But what if the election reform warriors of both parties are wrong? What if more voter enfranchisement and access don’t help Democrats win elections? What if Republican suppression tactics are inadvertently galvanizing Democrats and suppressing their own vote?
“Republicans have really talked themselves into believing that these non-registered Americans are just going to vote Democrat. It’s just not true,” said Chuck Warren, a Republican strategist whose political consulting firm, September Group, engaged in a 2020 voter contact operation that reached 5 million doors. He points to last year’s Knight Foundation study of unregistered Americans and registered voters who vote very rarely. The study found that were they to vote regularly, they “would add nearly equal share to Democratic and Republican candidates (33 percent versus 30 percent, respectively), while 18 percent said they would vote for a third party.” The study also concluded that these non-voters “skew center-left on some key issues like health care, [but] are slightly more conservative than active voters on immigration and abortion.”
Republicans fared respectably in a 2020 election that featured a larger turnout than any election since the Constitution guaranteed women’s suffrage. A whopping 21,725,329 more people voted in the 2020 presidential election than in 2016. Yet despite their loss of the White House and Senate, Republicans still made gains in the House and state legislatures.
Read the full article at Washington Monthly.