In the last several months, Republicans in dozens of states have engaged in a Machiavellian effort to curtail voting access. Their efforts have appeared to focus principally on the Black voters who helped hand Democrats control of the White House and the Senate. Their agenda is determinedly partisan. A Republican lawyer has acknowledged as much before the Supreme Court, and by all rights, this should be a crisis point in American political history.
But it’s not, mostly because Republican efforts seem almost certain to fail—and even backfire. Voter behavior, at least since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has proven notoriously hard to game. As Robert Griffin, the research director of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, put it to me, trying to be “Machiavellian in this situation is probably not going to work out,” given that Republicans are “going to have a hard time actually understanding the potential impacts” of their own crackdown. Considering that attacking the franchise appears to be the biggest agenda item of the post–Trump Republican Party, it’s a pretty strong indictment that they can’t seem to get that right. If Machiavelli were alive today, he’d be embarrassed.
The Republican fallacy starts with the assumption that voters are easy to manipulate along partisan lines. Unfortunately for them, evidence suggests otherwise, as Griffin recently argued in The Washington Post. Much of the Republican effort has been focused on restricting absentee or mail-in voting, which broke sharply for Democrats in 2020. But historically, mail voting has not favored either party. The 2020 tilt was almost certainly an artifact of the pandemic and of disparate voter-turnout strategies, where Democrats urged mail-in voting and Republicans—especially Donald Trump—pushed in-person.
A Stanford University study on the effect absentee voting had on last year’s election suggests that greater adoption of mail-in voting affected how you vote, but not whether you vote. In Texas, which limited mail-in voting mostly to those age 65 and older, 64- and 65-year-old voters participated in almost the exact same proportions, despite the very different rules governing ballot access. Similar studies have shown limited real-world impact of other Republican initiatives. Curtailing Sunday voting, as Georgia considered, was widely seen as a direct attack on Black voters. But in Georgia, a ban on Sunday voting could have just as likely impacted white evangelicals, as Chris Grant, the chair of the Political Science Department at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, told me. (The Sunday voting ban didn’t ultimately make it into the voting-restrictions law the state passed in late March.) There’s always the possibility of confusion around new rules, but Republicans are as easily confused as Democrats, and well-funded voter education and turnout efforts, as Democrats will surely mount in Georgia and elsewhere, will likely ameliorate any major impact, says Andra Gillespie, a professor of political science and sociology at Emory University.
Voting patterns in the last several elections demonstrate the difficulty of connecting voter-access rules to actual turnout. For the past few decades, convenience-voting opportunities in many states have been expanded. The total number of voters who voted early, absentee, or by mail more than doubled from 2004 to 2016, an increase from one in five of all ballots cast to two in five, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Yet overall voter turnout in elections stagnated over the same period. Neither greater access to mail voting nor the creation of early-voting periods materially increased voting; only the presence of Donald Trump brought people back to the polls in record numbers as voters on both sides concluded that they had a significant stake in electoral outcomes.
You wouldn’t know any of this, of course, if you judged by the posturing on the left. After the Georgia Senate advanced the new voting restrictions in March, Stacey Abrams declared them “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” President Joe Biden described the new measures created by Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country as “un-American” and “sick,” and Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project Action Fund, criticized Republicans’ “unholy war” on voting rights.
Abrams and the others are no doubt legitimately angry at Republicans for trying to manipulate elections, especially in the context of Trump’s violent attacks on election integrity. But they are also clever enough to know that the anger they’re fanning will benefit Democrats in 2022 and beyond. One of the bigger risks Democrats face is that their new voters in 2020 will be demotivated by success and by the absence of Trump. The Republican voting-law effort plays squarely into Democratic messaging that Trump may be out of the picture, but Trumpism is not. Grant, the Mercer political science professor, told me that Democrats around the state are madder than “wet hens,” and Abrams, whom he lauded as one of the savviest politicians he’s seen, will undoubtedly “harvest this energy and use it to her best advantage going into the next election.”
Gillespie assured me that Democrats will “attempt to make hay on this through 2022,” but it’s always possible in our era of Twitter attention span that voters will have moved on by next year. Voter motivation isn’t the only boon Republicans are poised to hand Democrats, however. Last year was an extraordinary financial windfall for the left. Fueled by small-dollar donors angry at Trump—what some called “fundraging”—Democrats were practically swimming in money: In 2020, Democratic candidates running for federal office raised almost $5 billion, a figure about three times the comparable fundraising in 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in Politics. With Trump exiting the scene and donors fatigued by politics, Democrats could reasonably anticipate a falloff. But likely thanks to Republican machinations like the Georgia election laws, the drop-off has not happened, at least to the level Democrats feared. “It has just kept going and hasn’t stopped,” a senior Democratic strategist in Georgia told me. The Democratic National Committee, which has sent out a seemingly endless series of emails on the Georgia election changes, just recorded its best-ever February fundraising in a non-presidential-election year—a windfall difficult to imagine without all these Republican missteps.
That the intent of Georgia’s new rules don’t appear to be matched by their impact is hardly a defense of the law, or of similar proposals elsewhere. They still further the false Trumpian narrative that the 2020 election was stolen, and they undermine faith on both sides of the fairness of our election laws. But if the end result is that, come 2022, Stacey Abrams is happily ensconced in the Governor’s Mansion in Atlanta, as many Georgia Democrats fervently hope, then perhaps this will all be a cautionary tale to Republicans that there’s a heavy price to be paid for messing with voting rights.
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