In the smoky backrooms I envision the Democrats still operate in – Schumer with a cigar and his interns with CBD oil vapes – something has surely occurred to Chuck, Nancy and team: without the massive and historical change in voting laws in 2020, would Joe Biden have beaten Donald Trump?
If the spectrum swings back to center, even a little, and the rules return to anywhere near their historic norms, do they have any chance next time? After all the panic and fear and misinformation stirred up by Democrats and the Partisan Press, the cumulative result of all the election laws being passed by Republican state legislatures is that the rules around the 2024 presidential election will probably look a lot like the 2016, 2012, and 2008 elections. Of course, in two of those we elected an African American president, which makes it hard to understand this all as a vestige of Jim Crow regime racism.
Beyond the Democrats' own unwittingly racist and paternalistic presumptions that African American voters need special help getting to the polls or acquiring government IDs, surely there’s some fear under the surface. Not that 74 million people turned out to vote for the Republican candidate, their fear about that has been right on the surface. But that a vast majority of them did so on what we used to call Election Day.
What if Democrats realized they can’t win elections without six weeks of bussing people to the polls? What if Americans see through the conceit that requiring an ID to vote or limiting absentee ballots – like the vast majority of the European countries Democrats idolize do – is not some evil obstruction of democracy, but a way to safeguard it in a divided country where elections are won by extremely slim margins?
That may be why Democrats are recklessly convincing half the country that elections conducted by anything other than either A) the COVID emergency rules of 2020 or B) the federalism-ending rules of HR1 are heretofore the only legitimate paths forward. Why else would they throw such dangerous red meat to their base, convincing them in the Stacey Abrams model that a great and evil fraud is afoot?
And who in the media will call Democrats out for their irresponsibility? For their fostering of delusion and misinformation? Who will tell them that the impediment to their goals is not the largely-unchanged-in-100-years Senate filibuster, but instead the razor-thin majority an unconvinced public tepidly awarded them? No one, because they are wrapped up in a majoritarian fantasy that does not match how America is meant to be governed. Because they fear the existing constraints of our federal union and are building the intellectual and political justifications for rejecting them.
That’s why they must teach folks to resent so much about our country, so they can justify changing the rules. It’s a national scale version of the process of dehumanization the Left uses to stir anti-rich, anti-capitalist sentiment in justifying naked wealth redistribution.
Who will tell them that fostering election hysteria tends to end poorly, as if we didn’t just get a pretty up-front lesson about that almost exactly six months ago? Who will call out their charlatans, embraced by polite society because they work at The New York Times and on the Hill instead of selling pillows?
I wrote over a year ago about what the Democrats were planning to do as we stumbled towards a contested election. Then I wrote about it again. And again. And I called out the role Stacey Abrams pioneered in 2018 and would be lionized for in 2020. I didn’t do so for partisan advantage. Instead, so we could reflect on the fact that the greatest country in the history of the world now has a divide so great and so basic it can’t even agree on how to conduct an election. The legitimacy-granting mechanism is itself losing legitimacy.
Think about that: the very contest we use to bridge our societal divides, filtered into the realm of what we call politics, is itself the source of dispute. Does everyone understand how core and deep our governance crisis is? Why an America without a federalist devolution of powers is not an America that can survive united?
When the President of the United States declares that opposing a federal takeover of our elections is an assault on democracy; that the traditional election rules that kept him for decades in the Senate and awarded him twice the vice presidency are evil relics of a blinkered past, what will happen? We get to find out in about 17 months.