey found a deep split between party members about election security, with 76 percent of Democrats saying it was too hard to vote, while 87 percent of Republicans said the rules weren’t strict enough.
Geoff Kabaservice, who chronicled the transformation of the GOP in his 2012 book, “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party,” said in an interview that party members are clinging to Trump’s false claims about the election to protect their own reelection.
“These people are afraid of their base,” Kabaservice said. “They know that if they actually come out and forthrightly tell these 70 percent of Republicans who believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the election, that the base will turn against them, that they’ll end up with a primary challenge, Trump himself will get involved and they’ll lose and they’ll be out of politics.”
Even McCarthy, as the leader of House Republicans, feels compelled to deliver conflicting message out of self-preservation, Kabaservice said.
“He can say one thing, either behind closed doors or to reporters in a place like Washington. But he’s not going to go out on the road with Trump and say everyone acknowledges that Joe Biden is a legitimate president. He’s not going to do it. People don’t want to stand up against Trump on this issue.”
They aren’t cowards, they are craven opportunists and willing destroyers of our democratic system.
Republicans have been trying to disenfranchise as many of their political opponents as they can for decades. They are just seizing the opportunity that Dear Leader has provided to really crank up the distrust in the system so they can degrade the system even more. Until everyone understands what the game is on this, they are are going to get away with it.
Disenfranchising the Democratic Party is their electoral strategy. It’s been their strategy for years. Trump heard all the chatter about “voter fraud” and used it for his own purposes but he didn’t come up with it on his own any more than he came up with “Make America Great Again.” His entire agenda piggybacked on various things he heard from talk radio and added a couple of his own eccentric obsessions like trade wars and hammering NATO. Voter fraud was one of them and it fit his purposes perfectly.
Trumpism is Republicanism. They are all in. I’m sure they wish that the Dear Leader of their anti-democratic, autocratic, corrupt “movement” was someone with a little bit more finesse but I’m sure they also realize that his crude, ignorant, bullying style is actually the reason so many voters love him so much.
Trump gets their voters out and they are working hard to make sure the Democrats cannot do the same. That’s the only way they can win. They just don’t have the numbers and they know it.