Republicans Might Not Win Again for Generations
Democrats have figured out how to beat us. We can't ignore this, nor should we join them.
We used to have “straight up” elections - votes for this guy versus that gal were tabulated on election day and a winner was declared. In these contests, the voters’ decisions came down to “these ideas” versus “those ideas” or “this plan” versus “that plan” or “this person’s character” versus “that other person’s character”.
Political campaigns, whose aim is to influence voter opinion, would have a defined starting and ending date. From the date of the initial FEC and state-level candidacy registrations through to election day - what falls in between those dates is something called a campaign. Campaigns are structured and built around voter outreach: unveiling of a platform (formal declaration of positions), media engagements, going door to door, public rallies, townhall events and debates. All these are planned out and carefully resourced with forecast expenditures and volunteer hours. Fundraising begins long before the formal campaign and runs continuously throughout. Campaigns are intended to sway voters’ opinions - to change outcomes.
That’s what it used to be about. Not anymore
In the modern electoral carnival there are a raft of outside influences that influence the choice of voters in what has become the continuous campaign: unceasing media influence, donations from other states and cities, politically-motivated policy decisions (see student loan debt forgiveness and selling off the Strategic Petroleum Reserve), polls engineered to influence voter decisions, corporate engagement and national political parties’ involvement in state and local elections.
The campaign never ceases. Even when you’re not thinking about politics and candidates, you’re being programmed to think about politics and candidates - through social media and the news and how major corporations engage you. And what politicians are promising you and “giving” you day to day in the form of (temporarily) lower gas prices, bigger social security checks, and promises to forgive your debts or make your mortgage more affordable.
It never stops. When they’re not telling you about the latest giveaway to enrich your bank account, they’re warning you that the other guys are evil incarnate, seeking to end our democracy and take away your rights!
And the endless polling never ceases either. It used to be that polls were the purview of wonky political operatives hoping to divine effective marketing strategies. Today we have polls constantly pushed on us to tell us what “most” people think - so we can identify with the majority or properly vilify those we’re told don’t believe the right things.
Our political class aren’t governing anymore so much as they are campaigning continuously.
But Republicans can actually overcome all that - as they did in 2016. And 2010. These were carnival campaign years and featured all the insanity I described above. We can win elections even if they’re lopsided in the media and pressure comes at the voter from every angle to vote Democrat.
What we can’t beat - and what has defeated us twice now - is the combination of early voting and widescale vote by mail.
This year was set to be a Republican blowout and it should have been. It was a Democrat midterm election for a deeply unpopular president, the economy is on the wrong track by an astounding 50 percentage points, inflation is tearing through the family budget, and our southern border is being poured through by illegals to the tune of over two million a year. And yet we didn’t regain one vote in the Senate and are poised to see the House barely under Republican control - maybe. Why?
Let’s address the cheating angle first. You can’t prove it happened. Oh don’t get me wrong, the irregularities in the counting look terrible. But that doesn’t prove anything. Once a ballot is received and determined to be legitimate according to state law, it gets processed and counted- and it doesn’t matter where that vote came from; its progeny at that point is immaterial. And nobody can prove otherwise. Republican legislatures in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania supposedly took the steps needed to ensure cheating couldn’t happen. The GOP hired hundreds of lawyers and paid election observers to engage early and watch every move. Supposedly we were ready for this election.
So we can assume either cheating didn’t happen, or the ballot was conducted in a manner in which the cheating was not going to be provable. Because Republican legislatures set the rules and we had lots of lawyers watching every step. So likely the latter: it isn’t provable - so it might as well have not even happened. Are you starting to see the problem?
What did happen, indisputably, is that Democrats’ highly effective get-out-the-vote machinery took supreme advantage of state law through early voting and mail in balloting, while Republicans waited for that one day to show up in person - sacrificing millions of votes in the process. And it was all legal. And if there was ballot harvesting and changing of votes - you can’t prove it happened. Just like 2020 all over again.
Democrats spent up to fifty days working their tails off getting ballots cast, while Republicans sat back, waiting for election day. And while paid Democrat volunteers were going door to door harvesting and bundling ballots and putting them in drop boxes, we were focused on just one day, weeks in the future, hoping our strategy would get enough voters to the polls in just 12 hours to overcome the multi-million ballot margin the Democrats had already banked. This is the kind of electioneering we’d expect from Third World Banana Republics.
Think for just a moment how pernicious early voting itself is. With four to six weeks still left to go in the campaign, with candidate town halls still yet to come, before the debates have occurred, before the candidates have had their chance to make their final case to the voters - millions of ballots have already been legally cast. In what universe does this make sense? Election day should mark the end of the campaigning and the start of voting - and not one day earlier. What few absentee ballots come in should not have the weight to change the outcome of the election, except in very rare circumstances.
So why do Republican legislatures go along with it?
Please don’t bring up convenience with me. It’s about as hard to vote on election day as it is to stop at the store on the way home from work to pick up a gallon of milk. I saw young parents at the polling station on Tuesday, November 8th with kids in strollers and backpacks. Nobody is disfranchised by restricting voting to just one day. And for military personnel and those in nursing homes or planned surgeries, they can request an absentee ballot. We don’t need 30 days to vote, let alone 50 or more. And yet Republicans allow this.
Again, it’s not about the cheating or potential to cheat - which can’t be proven in either case - it’s about honoring the registered candidates and their campaigns with a straight up vote after the campaigns have ended.
If Republicans can’t fix this early voting and mail in voting, they may never win another election again. Not when Democrats have a 50:1 advantage in the number of days available to get a voter to the polls.
Republicans need to stop talking about election integrity and end early voting. Period. Or they can get accustomed to being a minority party for at least another generation, or until the republic collapses - which ever comes first. If Trump really gave a damn about this country, he would have invested the last two years in getting rid of early and mail-in voting - because that is what cost him the election in 2020. Because you can’t prove cheating after ballots have been legally processed.
The other area that is completely within the bounds of Republicans to control: open primaries. Democrats spent huge sums of money on our primaries, aiming to get the weakest, easiest candidates to beat in the general election. Republican state organizations can demand the legislatures (most of whom are Republican controlled) to end that by simply decreeing their primary is closed. Why let Democrats vote in our primaries?
And not just closed to outside voters, but closed to outside campaign contributions as well. Establish a simple rule: no candidate for the party nomination may take funds from outside the state - meaning you have to win the Republican nomination with Republican voters using only money you raise locally. That way, Democrats can’t help to elect weak candidates. And Republicans from other states, who have no local skin in the game, can’t “help” either. Which has the added benefit of drawing Republican voters to the general election to vote for people they chose in the primary.
Think about it: Democrat dollars and Democrat voters are deciding who the Republican candidates are - surely you see how this might suppress Republican turnout for the general election. Contact your state GOP chairman and get them committed to ending this corruption.
Democrats have figured out how to beat Republicans - and they’re doing it. And the main reason they’re doing it is we’re enabling it to happen.
We shouldn’t join the Democrats in this game - it’s their game after all. As good as we might think we could get at this, they’ll stay a step ahead of us. And if it did come down to “who can cheat better than the other” what would that do to the legitimacy of our government? That it’s the result of the best cheater? Is that what we really want?
We can take back our elections by enforcing the rules we had in place just three short years ago - while closing our primaries to outside influence. Is that really so damn hard?
Election day should be one day and one day only. And Republicans should pick their candidates without outside influence. Do these two things and we’ll start winning again. Or at least we’ll be losing fairly.