Kustra: Republicans choose voter suppression over attracting new voters

The Republican Party is headed for a world of hurt, and party officials who have read the surveys and polls know the future is bleak for their ability to command electoral majorities. The split between the remaining Republican moderates in office and the majority members of the party still opting for Trump’s exclusionary brand of politics is evidence of the intramural fights that lie ahead for a party that has strayed from the principles and values of those who have come before them.

As long as the Republican Party preaches the gospel of Trump and continues to fear his reprisals at the next election, Republican Party numbers will decline as they have over the course of this recent election cycle. Just since January, media outlets such as CNN, NPR and NBC have reported thousands of voters dropping their Republican affiliation. Some of those may be disenchanted with Republican officials who did not defend Trump’s role in the Capitol riots, but it’s far more likely from interviews of the deserters that they left in disgust with a party that hitched its wagon to a leader who led them to an insurrection against our democratic way of life.

It will take some time before we know the depth and breadth of a major political realignment, but it’s on the way. Key Republican leaders such as Sen. Mitt Romney and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who called out a member of the House for her “loony lies and conspiracy theories,” seems to understand that the future is not theirs with the current form of Trump Republicanism.

Either the party broadens its appeal or it will become a permanent minority party in the grips of Trump and public officials like Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and their opportunistic agenda. Unable to hold on to the broad center of the political spectrum where we still find most Americans in a general election, a new political consensus will dictate the outcome of presidential elections, not the coalition Trump managed to assemble in 2016.

Author Charlotte Alter adds yet another cause for concern if you are a Republican Party official trying to rebuild after the Trump disaster. In her book, “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.” she finds 10 millennials born between 1980 and 1996 who are governing cities or serving in state legislatures or Congress. There are already 28 millennials serving in the U.S. Congress.

While explaining that most of the 10 she chose to interview are Democrats with only two coming from the Republican Party, Alter is confident this breakdown is not far from reality given a survey of the 2018 Pew Research Center showing the political identity of this generation. Nearly 60% of millennials say they are “consistently” or “mostly” liberal, while only 12% say they are “consistently” or “mostly” conservative.

Surveys can be reliable predictors of voter preferences, but elections are not determined by polling but by who shows up to vote, and Republicans aren’t faring well at the ballot box, either. Two Democrats winning U.S. Senate seats in Georgia is the latest evidence of shifting political winds in a state that has sent Republicans to the Senate in recent years. And that led to Democratic control of the Senate.

The current Republican Party in state after state is showing its true colors as it ignores those who call for moderation and opts for new election laws that make it more difficult for Democrats and independents to vote. Captured by the extreme right wing of the Republican Party and uninterested in expanding the size of its tent by moderating its party platform, the Republican Party has ramped up its voter suppression strategies. Relying on scare tactics that key elections are fraudulent and corrupted by Republican and Democrat election officials, they have turned voter suppression into an art form.

Truthout, a nonprofit news organization providing independent reporting and commentary, recently reported that Republican legislators in more than two dozen states have introduced more than 100 bills to restrict voting access. The Brennan Center, another independent and nonpartisan research organization, takes the longer view in claiming we have witnessed in the last two decades the imposition of strict voter ID laws, the shortening of voting times, restrictions on registration and purging of voter rolls without ample evidence.

One of the most restrictive election bills comes from the Republican-controlled Arizona legislature, which is bound and determined to prevent a Democratic candidate from taking all of Arizona’s electoral college votes, as President Biden did in November in accordance with long-established laws and norms of the Electoral College. A Republican state senator introduced a bill recently to give the legislature the final say on what candidate gets the state’s electoral votes regardless of actual election results, thereby overturning the will of the majority in the presidential election.

There can be no doubt that the Republican Party is spearheading efforts in state after state to deny people of color and others the right to vote. This new flurry of legislation since the November election may be explained as a result of Trump’s unfounded charges of election fraud, but Republican Party officials know they have more to worry about than communities of color opposed to the narrow and spiteful agenda of Trump’s Republican Party.

With progressive-leaning millennials showing up at the polls to vote and suburban white voters trending toward Democrats, the Republican Party has some soul-searching to do to remain a viable alternative in our two-party system. Unfortunately, it is less focused on understanding the demographic changes underway in our country and building a stronger base and more focused on cheating citizens out of their right to vote.

It will take courage for Republican leaders to stand up to a rabble-rousing right-wing of the party that spends its time building blockades to voting rather than building a platform that will win future elections. Democrats have nothing to fear at the moment, as courage among Republicans is in short supply.