“Voter Fraud Is Rampant”: This Week In Republican Political Lies
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas — last seen threatening the president of the United States with armed revolt — has turned his attention back to suppressing the vote in his home state.
On Monday, the governor took exception to comments President Obama made last week during an interview at the SXSW festival, to the effect that that Texas’s voter turnout is so abysmal in part because the state’s officials “aren’t interested in having more people participate” in elections. As an example, Mr. Obama pointed to Texas’s extremely strict voter-identification law, which lawmakers passed in 2011, but which was invalidated by a federal district judge in 2014.
Governor Abbott rejected Mr. Obama’s premise. “What I find is that leaders of the other party are against efforts to crack down on voter fraud,” he responded. “The fact is that voter fraud is rampant. In Texas, unlike some other states and unlike some other leaders, we are committed to cracking down on voter fraud.”
“Voter fraud is rampant” — it’s the hoariest claim of proponents of voter-ID laws, and the most untrue. As the evidence has shown over and over and over and over and over, there is no voter-impersonation fraud — the only type of fraud that such laws purport to combat.
In 2014, Justin Levitt, an election-law scholar at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, catalogued every instance of voter-impersonation fraud he could find in any election since 2000 — not just prosecutions, but even vaguely credible allegations. He found 31 — over a period in which Americans cast about 1 billion votes in federal, state and local elections.
Meanwhile, tens or hundreds of thousands of otherwise-eligible voters are either blocked from voting or deterred from trying because of these laws.
Back in 2007, a federal appeals court judge named Terence Evans saw this discrepancy plainly, calling voter-ID laws “a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.” Noting the discrepancy between the alleged harm and the proposed solution, he asked, “Is it wise to use a sledgehammer to hit either a real or imaginary fly on a glass coffee table?”
Nine years later, the hammer still swings. On March 9, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit voted to reconsider the district court’s decision striking down Texas’s voter-ID law.
Republican politicians, who appear more afraid every day of losing their tenuous grip on a changing electorate, could adjust their message to appeal to a broader swath of voters. Instead they are taking the path of least resistance and trying to silence those they’ve already written off.
By: Jesse Wegman, Editorial Pages, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, March 17, 2016
“Trumpkins Beware, It Get’s Worse”: Why We’re Segregated On Super Tuesday And How It Helps Explain Trump
The most segregated place in American politics just might be a partisan primary.
The massive racial disparities in voter turnout between Republicans and Democrats help explain how Donald Trump seems to be insulting his way to the nomination. But this same dynamic also underscores how screwed the GOP is in terms of national demographic shifts if they choose to go further down this dangerous path.
Today is Super Tuesday, nicknamed the SEC primary because it includes many states in the Southeastern college sports conference. Contrary to stereotypes, the South is more racially diverse than many regions in the United States. Also contrary to stereotypes, Republicans field a more diverse set of statewide elected officials than Democrats, as evidenced by the presence of two Hispanic senators from the South running for president on the right side of the aisle.
But the good news stops there. The racial polarization beneath our politics becomes clear when you look at who turns out to vote in partisan primaries.
Let’s start with a look at South Carolina—a state where black people make up 28 percent of the population, roughly double the national average.
Hillary Clinton won a massive victory there this past weekend, winning 86 percent of black vote in a primary where African Americans made up 61 percent of the turnout.
A week earlier, Republicans ran in the same state and CNN exit polls showed that black support for Republicans was almost nonexistent—or, in the statistical parlance of exit polls, “n/a”—not applicable.
This troubling trend is likely to become only more pronounced on Super Tuesday. Eight years ago—the closest comparison we have to this open-seat presidential cycle—voter turnout was high but the diversity was also skewed to one side, especially in the South.
In delegate-rich Texas, for example, black people make up 10 percent of the population, but made up only 2 percent of the voters in the 2008 Republican primary. Hispanics made up 38 percent of the Lone Star State population, but only 10 percent of the Republican votes. But in the Democratic primary, black Americans were 19 percent of the vote and Hispanics 32 percent of the vote, respectively.
In Alabama, black people make up 26 percent of the population, but made up only 4 percent of GOP primary voters in 2008. On the Democratic side of the aisle, black voters made up 51 percent of the primary electorate.
The same dynamic was evident in Georgia. Black Americans made up 31 percent of the population in 2008, but only 4 percent of the GOP primary vote. In contrast, black voters made up 52 percent of the Democratic primary turnout.
We’ll round out the sample set with Virginia, where black people make up 19 percent of the total population but made up only 3 percent of GOP primary voters in 2008. On the Democratic side, black voters constituted 30 percent of the primary turnout.
If you’re from the South or have spent much time there, these results may seem unremarkable. But they are a sign of a deeper sickness in our political system, where race is too often a partisan signifier.
Here’s the short version of how this happened in the South: This division is rooted in the legacy of slavery and the Civil War: The states of the former Confederacy voted against the Party of Lincoln for a hundred years (and blacks who could vote were loyal Republicans) until conservative Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Southern Strategy began. White Southern Democrats became Republicans, but they remained conservative populists.
This dynamic was compounded in recent years by collusion between the two parties in the form of the rigged system of redistricting, which gerrymandered the South into white and black congressional districts, rural and urban, driving the Bill Clinton-era Blue Dogs—centrist white Southern Democratic congressmen—into extinction. There are no swing seats left but the racial polarization of the parties in the South is intact, further reinforcing the sense that partisans can simply play to the political and racial base rather than reach out to form new coalitions.
Almost needless to say, this racial polarization does not mean that voters in the respective parties are racist—especially by the standards of a generation ago—but it does mean that the rank and file of our political parties are more segregated than our society at large. And the elevation of Donald Trump to the GOP nomination will only compound these problems.
This primary turnout explains how the rise of a Trump is possible while spewing divisive racial rhetoric: There is no short-term political cost and quite possibly some short-term political benefit in playing to fears of demographic change, cultural and economic resentment and anger toward the first black president. But the long run is all downside.
That’s because partisan primary turnout is often unrepresentative of the overall state. So you can win a partisan primary without having those results be a predictor of how the state will vote in the fall, especially in the case of a crucial swing state like Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, or Virginia. The primaries become the tail that wags the dog: A small number of voters, represented by an even smaller number of professional partisan activists and special interests, get massive attention from candidates trying to win the nomination. If you’re campaigning for the Republican nomination, you can safely ignore diverse communities, but that play-to-the-base path to winning the nomination is a surefire path for losing a general election.
Say what you want about George W. Bush, but he was genuinely passionate about increasing the reach of the Republican Party into communities of color. The foundation of his 2000 presidential run was his landslide re-election as governor of Texas in 1998, when he won 40 percent of the Latino vote.
Trumpkins will point out that The Donald won the Latino vote in the Nevada caucus last month. This is true and doubly impressive/depressing running against two actual Hispanics, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz—as Ruben Navarrette predicted in The Daily Beast. But it’s not incidental to point out that while a record 75,000 Republicans caucused, only an estimated 6,000 were Latino—well below the 27 percent of the population that is Hispanic. Cut this stat with two other facts—President Obama won the Latino vote by 50 points in Nevada and 80 percent of Latinos nationwide have a negative view of Trump—and you quickly pack up any notions that Trump’s Nevada caucus victory is an indicator of general-election strength.
And so it goes. The increasingly narrow base of the GOP, dominated by conservative populists, has created the conditions for a celebrity demagogue like Donald Trump. The absence of a strong center-right or real depth of diversity among the Republican constituency means that the party can be too easily hijacked in five weeks of partisan primaries by pandering to an electorate that doesn’t look much like the America that candidate will have to win—let alone govern.
While the polls show that Donald Trump is primed for a big night, don’t believe the hype: No matter how “yuge” the win, the underlying electoral math is apocalyptic for any party that chooses to not only ignore but insult the growing diversity in America.
By: John Avlon, The Daily Beast, March 1, 2016
“Bernie Sanders Has A Turnout Problem”: So Far, The Uprising Looks Pretty Limited
In order to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency, you have to amass 2,382 of the 4,763 delegates who will attend the party’s convention in July. The three contests that have taken place in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada have allotted only 118 of those delegates, or 2 percent. And yet to listen to journalists, pundits, and analysts, the end of the Democratic race is in sight. If Hillary Clinton succeeds in beating Bernie Sanders in South Carolina this coming Saturday, they will declare that she has delivered a crushing blow, leaving him face-down on the canvas, his vision doubled and ears ringing as his weakened arms struggle to raise him up for Super Tuesday, when the final, gruesome pummeling will be administered.
If that’s what they say, will it be unfair? You bet. There’s still a long way to go, most Democrats haven’t voted, and South Carolina won’t change that no matter what happens. But Sanders doesn’t have a lot of time to prove that his already remarkable campaign more resembles Barack Obama’s in 2008 than Howard Dean’s in 2004.
No analogy is perfect, but those are roughly the two paths facing Sanders: an extraordinary run that challenges conventional wisdom and the political establishment, confounding expectations by bringing in huge numbers of small donors, and exciting young people to get involved in politics for the first time, and then wins; or a campaign that does all those things, and then loses.
On Sunday, the day after Clinton won the Nevada caucuses, Sanders was candid about why he fell short. Here’s what he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press:
Well, what happened is over the last five weeks, Chuck, we came from 25 points down to five points down. As I understand it, we actually won the Latino vote yesterday, which is a big breakthrough for us. But the voter turnout was not as high as I had wanted. And what I’ve said over and over again, we will do well when young people, when working-class people come out. We do not do well when the voter turnout is not large. We did not do as good a job as I had wanted to bring out a large turnout. …
Again, I wish we had had a larger voter turnout. But by the way, we did phenomenally well with young people. I think we did well with working-class people. But remember, we were taking on a candidate who ran in 2008. She knew Nevada a lot better than we did, she had the names of a lot of her supporters. So I am proud of the campaign that we ran. Obviously, I wish we could have done a little bit better. But at the end of the day, I think she gets 19 delegates, we get 15 delegates, we move onto the next state.
Sanders is right: The Democratic Party in Nevada is estimating the turnout for the caucuses at around 80,000. In 2008, the last contested caucuses, just under 120,000 Nevadans turned out. In other words, turnout was down by about a third.
Caucuses are, of course, ridiculous and anti-democratic. They make voting even harder than it is in primaries, so rather than expressing the will of the voters, they express the will of a relatively small group of highly motivated voters who happen to be willing and able to attend a long meeting in order to state their preference. While 80,000 Democrats attended the caucuses, 530,000 Nevadans voted for Barack Obama in 2012. If the number voting for the Democratic candidate this November turns out to be in the same neighborhood, it would mean that only one in six or seven Democratic voters actually participated in the event to choose that candidate.
And it’s true that for many people inclined to vote for Sanders, like young people, caucusing may be particularly difficult. That’s a big part of the reason that Hillary Clinton was able to win the Iowa caucuses by a hair: The older people and frequent voters who were more likely to support her were more likely to caucus.
But in Iowa, turnout was down, too. Around 171,000 Iowa Democrats caucused this year, but in 2008, that number was 236,000, meaning it dropped by 27 percent. And in New Hampshire, which Sanders won easily, turnout this year was just over 250,000; in 2008 it exceeded 288,000. That’s a smaller decline (13 percent), but still a decline.
You might say that it’s a high standard—after all, 2008 was an unusual campaign, one that got Democratic voters energized in ways they had never been before. And that’s true. The problem for Sanders is that he needs to duplicate that excitement in order to win. His campaign is predicated not just on doing well with young voters or new voters or any other kind of voters. It’s predicated on expanding the electorate, both in the primaries and in the general election, so much that he overcomes the advantages more traditional politicians have.
More so than Obama or even Dean, Sanders is counting on a revolution, not only to help him defeat a primary opponent who has more of the traditional advantages of an establishment favorite, but also to govern once he wins the White House. When Sanders is challenged on how he’ll be able to push his ambitious policy plans through a recalcitrant Congress, he responds that he will lead a powerful uprising of the citizenry that will force politicians to accept change. So far though, the uprising looks pretty limited.
Sanders has already accomplished something remarkable. The fact that a frumpy 74-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont has turned what was supposed to be a walk in the park for Hillary Clinton into a genuinely competitive race is positively historic. But unless he really can expand the electorate, it may not be enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, February 24, 2016
“Voter Turnout Challenges Sanders’ Recipe For Success”: There Is No Real Evidence Supporting His Thesis
It’s not exactly a secret that Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign faces skeptics when it comes to “electability.” With so much on the line in 2016, including the prospect of a radicalized Republican Party controlling the White House and Congress, plenty of Democratic voters, even some who may like Sanders and his message, are reluctant to nominate a candidate who’s likely to fail in a general election.
And on the surface, those concerns are hard to dismiss out of hand. Sanders is, after all, a self-described socialist senator running in an era in which most Americans say they wouldn’t support a socialist candidate. He’s 74 years old – two years older than Bob Dole was in 1996. Sanders has no experience confronting the ferocity of the Republican Attack Machine.
When GOP officials, leaders, and candidates take steps to help the Sanders campaign, it’s pretty obvious why.
But Sanders and his supporters have a counter-argument at the ready. Below these surface-level details, the argument goes, Sanders’ bold and unapologetic message will resonate in ways the political mainstream doesn’t yet understand. Marginalized Americans who often feel alienated from the process – and who routinely stay home on Election Day – can and will rally to support Sanders and propel him to the White House.
The old political-science models, Team Sanders argues, are of limited use. Indeed, they’re stale and out of date, failing to reflect the kind of massive progressive turnout that Bernie Sanders – and only Bernie Sanders – can create.
This isn’t the entirety of Sanders’ pitch, but it’s a key pillar: the Vermont senator will boost turnout, which will propel him and Democratic candidates up and down the ballot to victory.
There is, however, some fresh evidence that challenges the thesis.
In last week’s Iowa caucuses, turnout was good in the Democratic race, but it dropped when compared to 2008, the last competitive Democratic nominating fight. (Republicans, however, saw turnout increase this year to a new, record high.)
In yesterday’s New Hampshire primary, turnout was again strong, and with nearly all of the precincts reporting, it looks like about 239,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary. But again, in the party’s 2008 nominating contest, nearly 288,000 voters turned out, which means we’ve seen another drop. (Like Iowa, Republican turnout in New Hampshire yesterday broke the party’s record.)
This is obviously just two nominating contests, and there will be many more to come. It’s entirely possible that Sanders-inspired turnout will start to appear in time.
But Iowa and New Hampshire are arguably the two best states in the nation, other than Vermont, for Sanders. But that didn’t produce an increase in voter turnout.
It’s a metric that may give Democrats pause as the fight continues. If Sanders’ entire model of success is built on the idea that he’ll bring more voters into the process, it matters that there’s no real evidence of that happening, at least not yet.
Update: I received an update from a reader who suggested comparing 2016 turnout to 2008 turnout isn’t entirely fair, since the 2008 Obama-Clinton race was an epic fight that drove numbers up. It was, in this sense, an outlier – which makes it a poor point of comparison.
And while there’s likely something to this, it actually helps reinforce my point: if a 74-year-old socialist is going to become president of the United States, he’d need to boost turnout in ways without modern precedent. Or more to the point, he’d need to be able to match and build on the kind of turnout Dems saw in 2008. So far, the numbers simply don’t show that.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 10, 2016
“2014 Midterm Elections”: With So Much At Stake, This Coming Election Day Is Not A Time For Eligible Voters To Stay Home
With less than 10 weeks to go before the midterm Congressional elections Americans in general are frustrated with Washington. National polls show that about three quarters of all Americans disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job. By comparison, about half of those Americans polled disapprove of President Barack Obama’s handling of his job.
Sunday’s New York Post reported that 163 laws have been passed and signed by the president since this two-year term of Congress began in January 2013. That is far lower than the 284 laws that were passed by the 2011-2013 session, which is an all time record for fewest bills passed. Congress passed 386 laws during the 2009-2011 session. Former Representative Lee Hamilton (R-IN) told the Post, “I’ve never seen it any worse in terms of public esteem for the Congress. I can’t find anybody who says a good word about it.”
Despite Congress’s lack of productivity, and as outrageous as it may seem, it appears that most incumbents will be reelected in November. Conventional wisdom is that while most Americans want to get rid of Congress, they nonetheless support their own representative. This is especially true during midterm elections because voter turnout is often very low, which gives incumbents an advantage. But both parties are leaving nothing to chance, as a record amount of campaign dollars will be poured into this election, surpassing the $3.6 billion spent in 2010.
Republicans currently hold a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives, 233-199; there are three vacant seats. The GOP expects to expand its majority in the House. Meanwhile, Democrats currently hold a majority in the Senate. But of the 36 Senate seats in play, 21 of them held by Democrats, while 15 are held by Republicans. If the GOP picks up six Senate seats this midterm they will be in the majority in both houses of Congress. Most experts, including Nate Silver, of the election site FiveThirtyEight, give Republicans a slight edge to take those seats and become the majority party in the Senate.
The Republicans are targeting the seven Democratic seats that are up in states where Mitt Romney beat President Obama in the 2012 presidential election. They are also going after four additional Democratic seats in states where the president remains unpopular. Republicans will do all they can to make this election about President Obama’s unpopularity.
Domestically the president has been attacked for executive actions he has taken to bypass the blockade that Congress has become. For example, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who himself has presidential aspirations, has regularly attacked the president, telling Fox News “He believes somehow that he’s become a monarch or an emperor that can basically ignore the law and do whatever he wants.” On the other hand, Republicans have attacked President Obama for being disengaged and “leading from behind” on foreign policy. The president’s recent comment the he does not have a strategy on dealing with ISIS in Syria was seized upon by Republicans. Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), said on CBS Sunday, “What I want to hear from the president is that he has a strategy to finish ISIS off, to defeat ISIS.”
Congressional and Senate Democratic candidates have tried to localize their elections, but Republicans are focusing on President Obama in an effort to energize their base. So Democrats are trying to mobilize minority voters, especially African-Americans, who generally don’t vote in midterms. Party activists are using the shooting in Ferguson, Mo., and conservative calls to impeach the president, to mobilize Blacks. An increase in the number of Southern Blacks helped Democrats during the 1998 midterm election, when President Bill Clinton was under heavy fire from the right.
Ironically, the one Republican Senator who is in the toughest fight to be reelected is the man who has the most to gain if Republicans win majority control. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), the Senate minority leader, has done all he can to obstruct and block the agenda of President Obama since the day he was sworn in to office in 2009. McConnell is facing a vigorous challenge from Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. McConnell is not popular in Kentucky, but a recent state poll shows he has the edge. Lundergan Grimes is making McConnell’s failings in Congress the issue. But McConnell is tying his opponent to President Obama.
Should Republicans take control of both houses the legislative process will grind to a halt. Anything the Republicans pass, like efforts to defund Obamacare, will be vetoed by the president. Meanwhile, Congressional investigations into the so-called scandals surrounding the IRS and Benghazi will intensify. The partisan divide will widen as Republicans try to score points before the 2016 Presidential Elections.
Because so much is at stake, this coming election day is not a time for eligible voters to stay home.
By: Joe Peyronnin, The Huffington Post Blog, September 1, 2014
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