Kmgw9v Loc: Miami, Florida

Opinion: Republicans are sprinting away from democracy

Opinion by
Catherine Rampell
Columnist
May 17, 2021 at 5:20 p.m. EDT

Almost half of Republicans are now saying the quiet part out loud: They’d prefer to ditch this whole democracy thing.
So finds CBS News-YouGov polling conducted in mid-May. The survey asked Republicans a series of questions about the required level of fealty to former president Donald Trump, their views of the 2020 election and priorities for the party going forward.
The results were bleak.

Two-thirds said it was “important” for Republicans to be “loyal to Donald Trump now.” The same share said they did not believe President Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. (They apparently missed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) recent assertion that “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.”)
But the most troubling results came from a question about the party’s best strategy for winning in 2022 and 2024. If you were consulting for the party, respondents were asked, would you focus on developing a message and “popular policies and ideas” to win over more voters? Or would you prioritize changes to the voting rules in states and districts?


A whopping 47 percent chose the latter option. In other words, nearly half of those who still identify as Republicans appear to have given up on a key premise of democracy: that you earn the right to govern by proposing ideas that appeal to a majority of the public. They’d prefer to short-circuit that process and, instead, make it harder for their opponents to vote.

So much for “party of ideas,” as the GOP once called itself.
In truth, the Republican Party mostly stopped coming up with new ideas about three decades ago, when it declared Reaganomics gospel and rarely looked back. No matter what evidence has since become available, GOP officials insist that tax cuts pay for themselves and that less regulation is always better (well, except when it comes to immigrants or trade or personal enemies of a Republican president, perhaps). But the GOP at least still pretended to generate novel, popular ideas and therefore be the party better suited to governance. To this day, some Republican politicians claim that it’s really Trump’s policy ideas, incoherent though they may be, that energize the base — rather than, you know, the cult of personality. Or the racism.

But party leaders let slip last summer that they no longer stood for any fixed principles whatsoever except loyalty to Trump. This was made clear when the Republican National Committee announced that it would not adopt a platform for a presidential election for the first time since the party’s founding more than 160 years earlier. Instead, the RNC released a groveling resolution that it would “continue to enthusiastically support” Trump and his “America-first agenda,” whatever its particulars might be.

Since then, party officials have prized allegiance to Trump above all else — as exemplified by, among other things, the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from her party leadership role. They have likewise abandoned any pretense of pursuing policies that voters want or that could otherwise improve their constituents’ lives; GOP political rhetoric is instead consumed by rants about fake burger restrictions or Mr. Potato Head. Meanwhile, their actual policymaking apparatus has been laser-focused on voter suppression. So far this year, legislators in at least 47 states have introduced bills that would restrict ballot access; at least 12 states have already made it harder to vote.
The only real GOP policy divide, it seems, is over whether to try to thwart the will of the voters ex-post or ex-ante. One faction of the party favoring ex-post measures is pushing crazy election lawsuits or ballot “audits” in Arizona. Then there’s the supposedly more respectable contingent, who view the hunt for hidden bamboo fibers as a little crass, and prefer to pass laws that make it harder to cast ballots in the first place. Some of the state and local Republican officials once treated as (small-d) democratic heroes for resisting Trumpian pressures to overturn the 2020 election have also been on the vanguard of ex-ante voter-suppression measures.

It’s easy to believe that cynical politicians — regardless of political persuasion — might do anything to hold onto power, including disenfranchising opponents. And presumably it feels freeing for politicians to pledge nothing more to their followers than to remain in power, as opposed to having to deliver on policies that might improve people’s lives.
But what is more perplexing, and disturbing, is that so many constituents apparently demand nothing more either. Half of Republicans apparently ask only that the people wearing their same jersey salute the boss and stay in office, by whatever anti-democratic means necessary.

There has been much hand-wringing the past few years about “democratic backsliding," a phrase that conjures images of a populace passively (perhaps unknowingly) slouching toward authoritarianism. What this and other polls suggest is that many Americans are instead running headlong into its arms.

rstipe Loc: S. Florida

Scary, but true!

rstipe Loc: S. Florida

Do you have a FB I can follow?

Kmgw9v Loc: Miami, Florida

IF you are asking me, please send a private message. 😀

CWGordon

Kmg:
The comments you posted earlier are a wonderful encapsulation and summary of what most Progressive folks see and believe. Unfortunately, there seems to be such a “blind loyalty” cult following of our former “leader” that this problem seems to only be getting worse not any better.

Leo_B Loc: Houston suburb

The problem with YouGov surveys is some/many of their questions don't offer respondents the ability to clearly say what they believe but just to choose between 2-4 specific choices that are varying levels of not what they think or would say but the only options available to them.

JRiepe Loc: Southern Illinois

Republicans are not for voter supression of those who have the right to vote. Democrats label common sense requirements in order to vote as voter suppression. How is verifying the eligibility to vote considered voter suppression? ID's are required for a great number of other things but national elections are not important enough to require them? Let anyone walk in and vote or mail in a vote without verifying eligibility? That's exactly what you Democrats want. What you actually want is fraudulent elections and any requirement to prevent fraud you label voter suppression. Too many rules limit fraud so let's eliminate all rules is the Democrat's agenda.

Leo_B Loc: Houston suburb

Kmgw9v Loc: Miami, Florida

No one wants “fraudulent” elections. What we all should want is the opportunity to vote without undue inconvenience, hardship and unnecessary obstacles designed to suppress the actual number of votes casts by legal voters who are not as privileged, but still have a right and want to vote.
That is democracy.
You should bone up in hiow and why the Republicans are counting on voter suppression tactics to regain control.

Triple G

Voter identification is not the issue in most cases; just the tag line. Most of the states where these voter suppression laws are going into effect already have strong registration rules, voter roster maintenance protocols, and ID and signature verification. The efforts are not about validity of the voters, but reducing voting time frames, access to mail-in voting, and access to physical locations. I support those laws in a few states which weren’t previously IDs required, but the rest of the restrictions are for suppression only. Be careful GOP; your efforts in vilifying mail-in voting kept your own people from voting.

https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-have-made-it-harder-to-vote-in-11-states-so-far/

DennyT Loc: Central Missouri woods

Baloney!!

The foundation of America is the people and their right to vote .

The Republicans have lost and their solution is to limit the vote. To do this they have dishonestly characterized antidotal instances of fraud as wide spread.

Voting in America should be in every conceivable way possible - email, mail, no reason absentee, multiple days etc.

It’s inconceivable that in a world where a persons privacy is protected. In their bank accounts, credit cards, medical accounts , Various secure accounts , all those voting avenues can not be made secure and safe.

If the republicans were honestly concerned with the security of the various ways of voting they would work to improve the security and not eliminating any voting opportunity.

They are totally dishonest.

Leo_B Loc: Houston suburb

And all the usual suspects come along denigrating requiring legitimate identification proving citizenship and legal right to vote.

boberic Loc: Quiet Corner, Connecticut. Ex long Islander

Kmgw9v Loc: Miami, Florida

De Santis bragged about how well done and secure the elections were conducted in 2020 in Florida: and subsequently signed a bill to restrict voting rights, access, and convenience . It wasn't broken; there was no voter fraud to correct. Phoney.

Triple G

The usual pivot. Look again, unless you’re talking about Nebraska (a Republican state), it’s not about ID rules.