Republicans’ voter suppression legislation is hardly a precision political weapon. It doesn’t need to be. In fact, if the laws harm their own voters Republicans are still fine with that so long as they hurt Democrats more. They are playing percentages. Republican leaders consider any of their own voters hurt by these vote suppression measures collateral damage. Acceptable casualties. Expendables.
CNN’s John Blake examines how features of the new wave of voter restrictions actually harm White people, making these laws less Jim Crow than Wile E. Coyote:
Some of the more obvious boomerang effects of these laws have already been noted. Voter restrictions anger and mobilize voters of color. They make it more difficult for older, rural White citizens to vote. And they discourage some White voters from even participating in elections.
Even some GOP leaders are now warning that restrictive voting laws are hurting their base. One commentator went further, saying Republicans are “inadvertently suppressing their own voters.”
That’s the conclusion Joel Mathis came to after examining the results of the recent recall election in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom decisively thwarted the GOP-led effort to remove him from office. Initial signs suggested Republicans were energized after conservative talk show host Larry Elder entered the race, but almost every major demographic group in the state rejected the recall.
The effort to replace Newsom failed, in part, because Elder and other GOP leaders discouraged many of their own supporters from voting by alleging voter fraud in the lead-up to the election, Mathis said in a column in The Week. This was the same dynamic that led to Democrats winning Georgia and control of Congress in the last presidential election, Mathis noted.
But restricting the vote affects more than the outcome of elections, Blake concludes. Restrictive voting laws result in less competent lawmakers taking office. That’s what political scientist Alex Keena found in co-authoring “Gerrymandering the States: Partisanship, Race, and the Transformation of American Federalism.” Elections rigged to favor members of one party promotes politicians more focused on wedge issues than voters’ real needs.
(Gerrymandering favors people such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who behaves more like a heel wrestler than a public servant.)
“It leads to legislators who are good at getting elected and raising money, but they don’t know a lot about government,” says Keena, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
This inability to govern can have lethal consequences. Keena says.
States that enacted partisan gerrymandering — redrawing congressional districts to favor the Republican party and deprive Black people of voting power — tended to have higher infant mortality rates, Keena says. They also were more likely to challenge the Affordable Care Act in courts and were generally less responsive to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 than Republican-controlled states that didn’t gerrymander, he found.
There is a phrase that describes what happens to some White voters in states like Mississippi. It’s called “Dying of Whiteness” — the name of a 2019 book by Jonathan M. Metzl that describes a political dynamic where racial, “backlash governance” leads to White voters picking political leaders who enact policies that tend to make them sicker, poorer and more likely to die early by gun suicide.
These laws alienate younger Whites by sending the message: We don’t want you to vote.
They enable politicians to ignore voices outside the elite, donor class, especially poor and middle-class White voices.
The wave of voter suppression laws targeting Blacks in the early 20th century turned the South into “an economic backwater where child labor flourished, workers were exploited and state governments did little to invest in social services and public schools for ordinary people,” Blake adds. “Such measures as poll taxes and literacy tests also prevented poor Whites from voting.”
But that’s where Republicans are. Public service is not their goal. Money, publicity and punditry matter more (MSNBC from January):
Following Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-Ohio) unexpected retirement announcement this week, National Journal spoke to one of the Republican senator’s longtime advisers about the state of the GOP.
“If you want to spend all your time going on Fox and be[ing] an a**hole, there’s never been a better time to serve,” Republican strategist Corry Bliss said. “But if you want to spend all your time being thoughtful and getting s**t done, there’s never been a worse time to serve.”
“Serve” has been excised from the job description in the current a pay-to-play system. Conservative White voters who support it do so at their own peril.