I cited a NY Times article on how poor Americans are increasingly voting Republican. Given the overall political lean of the NY Times, I expect they'd be very happy to promote your theory if there was any evidence for it. Yet they didn't mention it, because there doesn't appear to be any.
Maybe this NY Times article isn't biased and is simply reporting on the data. I don't find "NY Times liberals" to be a compelling refutation of the assertion that the Republican party might be good at voter suppression.
I'm not even claiming they are better at it but it is certainly possible and would explain the data.
> Maybe this NY Times article isn't biased and is simply reporting on the data. I don't find "NY Times liberals" to be a compelling refutation of the assertion that the Republican party might be good at voter suppression.
I don’t think you understand my point about bias. Let me put it this way - the fact that the conservative majority of SCOTUS failed to endorse Trump’s claims about the 2020 elections - in spite of the fact that their own bias would lead them to be sympathetic to them - is good evidence that his claims suffer from a serious lack of supporting evidence. Or, similarly - while Fox News hosts such as Tucker Carlson have expressed some sympathy for the members of the QAnon movement as individuals, nobody at Fox News has publicly endorsed their outlandish factual claims - and if there was remotely any evidence for them, surely Fox News would have done so, which is good evidence there isn’t.
This is what I am talking about here - everyone is biased, but when a person whose bias would naturally lead them to support some position fails to do so, that is in itself a form of indirect evidence against the position.
And I’m sure some voter suppression happens. But, let me put it this way - no doubt some fraud occurred in the 2020 election (just like every other), but it seems unlikely it occurred on a sufficient scale to change the outcome, and there is no good evidence that it did. Similarly, no doubt voter suppression sometimes happens, but it seems unlikely it happens on a sufficient scale to change national demographic trends in voting, and there is no good evidence that it does.
> Similarly, no doubt voter suppression sometimes happens, but it seems unlikely it happens on a sufficient scale to change national demographic trends in voting, and there is no good evidence that it does.
This is where we disagree. There is longstanding evidence for exactly this. It stretches back literally centuries.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. There is clear, established evidence of ongoing, large scale, material voter suppression.
It looks like you are not an American so consider that this is a thing in living memory here:
There is certainly a history in the US of voting suppression targeted at racial minorities, especially African-Americans. (And although I am indeed not an American, my own country also has a history of racial discrimination in voting, also within living memory–the US is less unique in that regard that you seem to think it is.)
However, if working class non-Hispanic whites appear to have been switching, over the last several elections, from Democrats to Republicans – it isn't clear how voter suppression explains that particular change. Your theory suggests that working class non-Hispanic whites haven't changed their collective political allegiance at all, it is simply that Republicans have managed to selectively suppress their vote, but only of those among them who vote Democrat. I don't think that's very plausible – it isn't consistent with the observed changes in turnout figures. And a history of electoral discrimination against racial minorities isn't very relevant to that theory either, since to explain this it would require, not voter suppression against a racial minority, but rather large-scale politically-selective voter suppression against the historical ethnic/racial majority, which is a rather different thing.
And, it isn't just non-Hispanic whites. The biggest swing towards Trump between 2016 and 2020 was in Laredo, Texas–27.7 percentage points. [0] And Laredo is over 95% Hispanic, indeed the most Hispanic city in the United States outside of Puerto Rico. It is also not a rich city by any measure – 30% of its population are below the poverty line. So, it looks like a significant chunk of Hispanic people in Laredo (and elsewhere in southern Texas) – many of whom would be of lower socioeconomic status – decided to switch their vote to Republican, or turnout for the first time for the GOP, in 2020. And the idea that, instead, Republicans just worked out how to suppress Democrats from voting, is inconsistent with the fact that turnout actually increased in Webb County from 2016 to 2020. [1]
I mean just logically the shifting voting habits of a given demographic don’t demonstrate the absence of voter suppression. Those shifting preferences could be for any number of reasons, including suppression itself. We don’t know.
What we do know is that there is no evidence of meaningful voter fraud in the US.
We also know there is an established history of voter suppression and to a lesser extent election fraud.
With this knowledge I see no reason to enact Voter ID.
> Those shifting preferences could be for any number of reasons, including suppression itself. We don’t know.
So, Trump improved his position between 2016 and 2020 in Laredo, Texas, by over 27 percentage points. Two possible explanations:
Explanation (1): He achieved that outcome through the ordinary legitimate means that any politician uses to improve their vote share – adjusting his message to better appeal to that audience, investment in grassroots campaigning, adopting policies which attract those voters, etc
Explanation (2): He achieved that outcome through some form of voter suppression
Some questions:
Question (a): What is the relative probability of Explanation (1) and Explanation (2)?
Question (b): What can we infer from media coverage of this topic as to how most journalists covering it would answer question (a)?
Question (c): Does the answer to question (b) tell us anything about the answer to question (a)?
> With this knowledge I see no reason to enact Voter ID.
I don't support voter ID – but I'm sceptical of claims made by both its proponents and its opponents that the issue would have any significant impact on election outcomes. I think we'd likely get the same election outcomes whether it was enacted or not, and I'm not aware of any hard evidence against that. I think, to a great extent, it is a symbolic issue, a political shibboleth.
Worldwide, there are several models for running elections. The US uses what is called the "executive model", in which the operation of elections is overseen by elected officials (and civil servants who directly report to those elected officials). It also uses a particularly decentralised version of the executive model, in which state and even local officials play a major role in national elections.
Most other English-speaking countries instead use what is called the "independent model", in which elected officials have no direct involvement in running elections, instead they are run by one or more independent government agencies. Australia and Canada are the most directly comparable Anglophone countries to the US, since they both have federal systems (unlike the unitary system used in Ireland and New Zealand, and the devolutionary system of the UK). In both Australia and the Canada, federal elections are fully run by an independent federal agency, while there are separate independent state/provincial agencies used to run state/provincial elections.
I think the widespread lack of faith in the US voting system, found on both sides, is in large part due to its use of the inferior executive model, and switching to the independent model used in most of the rest of the English-speaking world could do a lot to improve public confidence. (There is also a lot to be said for the "judicial model" used in much of Latin America, where elections are run by the judicial branch instead of the executive branch – but I imagine the US would be more open to copying an Anglophone approach to this issue than a Latin American one.)
I realise that having the FEC take over the running of federal elections, like the AEC does in Australia or Elections Canada does in Canada, is probably a non-starter due to constitutional issues. However, if a US state was to adopt a state constitutional amendment establishing a politically independent state agency with sole power over all elections in the state, taking that power away from state and local elected officials–I can't see SCOTUS could possibly object to that.
Your entire premise is flawed. There are more than two explanations for changes in votes by demographic. Your biggest mistake is assuming that race itself is a predictor of political affiliation.
In a world with established voter suppression efforts and a lack of evidence for voter fraud I see no reason to enact Voter ID. There’s no clear benefit and obvious downsides.
> Your entire premise is flawed. There are more than two explanations for changes in votes by demographic.
But which is the larger contributor? We of course will probably never be able to answer that with certainty, but which is more likely to be the larger factor?
> Your biggest mistake is assuming that race itself is a predictor of political affiliation.
But obviously there do exist correlations between race/ethnicity and political affiliation, both in the US and most other countries too. Almost never are they absolute (a group might split politically 60-40 or even 90-10 but almost never 100-0), and the correlations often change over time-the majority of group X might vote for one party now, but some decades ago they voted for the other instead, and maybe in a few more decades they might even swing back. Are you actually disputing this rather obvious fact?
