It is easy to get distracted by Republican theater. The positioning, the talking points, the disingenuous proposals, the phony demands for bipartisanship, etc. Twitter user Robert Black sums up the problem succinctly.
But fixation on the Manchins and the McConnells and the GOP clowns narrows the view of what is possible for Senate Democrats with no votes to spare. Paul Waldman suggests lack of legislation to protect voting rights can be offset by massive organization. And expenditures in the billions for on-the-ground organizing:
This is exactly what Democrats need to do — and what in the past they’ve so often failed to do. Every four years, they seem to rediscover the importance of organizing, putting together new, often well-funded organizations meant to register voters and get them to the polls — then the effort fades away after the election, and they have to start all over again.
“Resources that support Democratic registration drives are driven by the four-year cycle,” Lara Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh who researches grassroots politics and works with a group devoted to expanding Pennsylvania’s electorate, told me.
The spigot gets turned on during a presidential election, then turned off. That’s why Democrats must do what they’re doing in Texas, not starting in 2024 but in 2021.
Democrats have new tools and allied organizations prepositioned to aid them that did not exist a few years ago. Waldman notes that Democrats spent $7 billion on the 2020 election, so the money is out there. But long-term planning is not their focus. Or their funders’ focus. Getting donors to put their money behind the kind of longer-term, off-year organizing efforts Stacey Abrams used to great effect in Georgia is not in their nature. The right thinks long term. Lefties want quick fixes and candidates to fall in love with.
Chris Hayes believes another way too address the impasse in the Senate with Manchin is to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act that Manchin does support. Such action will help fight Republican vote suppression (if not election-rigging), but not swiftly.
But restoring the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provisions — even applying them to all 50 states and territories — is not the same as outright banning vote suppression practices and gerrymandering of congressional districts with the For The People Act (H.R.1). Investigations and court challenges can take years. A Republican Justice Department could slow-walk legal actions against discriminatory laws in the several states or not initiate any.
Trust me. We just lived through ten years of litigation over Republican voter suppression measures in North Carolina. That Republicans kept losing did not stop them from running out the clock on an entire decade.