Republicans are going to keep rigging the vote until the party falls out of favor with mainstream whites. They have every incentive to do it, and being the party of oligarchy means that they’ll commit political suicide if they don’t do it. This is why the Republican party is now a clear and present danger to democracy as we know it - at minimum a clear and present danger to American democracy and society as we’ve known it since 1965.
On the surface, the midterm elections look and feel good for progressives because, after all, we mostly ‘won’ more than we lost. The problem is, many of those victories were tight. Yes, they count, but it’s not like the Democrats dominated to the point that they’re causing Republicans to do some soul-searching. That might happen in 2020, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Look at what remains in the Republican party: Mostly Trump loyalists. Among the Republicans who survived, most represent districts that cheer Trump’s Vince McMahon approach to politics.
Just to follow up, we’re now at an interesting (depressing and ominous) moment in modern American political history, with a technically defeated candidate telling her supporters (of which there are many) that their state’s democracy is essentially illegitimate. I happen to agree with her. But this is also going to be used by Republicans to add further strain on democracy. I could easily see Republicans who lose refusing to concede, claiming that the system is rigged. I could see them stirring up a hornets nest, too.
Republicans are well aware of their problem with suburban whites. Whether they can solve it in time for 2020 is unknown.
And Trump is making blatant overtures to blacks. I doubt it will be that effective but it really wouldn’t take a whole lot to be disastrous for the Dems.
Republicans can’t go in reverse; they can only go in the same forward direction they’ve been going in since 2010. They might occasionally talk of moderating, but they can’t. They’re shackled by their base, which consists of oligarchs, white supremacists, and christian warriors. True, their base is a minority of the voting population, but their solution to that problem isn’t political moderation; it’s voter suppression and the further erosion of civil rights. And in Florida and Georgia, it has worked. It has worked in North Carolina as well over the past several years, to some degree.
As Democrats who have recently moved to Georgia, my wife and I have been doing all we can to thwart Kemp and the Republican vote suppressors: we canvassed and phone-banked for Stacey and the other Dems, and signed up to to be poll workers. We helped flip GA-6, chucking out Trump toady Karen Handel and replacing her with Lucy McBath in the district that Jon Ossoff lost two years ago, and that was Newt Gingrich’s for 20 years.
The next big push is coming up on Dec. 5, when there will be a runoff for Secretary of State: we have to get a Democrat in that position to help turn back Kemp’s voter suppression. We’ll be calling voters for that one, too, but I’m worried that people may not understand its importance or may feel discouraged at Stacey’s loss.
How would you feel if a Republican had posted “I signed up to be a poll worker to help the GOP candidate win”
?
Was your loyalty to the party or to the election?
Abrams lawsuit has no merit.
The purged voters she refers to were purged because of a 21 year old Georgia law that was passed by a Democrat legislature and signed by Democrat governor. The process of becoming a purged registration takes at least 3 years and by law must occur.
She also mentions registrations that were in limbo because the information on the registration does not match information on file. All the people that had mismatched information could still vote as long as they had a valid photo id.
Abrams is peddling conspiracy theories that have no validity in order to undermine the elected governor.
(Bolding added.)
Thank you for your work in GA-6, commasense. Also, thank you for being poll workers. (Most of us understand that’s not an opportunity to influence voters on behalf of a candidate, but to assure voting proceeds as smoothly and properly as possible, including allowance of provisional ballots where appropriate.)
In your phone banking, you should probably start by getting the date correct: please tell voters it’s Tuesday, December 4th!
I apologize for not expressing myself as clearly as I should have. We signed up to help at the polls not to help any candidate win, but to perform a civic duty, and to see for ourselves, first hand, how the election was being conducted. I was impressed that in Cobb County, at least, the process was handled fairly and professionally by all concerned, from country employees to trainers to poll workers like myself.
The main problem here, and in many other places, is that the voting machines (provided by Diebold, whose president infamously promised to deliver the Ohio electionto Bush in 2004) are very old (the copyright statement on the boot-up screen was dated 2003!), prone to being hacked, and have no paper backup.
D’oh! (But thanks for your kind words.)