The Patriot Post® · Suddenly, It's Republicans Who Stand to Gain From Expanding the Vote

I am of the view, heretical in some quarters, that no one has a civic duty to vote and high turnout is not a measure of democratic health. The popular belief that everyone should be expected to take part in elections has always struck me as perverse. Many people don’t care about politics and policy; they shouldn’t be hectored to vote for the sake of voting. I agree with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA superstar turned cultural critic. “Stop encouraging people who don’t want to vote to vote,” he has written. “When we pressure people to vote, we’re diluting the democratic process, by bringing out those who are easily manipulated.”

So I have consistently, if vainly, opposed election “reforms” designed to make voting as effortless and convenient as possible. Extended early voting, elections by mail, automatic voter registration, an Election Day holiday — in my view, they are all misguided.

That position is not based on partisan loyalty. (I support neither major political party.) It is based on not wanting to see the franchise devalued. For years, however, battles over such policies have been partisan, pitting Democrats, who tend to endorse every change meant to boost turnout, against Republicans, who generally push hard to block such laws.

In 2019, for example, the first legislation introduced by the newly elected Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, H.R. 1, was a bill to implement automatic voter registration nationwide and make Election Day a holiday. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called it “a naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party” and dubbed the measure the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.” The following year, then-president Trump dismissed a Democratic proposal to sharply boost funding for absentee and vote-by-mail options. Calling the package “crazy,” Trump told Fox News that if it passed, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

It’s no mystery why Democrats have so keenly pursued — and Republicans so keenly resisted — every means of making it easier to get unregistered people added to the rolls and voting in elections. Political organizers regard it as axiomatic that unregistered (or inactive) voters are more likely to lean Democratic. Thus if more marginal voters can be induced to register and cast a ballot, Democrats are more likely to gain. Pew Research Center findings compiled in 2014 showed the typical pattern: Among nonvoters that year, 29 percent identified with the Democratic Party, while only 18 percent said they favored the Republicans.

This model, so long and firmly established, explains the never-ending political skirmishing over voting rights and regulations. “Republicans want to throw up barriers,” Representative Summer Lee of Pennsylvania said Wednesday during the congressional debate over a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration, “because when people vote, they lose.” She could have said just as accurately that Democrats keep pushing to slacken election rules because they believe that when more people vote, they win.

Last year, Republican and Democratic policymakers waged versions of this battle in more than half of the state legislatures; there have been additional clashes this year in Alaska, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Montana.

But what if Democrats and Republicans are wrong? What if conventional wisdom has been turned inside out? What if marginal voters, contrary to long experience, have become a potential bonanza for the GOP?

According to Nate Cohn, the New York Times’s chief political analyst, that is exactly what has happened.

“In a reversal of one of the most familiar patterns in American politics, it appears that Donald J. Trump, not President Biden, would stand to gain if everyone in the country turned out and voted,” Cohn wrote recently.

Though Biden leads Trump among frequent voters, he trails so markedly among the rest of the electorate that Trump leads overall. For political operatives, this may be the most unexpected illustration yet of how thoroughly Trump’s populist appeal has transformed American political norms.

According to Cohn’s data, disengaged voters don’t especially like Trump personally. But they are motivated more by the pocketbook issues Republicans emphasize than by the defense-of-democracy argument being pushed by Democrats. Consequently, even low-turnout voters who would normally consider themselves Democrats now say they would be inclined to vote for Trump.

To psephologists crunching the latest numbers, indications of growing Republican support among infrequent voters — the ones who don’t bother to show up for primaries and special elections — have been visible for a while. In 2020 Trump came much closer to winning than polls of likely voters had foretold, in part because he showed surprising strength among Hispanic voters. Moreover, newly registered voters are significantly less likely to affiliate with the Democratic Party than was the case five years ago.

In North Carolina last year, Republicans — in keeping with the traditional pattern — fought to curb same-day registration, while Democrats went to court to protect it. But as the New York Sun recently noted, voters taking advantage of the opportunity to register on Election Day and then immediately vote in the last election were disproportionately Republican. Something similar happened in New Mexico and Virginia: Same-day registration was championed by Democrats, but a majority of the new voters attracted at the last minute signed up with the GOP.

Old habits die hard. By all accounts rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats haven’t abandoned their traditional views on whether to loosen or tighten ballot access. But can party leaders and campaign professionals ignore a tectonic shift that upends the old assumptions about who gains when more people vote? If it becomes unmistakable that higher turnout now hurts Democrats, will that affect their ardent calls to expand access to the ballot? If Republicans realize that they are more likely to win by promoting vote-by-mail and allowing voters to register on the spot, will they continue to assail such changes?

If the political winds have well and truly shifted, it is only a matter of time before the parties shift on voting rights as well. Republican and Democratic leaders may flatter themselves that their stands on voting rights are grounded in principle, not merely the hunger to win. But major political parties exist to win elections — there is no principle more compelling. Over the decades, the Republican and Democratic parties have dramatically altered seemingly fixed positions on everything from civil rights to protectionism to foreign policy. Will this be the one issue on which they stand their ground no matter what? Don’t count on it.