if everyone voted, repubs would be a severe minority and they know it. preventing democracy is their agenda
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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While I understand their suppressions are an attack on democracy and an attempt to make voting more difficult, why does it disproportionately affect Democrats? Are Republicans just more willing to jump through loops?
Yes. Conservatives vote out of a sense of duty. They don't really pay attention to politics. They vote every opportunity, no matter the circumstances. The 30% who always vote conservative are unaffected by the bullshit that makes progressives throw their hands up and walk away from it all. Progressives vote when they are motivated to vote, and can just as easily be demotivated. It's shitty and we need to do better.
Statistically speaking, Republican party voters are more white, more male, less poor*, less educated, more rural and older than Democrat party voters.
Making an effort to reduce a certain demographic's ability or willingness to vote will necessarily affect one party more than the other. As an example, if you add hoops to jump through, people who are already at their limit, working a zillion hours a week, are unlikely to do it, while the average retiree will probably not mind.
*It's complicated. Republican voters tend to be middle/upper-middle income, while Democrat voters tend to be lower/lower-middle income OR high income, leaving the middle for the Republicans.
Each state's Electoral College vote total is a combination of their House and Senate seats. Low population states are overrepresented in the Senate because each state gets two seats no matter their population. The House of Representatives has been capped at 435 seats which means lower populated states tend to be overrepresented there as well.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/435-representatives/
Republicans tend to do well in rural areas which typically have low populations. Democrats tend to do well in cities which typically have high populations. This pans out to Democrats wining states that have high populations and Republicans winning states with low populations.
Since Republican voters tend to be from areas with low population they tend to be overrepresneted in the Electoral College. This means Democrats need high voter turnout to compensate for their voters being underrepresented. This is how Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 despite losing the popular vote.
I think that you vastly overestimate that. When you look at states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, etc., they're almost overwhelmingly Republican. If elected officials aren't Republican, they're often still deeply conservative on social and fiscal issues.
Ohio here. The vast majority of nonvoters that I've met hold generally left-leaning viewpoints. If they were forced to vote, and did even the most basic research, they would overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
That said, I acknowledge that my experiences have a skewed demographic, and may not represent the population as a whole.
Former Buckeye here, I agree with you. So many were positive their vote wouldn't change anything. No amount of encouragement could make them see the power of the large numbers they held.
I hope some type of voting reform can catch on. I think Star, Ranked or anything better, could cause enough curiosity in how it works to encourage more people to register.
Sure, and I don't hand out with anyone that I know is on the right here in GA either.
It's esp. maddening because if I talk to people at shooting competitions, we can agree on a lot of the core issues, but then most of them are still blindly following Trump because it's all feels, no reals.
Georgia went for Biden and recently elected two Democratic senators. It is not overwhelmingly Republican.
not sure about the rest you listed because I don’t live there and I don’t pay attention to them
Ossof and Warnock were both elected in 2021; IIRC, both of them had run-off elections, and Republicans didn't vote because they thought the election was 'rigged'. Biden was elected because Trump was deeply unpopular; a number of people that had voted for Trump either didn't vote--esp. because around here it seemed like a foregone conclusion that he'd win again--or switched side in 2020.
OTOH, Kemp wins Governor elections pretty handily, and he's not exactly a centrist Republican like, say, Mitt Romney was/is. He clobbered Stacy Abrams in 2022, 53% to 46%. That was even stronger than the first time he beat her, in 2018, 50 to 49, and in 2022 she had put in four years of trying to build a stronger ground game.
Is the state gerrymandered all to hell? Oh yeah. But given the results of the last governor's race, I wouldn't be looking at Georgia to break Trump.
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