In early March, Joe Biden signed an executive order to “protect and promote the exercise of the right to vote” — a response to the groundswell of disenfranchisement bills Republicans in state legislatures across the country were pushing. The order didn’t do much — there’s only so much that can be done on voting rights through executive action — but it was meant as a signal that the president and his administration took the anti-democratic threat of the Trumpist GOP seriously. “We cannot let them succeed,” Biden said in a statement at the time.
But four months later, Biden and the Democrats appear no closer to stopping the Republicans’ anti-voting crusade. In fact, they’ve actually lost ground since then: States like Georgia and Florida have enacted their draconian voting restrictions, with Texas poised to do the same. Biden has spoken passionately and eloquently in defense of the vote, and Kamala Harris has been working on the issue since the beginning of the summer, but they haven’t managed to get their party unified around a strategy to combat the GOP, with their pro-democracy bills still hostage to the Senate filibuster. Biden legitimately seems to recognize the danger of what the Republicans are doing. But it’s been hard to understand what, exactly, he wants his party to do about it.
A new report may offer a glimpse into the administration’s thinking. According to the New York Times, White House officials and Biden allies have recently expressed confidence to voting rights groups that they could “out-organize voter suppression,” essentially believing that Democrats can turn out enough voters to overcome the GOP’s election shenanigans. White House officials said they “did not recall” making such comments to advocates, but the focus on turnout seems broadly in line with how the administration has approached the issue so far. “I have heard an emphasis on organizing,” Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the Times. That suggests the administration, instead of fighting the Republican assaults on the franchise, is more or less accepting them as an unfortunate reality, and prioritizing efforts to overcome the barriers at the ballot box rather than on Capitol Hill.
There is a certain amount of political realism to this tack: The John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act can’t pass with the filibuster in place, and even if Biden were to come around on abolishing it, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema say there’s no circumstance in which they would. Returning to a talking filibuster or lowering the bar from 60 votes to 55 could be possible, but such changes may not be enough to stop Republicans, whose political prospects depend on the very voter suppression efforts the bills are meant to prevent. “I would talk till I fell over,” Lindsey Graham said in March, suggesting that even making the filibuster more difficult to deploy wouldn’t keep Republicans from doing so. To the White House, it might make more sense to direct their efforts where they have a better chance of succeeding. Democrats turned out a record number of voters for Biden in 2020, even with the obstacles to access that already existed and a raging pandemic. Surely they could do it again — right?
Perhaps. But there are flaws to this thinking, beyond the obvious fact that barriers to the ballot box are fundamentally wrong, even if they’re overcome. First, it fails to account for the scope of the GOP’s well-organized disenfranchisement campaign. Second, voting restrictions are only one component of the Republicans’ scheme: In addition to passing laws to make it harder to vote, they have also been working to wrest more control of the electoral process itself. Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss failed, in part, because the functionaries in charge of administering and certifying the election results resisted his demands that they “find” or discard votes and did their jobs. Now, the GOP is trying to disempower or replace them. Democrats may be able to get their voters to the polls in spite of Republican restrictions — but what happens if election officials, like Trump, don’t respect the results? Boosting turnout is going to be important heading into the 2022 midterms and the 2024 general election. But doing so without also countering Republicans’ anti-democratic legislation is a gamble. “We cannot litigate our way out of this,” Ifill told the Times, “and we cannot organize our way out of this.”
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