Recycling the Trump Years: Can the GOP Voter Suppress its way to Victory or Can the Dems Stacey Abrams their way to Victory?

1. GOP Electoral Advantages
2. The Civil War Never Ended
3. The Republican Electorate
4. The Dynamics of Voter Turnout
5. The Role of Stacey Abrams
6. Conclusion: In 2024, GOP Voter Suppression Efforts Won
   1. Image Attribution

Ye Olde Blogge has been saying for years that the GOP has become an anti-democratic party, intent on establishing an authoritarian-style single-party pseudo-democratic minority-rule government. Their vision seems clear: to repurpose the federal government to be a tool for transferring the nation’s wealth to the 1% as quickly as possible, while the rest of us live in Cancer Alley, drink Flint water, pay for Texas utilities, and die quickly and quietly when we can no longer contribute to the 1% more than we cost.

GOP Electoral Advantages

In the past, the strategy was simple: elect a Republican president, implement massive, unnecessary tax cuts that wreck the economy, and then let a Democrat pick up the pieces. This pattern created a 16-year cycle: eight years of Republican policies scorching the earth, followed by eight years of Democratic recovery. It seems the 1% grew weary of this cycle—or perhaps it was an opportunity that caught Putin’s eye. Either way, party elites and their wealthy backers decided to sideline voters altogether. By ensuring they could win elections without a majority, they aimed to achieve Gingrich’s vision of a permanent Republican majority. They realized four key strategies:

1. Leverage Structural Advantages: The Constitution provides the GOP with advantages in the rural states in both the Senate and the Electoral College. All they have to do is focus their appeal on rural white voters. No where was this more apparent than in the 2024 Senate elections.
2. Judiciary Influence: By packing the federal judiciary with radically conservative judges, they could secure favorable rulings, even if those rulings contradicted the Constitution. Entering Trump’s immunity ruling and Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of his classified documents case into evidence.
3. Gerrymandering: They have redrawn district lines to maintain a perpetual majority in the House of Representatives. Depending on the outcome of a couple of California House races, the Republican majority rests on three North Carolina seats that the NC Supremes ensured by overturning the gerrymandering law in that state.
4. Voter Suppression: They could suppress the votes of likely Dem voters and rely on their traditional core base of consistent older conservative Christian white voters to win. Election 2024 turned this on its head a bit. They relied on a wave of low-information younger male voters.
5. Russian Disinformation: Since the Russian disinformation campaign was so 2016, the legacy news media isn’t covering it as extensively. Russia is systematically flooding our social media and airwaves with a constant stream of BS.

The Civil War Never Ended

To enact this strategy, they had to win state legislatures and governorships. The key to winning these races was to assure their voting base that regardless of the government’s actions, marginalized groups—Blacks, Browns, women, immigrants, and liberals—would bear the brunt of the worst consequences. This sense of relative privilege allowed their voters to tolerate the economic hardships imposed by Republican governance, as exemplified by the dismal records of leaders like Bobby Jindal, Sam Brownback, Paul LePage, and Scott Walker.

It’s only gotten worse since then even though there haven’t been the spectacular disasters like we saw in Louisiana’s cancellation of high school or college football due to budget cutbacks crisis, Michigan’s Flint water disaster, Kansas’ near bankruptcy, and whatever the heck you called LePage’s Maine, we have exploding maternal and infant mortality rates and people salivating to march all the bad folks into concentration camps.

Since the 1990s, the GQP has been successfully consolidating power at the state level, and we are now witnessing the fruits of Gingrich’s vision. Our democracy hangs precariously, like a big beautiful shiny red apple from a slowly decaying stem on the tree of government. Eventually, it will drop from the tree to be ground under the boot heel of fascism and forgotten. Every election presents a crucial opportunity to preserve it. As long as Republicans can contest for majorities, from the presidency down to local school boards, every election could be our last chance to safeguard democracy.

And, siblings, it looks like 2024 was THAT election. They’ve got us by the short hairs. It’s going to take a lot of pain to restore our democracy, prevent a climate disaster, and resurrect the Age of Liberal Democracy.

The Republican Electorate

Many of the progressive and liberal talking heads have been smirking about how the ding-dang-dumb Repubes are not only suppressing Black, Brown, and urban voters, they’re suppressing their own voters the big dummies. And, it is true. They are going to end up suppressing their own voters, so let’s think that through, though.

The Repube electorate looks something like this nowadays:

• Traditional Republican Voters: Mostly older, wealthier, conservative white individuals. Historically, they’ve been reliable voters, often turning out for every election, regardless of significance. When Ye Olde Blogge was a youngin, they were known as the party of the rich because they favored small government and low taxes. Jokes on everyone who ever believed that. You’d have to back to Herbert Hoover to find a Repube president who didn’t preside over an expanding federal government, raising taxes, and exploding deficits, right Ronnie? But, still that was their go to demographic.
• New Republican Voters: This includes a broader base of white Southerners across various economic backgrounds, who were galvanized by the Southern Strategy to embrace the GOP.
• MAGA Voters: These are often first-time or seldom voters who were motivated by Trump’s explicit racism and misogyny. This was the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s one strange trick that no one could believe and that doctors didn’t want you to know about. He brought in people who hadn’t voted before. He failed to do it in 2020, but damned if he didn’t do it again in 2024. Somebody ought to figure out what they were doing, don’t ya think?

The Dynamics of Voter Turnout

Traditionally, the Republican base comprised high-information voters who consistently engaged in elections. In contrast, Democratic voters have typically shown lower engagement in off-year elections but turned out significantly for presidential contests.

The 2018 midterm elections showcased a strong backlash against Trump, driving anti-Trump voters to the polls. However, with Trump on the ballot in 2020, many first-time voters reverted to irregular participation, complicating Republican strategies.

In 2022, GOP leaders believed their voter suppression laws would disproportionately impact low-propensity Trump voters, while their core supporters would always find a way to vote. They banked on the enthusiasm of their base, motivated by cultural issues like policing and economic policies perceived to favor marginalized groups. They figured they could afford to suppress those unlikely low-propensity voters as long as Southern Strategy voter that gave George Wallace real live electors and turned out in 2016 and 2020 turned out again, they’d win. That didn’t workout very well for them.

However, in 2024, the low-propensity, low-information voter turned out AGAIN in significant enough numbers to elect Trump. In addition, they’d had four years to fine tune their voter suppression laws and voter roll purges.

The Role of Stacey Abrams

The 2022 Republican Party gambled that Stacey Abrams wouldn’t be able to turn out Georgia a second time. They thought repeating the 2020 Georgia elections would be harder the second time around. There is a reason that there are few successful multi-generational dynasties and repeating champions in sports. The voter suppression laws that the Repubes have been advancing in state houses across the country were designed specifically to stop Abrams in Georgia and anyone wanting to imitate her in other states.

Stacey Abrams was able to repeat her voter turn out magic in multiple states across the country and thwart the Repube voter suppression laws in 2022. However, this is perhaps the most important paragraph in the first edition of the post (emphasis added):

The truth is, I don’t know. Tradition has it that the party in the White House loses seats in the Congress in the off-election. The undercounted census has shifted House seats to the Repubes and away from the Dems. After 911, the Repubes gained seats the Congress in the year two, and in the year ten after the economic debacle of ’08, the Dems limited losses. Could something similar happen here after the #COVID19 pandemic and concomitant economic collapse and the 6 January Insurrection? Like all things Trump related, we’re in uncharted territory and we’ll have to see. All I know is that if our democracy is to survive, we have to circumvent the GOP voter suppression effort and get our folks to the polls.

Conclusion: In 2024, GOP Voter Suppression Efforts Won

Given the lessons of the elections from 2016, we have to conclude that a significant factor in the rightward tilt of the country was the success of the Republican Party in suppressing traditional Democratic voters. Whether it was through limiting early voting or vote by mail, reducing the number of polling places in Democratic strongholds, requiring voter ID’s, purging voter rolls, or using disinformation to discourage traditional Democratic coalition voters, Democratic turnout was down across the board.

Watching the Republicans in the run up to the election, it was like they knew — or maybe that is my own paranoia and cognitive Tom Fuckery getting in the way — that they had figured a way to win.

Now, the question is has the voter suppression effort become so successful that we can Stacey Abrams our way out of it?

Image Attribution

“Gaming the Vote. Keith Knight, pen, ink ©2018. “This BINGO is no fun for the millions of US citizens targeted by state-sanctioned disenfranchisement. Reflecting the Republican lust for power, voter suppression is thriving. The 2013 Supreme Court” by veritatem is licensed under CC BY 2.0