The stakes in Georgia's election changes

The stakes in Georgia's election changes

Slow Boring / by Matthew Yglesias / now

April 5, 2021. 

Major League Baseball, with the encouragement of national Democrats but over the objections of local ones, decided late last week to move the All-Star Game out of the state of Georgia.

That was part of a larger campaign of big corporations feeling pressure to denounce the election administration changes made by Georgia Republicans. And the basic story here is that while senior citizens and non-college whites are overrepresented in American political institutions, they are underrepresented in corporate America where the executives are largely non-elderly college graduates.

National Republicans now want to strike back at Major League Baseball by passing a law that would eliminate its antitrust exemption.1

Mike Lee @SenMikeLee

Why does @MLB still have antitrust immunity? It’s time for the federal government to stop granting special privileges to specific, favored corporations—especially those that punish their political opponents. https://t.co/k3GIZuGYHB

Rep. Jeff Duncan @RepJeffDuncan

In light of @MLB's stance to undermine election integrity laws, I have instructed my staff to begin drafting legislation to remove Major League Baseball's federal antitrust exception.

April 2nd 2021

1,060 Retweets4,255 Likes

A more consequential — but lower-profile — version of this fight is playing out with Delta, which maintains a gigantic hub in Atlanta. Delta also weighed in against Georgia’s election law changes, and now angry Republicans want to increase taxes on jet fuel to punish them.

I doubt that the jet fuel thing will actually happen, since unlike tinkering with antitrust law, it could have genuine negative economic consequences for Georgia. But it is a sign of where we are politically, wherein Republicans are still too in hock to free market ideology to adopt popular positions on taxes and healthcare, but are increasingly interested in saying they will selectively abandon it in order to punish companies that make them mad. Meanwhile, I think the actual issue in Georgia is slipping away under various levels of meta-commentary.

What Georgia is doing

The Georgia election law has a lot of provisions, many of which interact with each other. It also featured some ideas that changed at the last minute. And it’s attracted a big national audience of critics, many of whom neither live in the state nor have any particularly broad view of election administration issues. Therefore a lot of people have said untrue things about it, which has led some conservatives to form the erroneous view that the criticisms are all lies and hysteria.

But I really recommend this breakdown by Reid Epstein and Nick Corasantini which reveals a lot of consequential changes.

One thing is that they’ve made it less likely that people will vote absentee in Georgia — they narrowed the window during which ballots can be requested, they largely banned absentee dropboxes, and they made it illegal for local officials to adopt a policy of mailing ballots to all voters. Then they banned mobile voting centers.

The upshot is to funnel more people to normal in-person voting, which likely means longer lines. Yet they put restrictions on giving people food and water in line to encourage them to stick it out and vote. They made it harder to vote legally if you vote at the wrong polling place (perhaps deterred by long lines). And they made it harder to respond to long lines by extending voting hours.

This is all offset by a provision that expands early voting — but does so in a very particular way. Basically, it raises the floor for early voting rather than raising the ceiling. This means, in practice, that early voting should become more available in rural counties while staying the same in the high population Greater Atlanta counties. They are pretty clearly trying to make voting more burdensome and frustrating in metro Atlanta while keeping things the same or maybe even making it easier in the rural parts of the state. It’s an effort to halt the state’s leftward drift by manipulating the electorate rather than adapting to shifting opinion. It will also just make voting more annoying for the typical person, which is bad, albeit not exactly the return of Jim Crow.

Overblown analogies and dumb rebuttals

Stacy Abrams referred to all this as “Jim Crow in a suit + tie,” which seems mistaken to me on two grounds.

Stacey Abrams @staceyabrams

Georgia Republicans want to hide their shameful actions from public scrutiny. It’s Jim Crow in a suit + tie: cutting off access, adding restrictions, encouraging more “show me your papers” actions to challenge a citizen’s right to vote. Facially neutral but racially targeted. 2/

March 25th 2021

6,408 Retweets25,732 Likes

For starters, it implies that somehow the original Jim Crow was not wearing a suit and tie. There was a good recent case study of disenfranchisement in Louisiana. The 15th Amendment remained on the books so you couldn’t pass a law saying Black people can’t vote. Instead, the poll tax was a powerful weapon for disenfranchising Black people (almost all of whom were poor) that also disenfranchised a lot of white people.

Graph showing proportion of African Americans and White Voters registered to vote over time

There was also just a lot of violence. In 1869, a Black Georgia state legislator was taken out of his house and beaten by the Ku Klux Klan. The governor of the state at the time was a Reconstruction Republican who tried to offer a reward for the capture of the mob, but that wasn’t successful. The legislator in question did not run for re-election in 1870, and given the climate of violence and intimidation, white Democrats swept the legislature. They then took steps to impeach the governor who fled the state.

Raphael Warnock calls present-day voter restrictions “Jim Crow in new clothes,” which I think depicts the class politics better. Again, though, it’s obviously not as violent or extreme as classic Jim Crow, and I don’t really know what the value of overheated analogies is.

Then on the flip side, you have Ben Shapiro arguing that nothing counts as voter suppression because in his view “voter suppression is when you don’t get to vote.”

Jason Campbell @JasonSCampbell

Ben Shapiro: "Voter suppression doesn't involve long lines, any more than long lines at Disneyland are ride suppression"Image

March 31st 2021

539 Retweets4,294 Likes

This is a ridiculous way of looking at Disneyland, which is trying to manage scarcity of its rides in a profit-maximizing way. They use a mix of fees and rationing-by-queuing to try to make money, and obviously the length of the lines is in fact a deterrent to taking the rides.

It’s also the case if you look back at the Louisiana chart that the era of universal Black disenfranchisement actually ended a generation before the Voting Rights Act. Starting in the New Deal era, poll taxes went away in many states (to enfranchise poor whites), and you often saw a switch to the “white primary” system of disenfranchisement. The Supreme Court ruled this illegal in 1944, and you saw a bump in Black voter registration associated with the end of the white primary and return from World War II military service.

By Shapiro’s standard, the situation that prevailed between the end of the war and the passage of the Voting Rights Act would I guess not count as vote-suppression.

graph showing the impact of the voting rights act of 1965, specifically voter registration disparity in southern states

The real story here is just that the Jim Crow Era was long — considerably more time elapsed between the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Civil Rights Act than has passed since MLK’s assassination and today — and a lot of different stuff happened. But if you accept the view that the voting rights situation that prevailed in the 1950s and early 1960s was bad,2 then half-measures toward disenfranchisement also count as bad.

All that said, the real-world impact of this should be modest and the big problem is elsewhere.

Election administration is not that big of a deal

The point I really will grant to Georgia Republicans is that it’s not like this means Georgia is going to have the most restrictive ballot access rules in the country. The big stylized fact about voting in the United States is that the most voter-friendly rules exist out west as a legacy of the Progressive Era and the least voter-friendly rules exist in the urban northeast as a legacy of old-time political machines. The other regions are somewhere in between.

Overlaid on this regional pattern is a more recent partisan pattern where, especially since Obama won in 2008, both parties have tended to act as if systematically higher turnout is good for Democrats.

That’s meant Democrats have generally backed bills to make it easier to vote while Republicans have generally backed more restrictions. And that’s led to some regional convergence, as the urban northeast has gotten more voter-friendly while the South and Midwest have generally gotten more restrictive. But then Virginia has a southern institutional legacy but solid Democratic control of state government, so they’ve become practically Pacific Coast in voting. And in the Pacific Coast states, at this point the governor will practically show up at your doorstep personally and collect your ballot.

The smart analysts all say that the partisan narratives around this are mostly wrong. Virginia’s very dramatic pro-voter and allegedly pro-Democratic changes to election administration, for example, didn’t really have the intended effect.

Nate Cohn @Nate_Cohn

Virginia's an example of how hard it can be to see any tangible consequence to changing voting laws Perhaps no state did more to make it easier to vote. It basically passed HR1. Yet the increase in turnout was average and the Black % of the electorate fellVirginia, the Old Confederacy’s Heart, Becomes a Voting Rights BastionFor nearly 50 years, the state was subject to Voting Rights Act rules meant to deter racial discrimination. Those federal guidelines are now shredded, but Virginia just recreated them on its own.nytimes.com

April 2nd 2021

69 Retweets421 Likes

One way to think about these misperceptions is that after Obama’s two successful election campaigns, his main communications and message operatives sold out to go do corporate work. The veterans of his organizing operations, by contrast, had fewer marketable skills and generally more left-wing convictions, so they stuck around in politics and took over the Democratic Party — telling everyone that investing in organizing and turnout rather than in rigorous message-testing is the way to win.

More broadly, ideologues on both sides like to overrate the idea that you can manipulate the composition of the electorate because it implies there are no electoral benefits to moderation. Yet it’s clear that Susan Collins won Maine even though Trump lost the state, and Jared Golden won the ME-1 congressional race even though Biden lost that district. That’s not because of some incredibly complicated series of turnout differentials; it’s because both Biden/Collins crossover voters and Trump/Golden crossover voters are real people who exist.

Then, what started as mostly harmless puffery by veterans of Obama’s successful campaigns turned into something rancid and dangerous thanks to Trump’s less successful efforts.

The plot to steal the election

After a lot of words, I think the key context on Georgia’s election changes is the ongoing claims by Donald Trump that the 2020 election was fraudulently stolen from him.

When he pushed these claims in the winter of 2020-21, the key Republicans with decision-making authority generally stood firmly against him. But a healthy minority of Republican senators backed him; most House Republicans backed him; and the general perception is that downballot GOP elected officials who did the right thing damaged their political fortunes. The Georgia restrictions represent a symbolic and practical healing of the intra-GOP divide, and they do so on Trump’s terms.

Making it harder for people to vote is bad per se, but unlikely to swing the 2024 election.

The risk is simply that in the future, GOP officials will do what Trump wanted and steal elections. The spectacular and alarming events of January 6 ended up creating what I think is an overstated sense in some people’s minds that the country is facing some kind of violent terrorist movement that might try to seize power. A much more plausible threat is just that a bunch of boring state legislators who are insulated from electoral accountability by gerrymandering will, through one means or another, assign their state’s electorate votes to the Republican candidate.

Back to Georgia, the election reform package also includes a great deal of centralization of power, further raising the risk that the GOP-dominated state legislature will try to invalidate the election.

After all, one big problem for Trump in 2020 was that he lost the election pretty badly. He needed three states to flip in his favor to win, which was a hard hurdle to cross. But suppose he’d lost the popular vote by 3.5 points rather than four points? Then Georgia and Arizona flip to Trump, and Biden’s wins in both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania become razor-thin. Now the GOP only has to flip either Wisconsin or Pennsylvania to steal the election, and it becomes a lot more tempting for one of the legislatures to do it and just brazen it out.

Back in the 2018 wave year, for example, Democrats won 55% of the vote for the lower house in Pennsylvania, which got them 45% of the seats. So Pennsylvania Republicans have a lot of latitude to defy public opinion if they want to. Republicans’ increasing comfort with disregarding the normative force of majority rule combined with validation of the narrative that Democrats only win by fraud suggests the possibility of the imminent collapse of American democracy. So I think it’s important to raise alarms about Georgia, but also to keep an eye on the prize in terms of political equality.

Don’t get angry, get even

To me it’s been frustrating to watch Democrats sort of spin their gears over HR-1, their big democracy package.

This originated as a message bill — i.e., something House Democrats wrote in 2017 planning to pass with the knowledge that Senate Republicans would defeat it. Once upon a time in the misty past, the way a “messaging bill” worked was that you didn’t worry too much about the policy details, you just jam it with popular stuff. More recently, because everyone has forgotten how to do the basic blocking and tackling of electoral politics, message bills just turn into absurd interest group laundry lists, and then all questions are brushed aside with “well it’s a message bill.”

So what you have in HR-1 is just tons and tons of provisions about all kinds of things — 6:1 small donor matching funds! more disclosure for Facebook ads! automatic voter registration! — many of which are worthy, but mostly a sort of peripheral to the core crisis in American democracy.

Right now, the U.S. House of Representatives and a majority of the state legislatures in the country have badly skewed partisan gerrymanders. We just wrapped up a census last year and redistricting is imminent. Democrats have a once-in-a-decade chance to pass a tough anti-gerrymandering law that sets a partisan fairness standard. If they pass such a law, then if they win future elections 51-49 they will receive narrow governing majorities. If they do not pass such a law, then Republicans will continue to run states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin indefinitely and just laugh off the occasional 55-45 defeat.

Similarly, right now, the geographic skew of the Senate massively overrepresents non-college white voters while underrepresenting Black and Hispanic voters.

graph showing that the senate gives disproportionate power to the most populous demographics

This means that it is going to be very hard for Democrats to win future Senate majorities. The current 50-50 Senate is based on Democrats having held on to Senate seats in West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio back in 2018 when there was a Republican president, Democratic incumbents in each of those states, and a very favorable national political environment. That majority likely cannot be sustained past the 2022 and 2024 cycles, meaning the chance to enact reforms is slipping away very fast.

These big skews — gerrymandering and the Senate — matter much more than the marginal impact of tinkering with voter ID or absentee ballot rules. And right now, nothing at all other than timidity and paralysis is stopping Democrats from curtailing the filibuster, passing anti-filibuster rules, and creating a path for D.C. and U.S. territories to become states. Those would be good, highly effective, pro-democracy reforms with strong public legitimacy that would make it much harder to steal future elections. They deserve much more focus and urgency.

1

As best as I can tell this is not a big deal in practice, and the NFL and NBA operate in an economically similar situation despite the lack of any such exemption.

2

Of course at the time, the conservative movement said it wasn’t bad.

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