California Recall Lesson: Republicans Believe In Elections Only When They Win
Republicans,;like totalitarians, believe in elections. But only if they always win.
New case in point? California, where voters on Tuesday appeared inclined to keep Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall election.
Cue Larry Elder, the leading Republican to replace him, who started dropping unsubstantiated claims that the election was;rigged against him.
Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.
The only proof Elder offered was the fact that California voters were poised to pick Newsom over him or anyone else on the long list of possible replacements.
How could that be? Republicans can only lose if theyre cheated, right?
I Do Not Buy That A Social Media Ban Hurts Trumps 2024 Aspirations: Nate Silver
sarah: Yeah, Democrats might not have their worst Senate map in 2022, but it will by no means be easy, and how they fare will have a lot to do with the national environment. And as we touched on earlier, Bidens overall approval rating will also make a big difference in Democrats midterm chances.
nrakich: Yeah, if the national environment is even a bit Republican-leaning, that could be enough to allow solid Republican recruits to flip even Nevada and New Hampshire. And then it wouldnt even matter if Democrats win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
One thing is for sure, though whichever party wins the Senate will have only a narrow majority, so I think were stuck in this era of moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski controlling every bills fate for at least a while longer.;
sarah: Lets talk about big picture strategy, then, and where that leaves us moving forward. Its still early and far too easy to prescribe election narratives that arent grounded in anything, but one gambit the Republican Party seems to be making at this point is that attacking the Democratic Party for being too progressive or woke will help them win.
What do we make of that playbook headed into 2022? Likewise, as the party in charge, what are Democrats planning for?
With that being said, the GOPs strategies could still gin up turnout among its base, in particular, but its hard to separate that from general dissatisfaction with Biden.
Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger: National Gop Figures Didn’t Understand Our Laws
But Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, said on Wednesday that the system is working exactly the way it is intended.
“The irony of saying ‘fraudulent votes have been found’ â he has gained in the finding of these votes,” he said.
Raffensperger has said he’s been pressured by top Republicans to find ways of disqualifying ballots that hurt the Trump campaign.
“They say that as pressure builds, it reveals your character, it doesn’t change your character. Some people aren’t behaving too well with seeing where the results are,” Raffensperger told NPR’s Ari Shapiro on Tuesday.
“At the end of the day, I want voters to understand that when they cast their ballot in Georgia, it will be accurately counted. You may not like the results and I get that. I understand how contentious it is. But you can then respect the results.”
Poll workers check voters’ identifications on Election Day at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wis. The Trump campaign has announced it is filing for a recount in two Wisconsin counties.hide caption
toggle caption
Poll workers check voters’ identifications on Election Day at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wis. The Trump campaign has announced it is filing for a recount in two Wisconsin counties.
President Trump’s campaign announced Wednesday morning it is filing a petition to formally ask election authorities to conduct a recount in two Wisconsin counties. President-elect Joe Biden won the state by a little more than 20,000 votes.
Recommended Reading: Did Donald Trump Really Say Republicans Are Dumb
Gop Scores An Early Win In 2024 Race
New Census figures show the gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College is widening.
As a result of Census Bureau population figures released Monday, if every state voted the same way in 2024 that they did in 2020, President Joe Biden would win three fewer Electoral College votes than he did in November. |
-
Link Copied
President Joe Bidens path to reelection just got a little harder.
As a result of Census Bureau population figures released Monday, if every state voted the same way in 2024 that they did in 2020, Biden would win three fewer Electoral College votes than he did in November, while the Republican nominee would win three more.
The shift is only a marginal one it would only affect the closest of elections.
But that doesnt mean the new state numbers which are used to apportion the number of congressional districts each state gets, and thus the number of electoral votes wont alter the landscape in 2024 and 2028.
Here are five reasons why:
The gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College is widening.
Biden beat then-President Donald Trump by 74 Electoral College votes. A net gain of six votes for Trump wouldnt have mattered.
But in a close race like the one in 2000, where just five electoral votes separated George W. Bush and Al Gore the re-balancing of the Electoral College could tip the scales.
Thats significant for a party whose presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once since 1988.
But thats right now.
The Numbers Are Grim Republicans Are Winning At Normalizing Voter Suppression
Voter ID laws which are sculpted to make it harder to vote are wildly popular with voters, according to surveys
Voter suppression has been around for as long as the republic. Stories of subterfuge and ballot box-stuffing schemes are such a part of American political folklore, theres an entire book about them. So in one sense, there is nothing particularly novel about Republican politicians efforts to rig the vote, or the important revelations that rightwing groups and corporate officials are coordinating state-level campaigns to make it harder to vote.
However, a new nugget of polling data illustrates that something more fundamental has happened: voter suppression is no longer a plot engineered in the shadows and denied in public, for fear of criticism by a population that considers such measures grotesque. Instead, voter suppression is having its coming-out party because more and more Americans now consider it to be a perfectly legitimate and even laudable campaign tactic.
The data point comes in a new CBS/YouGov survey, buried under the topline finding that almost two-thirds of Republican voters do not consider Joe Biden the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, despite Bidens electoral college and popular vote victories.
Nearly half of Republicans surveyed supported the latter move, with the strongest demographics in support being female Republicans, non-white Republicans and white Republicans with no college degree.
Read Also: Democrats Have Tried To Impeach Every Republican President Since Eisenhower
Biden Avoids The Microscope
Another benefit Biden can enjoy from having his party control both chambers of Congress is that Republican investigatory powers will be greatly diminished. With Democrats in charge of Senate committees, embarrassing and potentially explosive investigations are unlikely to materialise.
Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson will no longer run the Government Oversight Committee, so his planned forays into Hunter Biden’s China dealings and any connections to the incoming president will go away. The same applies to Lindsey Graham and the Judiciary Committee, which was expected to hold more hearings into the 2016 Russia election-meddling investigation and the origins of Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe.
Any new Democratic scandals that crop up should also avoid a full and potential politically damaging airing – a luxury Trump also enjoyed during his first two years in office and sorely missed during his final two.
Biden Flips Coveted Georgia The Last State To Be Called By The Ap
The full hand recount of the state’s 5 million presidential votes resulted in a narrowing of Biden’s lead over President Trump in Georgia, but not nearly enough to change the result. He started out with a 14,000 vote lead, and now leads by just over 12,000 votes.
The recount, formally known as a risk-limiting audit, is intended to verify the contest’s winner. As Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Stephen Fowler reported, four counties uncovered a few thousand previously uncounted votes, which subsequently cut into Biden’s margin of victory.
Douglas, Walton, Fayette and Floyd counties all experienced issues with missing or unscanned votes related to human error â but the numbers weren’t significant enough to change the outcome of the election.
Loading…
There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law does allow for a recount if the margin is less than .5%. It currently stands at .2%.
Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the hand audit last week, citing the close margin of the race.
The four counties with new vote totals must recertify their results. Statewide election results must be certified by Friday. The Trump campaign then has until Tuesday to request an additional recount, which would be by machine rather than by hand.
Trump has repeatedly questioned the integrity of Georgia’s vote counting, it both a “joke” and a process that led to “fraudulent votes” being found.
Read Also: Are Any Republicans In Favor Of Impeachment
Redistricting Is The Next Step On A Path To One
The redistricting process kicked off this week in Washington. The Census Bureau released initial data from the 2020 census Monday afternoon, , which means that congressional district boundaries will soon be redrawn to account for changes in population.
These changes will probably tend to benefit the Republican Party, as conservative states will get more seats for instance, Texas will gain two seats, while New York, California, and Illinois will all lose one. Republicans are also certain to use the process to try to gerrymander themselves as many additional congressional seats as possible by leveraging their control of a majority of state legislatures. And that is just the opening tactic in a long-term strategy to abolish American democracy and set up one-party rule.
Today in Michigan, gerrymandering means Republicans enjoy a 3.4-point handicap in the state House and a 10.7-point handicap in the state Senate; in Pennsylvania, it’s a 3.1-point handicap in the House and a 5.9-point handicap in the Senate; and in Wisconsin, a 7.1-point handicap in the House and a 10.1-point handicap in the Senate.
It’s impossible to gerrymander the Senate, of course, but luckily for Republicans that chamber is inherently gerrymandered due to the large number of disproportionately white, low-population rural states that lean conservative. The swing seat in the Senate is biased something like 7 points to the right.
A Late Surge In Latino Voters Helped Newsom Keep His Job
For weeks, Democrats openly worried that Latino voters were not going to show up in force for Gov. Gavin Newsom. That might have spelled doom for the party, which has relied on support from Latino voters to rise to its current grip on power in the state.
But early numbers suggest that it might have been history repeating itself: a late investment in Latino voter outreach, and a late uptick in interest and voting among Latinos. Though it was far from unanimous, the majority of Latino voters backed Mr. Newsom, with some Latino-heavy precincts defeating the recall by as much as 88 percent, according to an analysis by the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Early numbers, though, suggest that Latino voters may still not be showing up to the polls at the same rates as white, Black and Asian American voters. As of Tuesday morning, 30 percent of Latino voters who received their ballots by mail had sent them back, compared with 50 percent of white voters and 40 percent of Black voters, according to Political Data Inc., a Sacramento-based research group.
Historically, Latinos are more likely to vote late, and many observers thought it was possible to see a last-minute surge among those voters. Exit polling suggests that Latinos made up roughly 24 percent of all voters in the recall, and that about 60 percent of those Latino voters favored keeping the governor in office.
You May Like: Are There More Republicans Or Democrats In The House
Some Republicans Including Trump Make Baseless Pre
As Election Day dawned in California, some leading Republicans were preparing to declare the results marred by fraud.
Elder had already set up a link on his campaign website to a petition asking the state legislature to investigate voting fraud. In recent interviews he encouraged citizens to report voting issues to his campaign and said a team of lawyers was ready to act if needed.
The pre-election efforts to undermine confidence in the results were led by former president Donald Trump, who sent out a statement Tuesday morning warning of rampant voter fraud. In a Tuesday evening interview on Newsmax, Trump repeated his baseless claims, urging viewers to take a look at whats going on right now in California with the mail-in ballots and all the crap that theyre doing.
Shortly after 1 p.m. Tuesday outside a voting location at the Stanislaus County Fairgrounds in Turlock, Charlotte Dutra, 68, a retired human resources analyst for Turlock Irrigation District, said she is a proud Republican and voted yes to take out.
Dutra said she filled out her recall ballot and dropped it off in person. She said she believes there was fraud in the 2020 election, and shes still skeptical of election integrity in California because the current secretary of state was appointed by the White-privileged Gavin Newsom.
There is no evidence that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Can Pence Affect The Outcome
While Pence has said he welcomes objections to the electoral college count, his role in the processopening envelopes and affirming the victoriesis largely ceremonial.
Last month, Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to give Pence the authority to overturn Bidens win, but Pence successfully requested the case be dismissed, with an attorney for the Department of Justice arguing he was not the right defendant.
Read Also: Why Do Republicans Want To Take Away Health Care
Newsoms Efforts To Combat Coronavirus Sway Some Voters
In a rapidly gentrifying part of Inglewood, Calif., Gov. Gavin Newsoms imposition of restrictions in response to the coronavirus pandemic swayed some voters as did Republican Larry Elders statements that children do not need to be vaccinated or wear masks.
Keeping a candidate in office thats going to protect health-care workers, protect children, enforce the mask mandate at this point Im on the front lines. I work at UCLA Health in a hospital setting as a manager and am in the thick of it, seeing children get sick, Jolie Emenike, 41, said about the issue that drove her to vote against the recall Tuesday morning.
I dont want to see the vaccine or mask mandates change, she said.
For Dan Sabin, too, the vaccine rules were top of mind, though his conclusion was different.
I was subject to a vaccine mandate when I was younger in Romania. We overthrew our government, but I still have the lasting effects of that mandate, said Sabin, 33. I definitely recalled Gavin Newsom.
Although he called mail-in ballots a massive risk, the software engineer said he trusts the election process.
Im not really sure. You have to trust the people that do the ballots, he said. Ultimately, the people that work in there are people in the community.
If Rep Liz Cheney Doesnt Have A Home In The Gop Who Does
To be sure, though, Fragas own research has found that white voters, regardless of how easy or hard it is for them to vote, consistently turn out at higher rates than voters of color, so we do want to be careful of not reading too much into this. Jennifer McCoy, a political scientist at Georgia State University who studies the effects of polarization on democracy, told me that she thought the current emphasis on voter restrictions boiled down to Republicans thinking they could appeal to Trumps base by codifying his baseless claims of voter fraud. know they have to attract Donald Trump supporters who now believe there is fraud, said McCoy. So a large part of the current efforts to change voter laws was a direct response to this last election. Large majorities of Republicans continue to believe Bidens win is not legitimate, and a that only 28 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning people agreed that everything possible should be done to make voting easy, a steep drop from 48 percent in October 2018.
The GOPs restrictionist bent sends the message that Republicans dont want Black and brown Americans to vote. In September 2020, 54 percent of Black respondents and 35 percent of Hispanic respondents told FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos they believed Republicans didnt want people like me to vote.
Don’t Miss: What Percent Of Republicans Approve Of Trump
Why Are Republicans Fighting So Hard For Georgia
While the presidential election results were full of disappointments for Donald Trump, losing Georgia may have been the unkindest cut.
Like Arizona, the state hadn’t been carried by a Democrat since 1992. But unlike that desert state, Georgia wasn’t considered an electoral battleground until the campaign’s final weeks.
That, along with the narrowness of the Biden lead in the state, may be why the Trump team has fought so furiously to flip the state to his column – even if it means going to war with local Republicans overseeing the state’s election.
The president’s efforts to cast doubt on the results in Georgia are complicated by the fact that the state’s two runoff contests in January will decide control of the US Senate. The more he feuds with his own party in the state, the greater the risk division will lead to Republican defeat.
Trump is making Georgia his first presidential visit since the election. The stated purpose is to campaign for the two Republican incumbent senators, but he is sure to continue to call into question the presidential verdict in the state.
Reversing the election results has proven to be a futile battle, but it seems the only thing worse for this president than actual defeat is appearing to accept it.
