The reason the @GOP wants to make it harder for people to vote is because the higher the turnout, generally, the more likely it is that a state goes blue.
And the Republican Party seems to have given up on winning elections by attempting to appeal to the electorate at large. The party has won three out of the past eight Presidential elections. But two of those three came despite losing the popular vote.
That’s now their goal.
They seem to think that their only path to victory is to win the electoral vote while losing the popular vote (and thus not even trying to appeal to the masses of voters). And to do that, to win these narrow electoral victories, they need to suppress turnout.
High turnout seems to be the GOP’s perceived natural enemy. Especially among black voters
Again, for all but one of the last six elections, 8 of the 10 states w/lowest turnouts went red. And in all but one of the last six, 7 of the 10 states w/highest turnouts went blue.
If they can purge mom from the polls (well, at least MY mom ... maybe they like yours) and make it inconvenient for people who don’t have extreme flexibility in their schedule to vote, make it harder to register, everything they can think of, fewer people of my hue will bother.
And that’s the whole point. They think they don’t need to bother trying to compete in the marketplace of ideas in order to win the hearts, minds and votes of America as a whole.
Instead, they’ll just try to whittle away at the numerator. Get fewer of us to vote.
In order to apply the thinnest possible vernier over what most people now realize is naked voter suppression, they speak of “election security.”
Although there is no actual evidence for any sort of widescale problem with the integrity of the vote.
Ignore the masses, try to suppress voters who have the least flexibility and resources, try to win a few key states and hope the Electoral College will save them.
That’s their playbook.
One more thing: there are very few states - even among blue states - in which the GOP outright loses with white voters.
Most states that go blue go blue because the GOP does so badly with nonwhite voters.
They know this.
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There are a bunch of states that, if you compare the turnout rates during Presidential Elections and the GOP's margins for Presidential Elections over the last 4 to 5 elections, have an odd quirk.
They always move in the opposite directions.
In other words, in these states, the higher the turnout, the worse the GOP does. And the lower the turnout, the better the GOP does.
There are 3 states that have followed this pattern since 2004 and another 6 that have followed it since 2008.
All but one of these 9 states has a population that is at least 10% black, 10% latino or both. The one exception is the state of Montana, which also follows this pattern. The more people have voted, the worse the GOP has done during Presidential elections and visa versa.
On average, a higher percentage of the population voted in blue states than in red states. And the growth in the percentage of voters who voted in 2020 blue states was higher than the growth in 2020 red states when you compare the states against their turnout rates in 2016.
Also, 8 of the 10 states with the lowest growth in turnout rates comparing 2016 and 2020 were red states (North Dakota, Louisiana, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Wyoming). Two were red states (New Hampshire and Maine).
One year ago, in February, 2020, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 158.7 million Americans were employed.
In February, 2021, the number of employed Americans is down to 150.2 million.
(Source: bls.gov)
And if you total all the monthly jobs reports from last March through the one that was released yesterday, even with the recent gains, America has lost 6.11 million jobs in the last 12 months.
That's a lot of money out of households.
A lot of small businesses struggling to survive. Or not surviving.
I hate debt and I hate spending. I hate incurring it myself and I hate it when the government incurs it.
But I also hate hypocrisy.
When Trump came to office, the National Debt was $19.95 trillion.
When he left, it was $27.76 trillion.
$7.81 trillion. And the GOP said NOTHING
We're in a pandemic now. America has about 2.5 million fewer jobs today than we had four years ago. That missing money has put a lot of people in financial jeopardy. The tax revenue lost by government and the toll on businesses has been staggering. Many are barely surviving.
That $7.8 trillion dollars in additional debt that America incurred during the Presidency of Donald Trump, which the GOP members of Congress had no problem with whatsoever based on their public comments, is more than four times the cost of the COVID bill. @HouseGOP@SenateGOP