Sunday, September 26, 2021

Republican Voter Suppression Laws Hurt Whites

As the Republican Party has seen its support concentrate incrasingly in circles of reactionary elder whites, Christofascists, white supremamcists and conspiracy theory devotees, efforts have been made by Republican controlled legislatures to restrict access and ease of voting to freeze out minority voters, college students, and those ther GOP base views as "other."  Long term, the effort may still fail as the GOP base dies off and shrinks further.   In both the the short term and long term, the effort also harms whites - especially the working class - as it not only makes voting more difficult and leads to a host of other adverse effects, including at the moment soaring death rates from Covid-19 which are concentrated in the vaccine refusers of the GOP base. The pervese version of "freedom" being pushed by governors like those of Texas, Florida and Mississippi - and Virginia's GOP gubernatorial candidate, Glenn Youngkin - is literally killing members of the party base.  A lengthy piece at CNN looks at how the GOP voter suppressions efforts is and will harm its white base.  Here are excerpts:

Critics often describe the wave of voter restriction laws sweeping the nation as a new version of Jim Crow, the 19th century minstrel figure whose stage name became the symbol of a brutal era of Black oppression.

But if you want to understand how these new voter restriction laws also oppress White people, it's more useful to invoke another cultural figure: Wile E. Coyote. 

This comparison is not designed to make light of voter suppression, which is an alarming attack on our democracy. It's to make a point that doesn't get emphasized enough as Democrats approach a crucial stretch in their efforts to pass a new voting rights bill: White people -- not just people of color -- have been some of the biggest victims of voter suppression tactics.

The Republican Party's crusade to make voting more difficult isn't just morally wrong. It's folly. By obsessively chasing the phantom of widespread voter fraud, they are actually hurting their own base of White voters. 

Some of the more obvious boomerang effects of these laws have already been noted. Voter restrictions anger and mobilize voters of color. They make it more difficult for older, rural White citizens to vote. And they discourage some White voters from even participating in elections.

Even some GOP leaders are now warning that restrictive voting laws are hurting their base. One commentator went further, saying Republicans are "inadvertently suppressing their own voters." 

The [California recall] effort to replace Newsom failed, in part, because Elder and other GOP leaders discouraged many of their own supporters from voting by alleging voter fraud in the lead-up to the election, Mathis said in a column in The Week. This was the same dynamic that led to Democrats winning Georgia and control of Congress in the last presidential election, Mathis noted.

"We now have a likely answer to the question of what will happen if Republicans keep manufacturing charges of 'voter fraud' every time they lose an election: Fewer Republican voters will go to the polls," Mathis said. 

But there are other, less apparent reasons why voter suppression tactics not only harm White people but can literally cost them their lives. 

Take, for example, recent comments by Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, which has the highest death rate for Covid-19 deaths in the US and one of the worst vaccination rates in the country.

Reeves says every Covid death breaks his heart but told CNN he still opposes President Joe Biden's vaccine mandates because they are "tyrannical." 

The fact that Mississippi has some of the nation's most restrictive voting laws and an overall health system that's ranked dead last in the nation may seem unrelated. But some say they're not, because restrictive voting laws lead to voters electing less competent political leaders who don't respond to the needs of all their constituents. 

That's what Alex Keena, a political scientist, discovered while researching a book he co-authored, "Gerrymandering the States: Partisanship, Race, and the Transformation of American Federalism."

"It leads to legislators who are good at getting elected and raising money, but they don't know a lot about government," says Keena, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

This inability to govern can have lethal consequences. Keena says. 

States that enacted partisan gerrymandering -- redrawing congressional districts to favor the Republican party and deprive Black people of voting power -- tended to have higher infant mortality rates, Keena says. They also were more likely to challenge the Affordable Care Act in courts and were generally less responsive to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 than Republican-controlled states that didn't gerrymander, he found. 

There is a phrase that describes what happens to some White voters in states like Mississippi. It's called "Dying of Whiteness" -- the name of a 2019 book by Jonathan M. Metzl that describes a political dynamic where racial, "backlash governance" leads to White voters picking political leaders who enact policies that tend to make them sicker, poorer and more likely to die early by gun suicide. 

This same dynamic is partly why most of the counties in the US with the fewest fully vaccinated people are in Southern states led by GOP governors. 

"When state governments rig the voting rules to suppress the voting power of their opponents, there are measurable decreases in public health and policy outcomes that affect everyone," Keena says.

Republican leaders who seek to restrict voting rights also hurt themselves by turning off young White voters who could make the difference for them in future elections. . . . The best way to ensure that students turn into good citizens who vote in every election is through steps such as placing polling places on every college campus -- something discouraged by many new, restrictive voting laws, she says.

"Make voting easy and accessible to first-time voters, "says Evins, a history professor at Middle Tennessee State University.  "And that is precisely what the voter suppression laws expressly opt not to do," she says. "Instead they limit opportunities, narrow locations and choices."

Voter suppression hurts White people in another, more insidious way. It silences their voice in the political process. 

A famous 2015 study concluded that the US is not a democracy but an oligarchy where the elites, not ordinary voters, determine public policy. That study validated a belief among many lower- and middle-class White voters that politicians listen to wealthy donors but not to them. 

Voter suppression laws make it easier for political leaders to do just that -- favor wealthy people over others, says Lindsey Cormack, an expert on voter suppression and elections at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

Voter suppression laws "enshrine inequalities" by transforming politics into a pay-to-play system where politicians tune out ordinary voters, she says. 

"Voter suppression laws that make it harder for any poor and middle-class people to vote make it so that members of Congress have less of a reason to listen to the wants of people who are less likely to be able to turn out and vote," Cormack says.

Sadly, too many working class and middle class whites continue to vote for Republicans who support an agenda that favors the rich and which has harmed other white voters over the last four decades. Too many white voters continue to fall for sound bites about race, religion, and the danger of gays and fail to see that it is the GOP which is their true adversary. 

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