Well, today's the series finale of America...
...and like every other great show's finale, it's gonna suck and we're gonna talk about it for a long time.
What I don't see people talking about enough is the reason we got here.
Not that they haven't been talking. Democrats need better messaging. Democrats need to be nicer to incels. Democrats should throw trans people under the bus. Democrats have to motivate the base! Be harder on immigration. Softer on immigration. Cultivate hispanic men, black men, young men. Be more populist! Be more progressive! (Not participate in genocide, maybe.)
But I just don't see people saying:
The voter suppression worked.
According to US News & World Report, 9 million fewer people voted in the 2024 election than in 2020, although the electorate expanded from 240M to 244M. The turnout dropped from 66% to 64%.
I'm not even going to talk about the 4 million new potential voters (who swung heavily to the right or whatever) or the people who changed their vote because the price of cheeseburgers was too damn high. Or. You know. For other reasons. Let's concentrate on the 9 million who cared enough to vote in 2020 and didn't in 2024. What happened to them?
Well, no doubt a bunch of them died, from Covid or natural aging or other diseases (or in mass shootings!). And I'm sure a lot of people stayed home to protest the Biden Administration's shameful conduct regarding the Gaza genocide. And golly, I bet some of them for reasons they can't quite articulate didn't want to vote for a Black woman. But I don't think any of those causes would add up to a net loss of 9 million votes.
Purely coincidentally, Republican legislatures have been working to restrict voting since 2020. By 2021 they'd introduced 361 bills in 47 states. In one year ALONE.
Republicans restricted access to mail-in voting, shortened early voting periods, moved balloting places, required more and harder to get documentary proof of citizenship, and purged voter rolls.
So did various demographics swing hard to the far right, or were those the groups in which a balancing number of potential voters were intimidated away from or prevented having a voice?
This is what Democrats need to look at if they ever hope to win another national election.
