If men and white people were the only voters, Donald Trump would have won the 2020 election in a landslide. These plain truths underscore the political dynamics in America today.
This is not a new story, nor is it unique to Trump. The last time Democrats won a majority from either of these groups was in 1964 when voters, fearful of Barry Goldwater’s extremism, delivered Lyndon B Johnson his own mandate.
Never mind the myth of meritocracy. America has always been ruled by white men. Business, politics, economics and culture cater to their needs above all. The modern Republican Party is their standard-bearer. Trump didn’t reinvent the GOP. He simply lifted the veil. He dispensed with the pretence.
Republicans know that maintaining white supremacy is getting harder in an increasingly diverse America. Their party has won a majority of voters in a presidential election only once in the past 30 years.
Luckily for them the popular vote doesn’t determine the winner. But it does reveal a changing nation.
Since 1980 the share of the non-Hispanic white population has declined from 80% to 58%. This is an extraordinary shift in just four decades — from a dominant monoculture towards a multiracial, multicultural, pluralistic society. The trend shows no sign of abating.
After Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, the GOP conducted a comprehensive post-election review that stressed the need to expand its appeal. Trump ignored that plan, and doubled down on white voters. To everyone’s surprise, including his own, his strategy worked in 2016. Despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million, he eked out a narrow victory in the Electoral College.
However, the strategy failed in 2020. Joe Biden won 7 million more votes than Trump, and not even the Electoral College could save him. Trump refused to yield. Instead he leaned in and launched the Big Lie, which at its core rests on the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory that America is being stolen from its rightful white owners. “You’re not going to have a country any more,” he spat.
The Republican Party has followed his lead. It doesn’t believe it can win if all eligible citizens cast a ballot. So it has chosen to rig the rules.
Elections are a maths puzzle. You can win by adding voters to your column. Or you can win by subtracting voters from your opponents’ column. By tipping the scales a point here and a couple of points there, you can compile a winning margin.
Both parties play this game. But the Republicans play it much rougher. They do whatever it takes.
This is the backstory to last week’s voting rights showdown in the United States Senate. On Monday the national public holiday in honour of Martin Luther King Jr, Republicans joined Democrats to laud the slain civil rights leader. On Wednesday they rejected everything he stood for by blocking two voting rights bills — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — designed to ensure uniform federal election standards in every state, and equal access to the ballot box for every eligible citizen.
In America, federal elections are not managed by a national agency. Instead all 50 states have distinct rules. But it’s worse than that. Local officials in 3243 districts scattered across the country administer the actual voting. The largest, Los Angeles County, has more than 10 million residents. The smallest, Kalawao County in Hawaii, has fewer than 100. This jigsaw democracy has enabled wide disparities of election procedures and discriminatory voter access. Imagine Bendigo having different voting rules from Dubbo.
These were the loopholes exploited by the Jim Crow South to disenfranchise Black Americans until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 after Selma’s Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The law was enacted to enforce the rights granted by the 15thAmendment 95 years earlier. Most Republican politicians supported the bill in 1965, and again when it was renewed in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006. In 2006 the Senate voted 98-0 to reauthorise it and 16 current Republican senators voted for it.
However, in 2013 the Supreme Court declared that key provisions of the act were unconstitutional. Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, a staunch opponent of voting rights legislation, the court’s conservatives voted 5-4 in Shelby County v Holder to gut the law. They argued that the country had changed, and that the law was “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day”.
Republicans wasted no time in proving them wrong. In state after state they began to reimpose spurious laws and regulations surgically targeted at voters less likely to support them. These are primarily non-white and younger voters. They closed some polling stations and understaffed others, purged voter rolls, mandated identification laws tailored to their base, limited voting hours and mail ballot applications, and a raft of other measures all designed to chip away support for their opponents.
Their aim is to create friction in voting by putting sand in the machinery. Remember, elections are a maths puzzle.
In 2021, terrified by historic voter turnout and emboldened by Trump’s Big Lie, Republicans stepped up their attack. In 19 states they passed 34 new laws to stack the deck in their favour. They reduced ballot drop boxes, eliminated same-day voter registration, restricted polling hours, and outlawed assisting others to vote. In Georgia they made it a crime to give food or water to voters waiting in line. More laws are on the way.
As a failsafe, they have also facilitated partisan supervision of election counts and granted themselves the authority to override voters’ choices.
They piously parrot that these measures are essential to ensure “election integrity”. They provide no evidence to sustain these claims, because there is none. Every word is a lie.
In less than a decade, Republicans have unleashed an avalanche of voter suppression designed to create disincentives and fear of voting among specific citizens who don’t support them.
All this led to last week’s Senate stalemate. Democrats wanted to restore the Voting Rights Act by addressing the Supreme Court’s objections, and to establish minimum federal election standards that would apply consistently in every state. These included rules for early and mail voting, voter identification, a ban on gerrymandering, ensuring no one waits more than 30 minutes to vote, and making election day, always a Tuesday, a legal public holiday.
It also provided for automatic voter registration for all eligible citizens; 63 million Americans — one quarter of the electorate — were prevented from voting in 2020 because of arbitrary registration rules. The constitution makes no mention of voter registration, yet this bureaucratic hurdle is routinely used to limit who can vote. The obstacle is so embedded that few think to query it, or ask why the onus should not be on government to ensure every adult citizen can vote. Since 2015, 20 states and the District of Columbia have implemented automatic voter registration, which confirms it can be done.
Republicans decry these measures as a “federal takeover” of elections. Their language is instructive. It is the same used by Jim Crow politicians to defend their pernicious system. They elide the truth that Article 1 of the constitution empowers Congress to regulate the “times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives” at any time.
This fight is about raw power. Who wins it, who wields it, and who benefits from it.
Republicans are waging a multi-front battle to reinstate Jim Crow 2022 and preserve white supremacy in America. They want to control who can vote, when they can vote, where they can vote, and how they can vote, with a veto over the final count and criminal sanctions against anyone who violates their rules. Right now, they are winning.
What I’ll never understand is what do the Republicans get if they win? It’s not like they’re suffering particularly much at the moment, so it always seems like it’s just power for power’s sake. Where’s the fulfillment in that?
I know these people are just evil, but I genuinely can never workout the long game. You implement these restrictions and destroy the republic, then what?
Power is fulfillment. They get to impose their rule on everyone else. They keep themselves safe, they hope, from the revenge they expect all the others to take on them for all the injuries they inflicted; there is a great deal of fear involved in all this. They keep their status over all the others. Their vision can be summed up by O’Brien’s words in 1984,
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
I read that Orwell acknowledged Jack London’s apocalyptic novels, Iron Heel and People of the Abyss, when constructing his opus.
London noted, in both the US & UK the well fed, rural bred police protecting the better types from the starving scum.
It’s a bit like the response to global warming: who care what the outcome is, as long as we’re wielding power and making money.
Gilead.
They are not thinking that far ahead. They just don’t want to lose power. This is the last gasp of the old white men, and they are going to make sure that everyone pays.
Republicans want power for power’s sake. They are not interested in governing, not interested in doing anything for Americans or America. They are only interested in keeping Democrats out of office. Aided and abetted by Murdoch, they are winning the war against their fellow citizens.
We saw by the failed attempt by the LNP with voter ID laws that similar laws and restrictions would be applied here given half a chance.
America could well have a civil war as a consequence.
Australians still have an independent electoral system. Best we be on guard to protect that. Make no mistake, the LNP will have a long game of their own, and breaking down such independence would not be above them.
They are, with the increased membership of religious idealogues beginning to move in that direction.
The hard right, personified by exSenatorNick Minchin, make no secret of the electoral changes they want – FPtP, voluntary and no limit on contributions.
The US Republicans and our home-grown equivalents such as Minchin might gain inspiration from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s futuristic novel ‘We‘ written in the USSR in 1921 (and promptly suppressed), which clearly inspired Orwell’s 1984. There’s a paragraph where its first-person narrator describes with great enthusiasm OneState’s superior electoral system. A regular election is held on the ‘Day of Unanimity’; it
… has no resemblance to the disorderly, unorganized elections in ancient times, when— it’s hard to say this with a straight face— they couldn’t even tell before an election how it would come out. To establish a state on the basis of absolutely unpredictable randomness, blindly — could there be anything more idiotic? … They say the ancients somehow carried out their elections in secret, hiding like thieves. … Why all this secretiveness was needed has has never yet been fully explained. Most probably the elections were connected with some mystical, superstitious or maybe even criminal rites. But we have nothing to hide or be ashamed of; we celebrate our elections openly, honestly, in the daylight. I see how everybody votes for the Benefactor and everybody sees how I vote for the Benefactor.
Oh dear! You are drawing their attention to another dystopian novel that can be used as an instruction manual. Just remember, as The Australian tells us, that we have always been at war with East Asia.
If Australia’s voting system was like the US’s, not just would elections be handled differently between Bendigo and Dubbo, but it would also be different between Bathurst and Dubbo, Bendigo and Ballarat, or Perth and Bunbury. Thank goodness Australia still has the AEC, and that they still appear to be completely independent of any government or political party.
AEC is still afraid to enter the political fray against breaches by the cons, though. Remember the AEC colours on 2 marginal Lib party Melbourne electoral corflutes – Kooyong, member Frydenberg and Chisholm, Gladys Liu, a known bagman for Chinese developers during the last election ?
“Right now, they are winning.”
They certainly are. They’re winning everywhere it matters. I predicted at the time of the last US election that the Democrats would achieve nothing more than a dead cat bounce, and that’s exactly what we are seeing. The Democrats have failed to pass any of the bills necessary to reverse the tide. They have done nothing about the Supreme Court, which is now openly partisan for the Republicans and has given up any pretence of being objective in its judgements. The investigation of the Capitol insurrection only sweeps up the small fry; its progress with the big fish moves at a snail’s pace and it will be abandoned after the mid-term elections return Republican majorities in Congress. At the same time the investigations into Trump over all his other (alleged) crimes will be halted too. The Republicans will never again cede power because of an election, so the American republic, for what it’s worth, ends this year.
I saw a woman, a member of the public and not an official, on some live hearing broadcast on TV from Florida in 2020 assert that “America is not a democracy, it is a republic.” I assume she was confusing the concepts with the names of the two parties.
She was referring to Ben Franklin’s astute comments, long ago.
No, that woman has a point, even if it is over-stated. It’s in the Federalist papers written by Hamilton, Madison and Jay that document how the US constitution was put together and the debates about all the provision. There was debate about whether to prefer a democracy derived from a Greek / Athenian model or a republic derived from Rome. The choice was Rome, hence there is a Senate and not a Forum and so on. The Roman Republic had elections of course, but did not believe power or sovereignty came from the common people. The US constitution is likewise constructed to avoid giving ordinary people too much say and is not meant to be democratic beyond definite limits. For example in its original form the Senate was not elected at all; all senators were appointed by State legislatures until the early 20th C.
“not a Forum”: delete Forum insert Agora. Apologies.
Just hope that not too many here think of agoraphobia and think it’s summat to do with fear of democracy.
I think we’re brighter than that, Phryne.
In the immortal words of Tonto, “What you mean ‘we’, paleface?”
That attitude is even more prevalent in Texas. You will even encounter the argument that the word democracy is not written anywhere in the American constitution, therefore it is unconstitutional to treat America as a democracy. If you point out that America is a democratic republic (as per here: https://blog.prepscholar.com/republic-vs-democracy-difference) you will likely be told that that is just a lie and that you are a commie.
SRS I believe it goes back to the arrogance of the elites in the Democrats and a similar situation is unraveling in Australia with Labor. It was clearly obvious that the younger and more diverse population preferred The Bern to the Princess Hawke Hillary but it was with the help of the Democrat elite and the Republican underliers Hillary got preselection. (The Republicans thought she would be easier to beat.)
It has gone downhill ever since. Had the Bern won it would be a different World.
Orwellian? The ‘arrogance of the elites’ when the wealthy elites of the GOP, LNP and Tories, with support of corporate donors, are constantly denigrating and/or gaming democracy for power?
Meanwhile lower income, minorities et al. are thrown under a bus by what is supposed to be their own side; a successful strategy reminiscent of the Greens stymieing Labor’s ETS?
Please stop recycling the nonsense about Labor’s ETS. The Greens supported it for as long as they could decently could. Once it had become a scheme to subsidise pollution, that is, a scheme that would offer such gross amounts of compensation it would encourage the production and release of CO2, it was worse than useless and could not be supported.
The real villain in that tragedy was Rudd, not only for sabotaging his own scheme, but because he used it to play silly games aiming to destabilise Turnbull’s leadership of the Liberals. This was, in the short term, a great success. Turnbull was booted out. In the longer term Rudd’s too-clever-by-half tactical wizardry gave us PM Tony Abbott. Thanks, Rudd!
Thanks for that – I’ve grown weary of trying to correct the record.
The reason Talcum supported it was that he saw that it was also a job creation scam…sorry, scheme for shonky accountants, lawyers & autocrats abroad to sell offsets aided by merchant bankers – what was not to love for his ilk about emissions trading?
All of which was pointed out at the time and why Greens support was spurned.
Long before Killary was nominated all polls showed that she was the only Dem who would struggle to beat Trump – Berny et al were 10-20% more certain of trouncing the Orange Ogre.
The War Machine needed feeding after Obama failed to start any significant new wars and even Trump proved inadequate to that appetite so by 2020 it was desperate hence Slow-Joe, a barely conscious, never mind sentient, sock puppet.
No it wouldn’t. He would have faced the same problem with a divided senate as Biden is facing.
Like Australia, US media (all right wing, not just Fox) after any election, immediately start dog whistling and white anting the Democrats, whether in government or not, to deflect from the GOP or last time Trump; Democrat supporters become gamed into being some of their own biggest critics…….
The US is no longer agile enough to be a healthy democracy or cope with the world.
Senate filibuster should go. DC residents should be adequately represented in Congress. But no progress like that appears likely to happen.
What happened to Mitt Romney and Lynn Cheney in all this? Seems their principles are not not as principled as they pretend.