Politico | Why Donald Trump needs to suppress the vote to win
- Never before in modern presidential politics has a candidate been so reliant on wide-scale efforts to limit the number of votes cast
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by David Siders and Zach Montellaro on politico.com on October 29, 2020.
Donald Trump won the presidency with 46 per cent of the popular vote. His approval rating, according to Gallup, has never hit 50 per cent. He remains under 50 per cent in national polling averages.
The president’s inability to capture a majority of support sheds light on his extraordinary attempts to limit the number of votes cast across the battleground state map – a massive campaign-within-a-campaign to maximise Trump’s chances of winning a contest in which he’s all but certain to earn less than 50 per cent of the vote.
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Never before in modern presidential politics has a candidate been so reliant on wide-scale efforts to depress the vote as Trump.
“What we have seen this year which is completely unprecedented … is a concerted national Republican effort across the country in every one of the states that has had a legal battle to make it harder for citizens to vote,” said Trevor Potter, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission who served as general counsel to Republican John McCain’s two presidential campaigns.
“There just has been this unrelenting Republican attack on making it easier to vote.”
Potter, who now heads the non-partisan Campaign Legal Centre, added: “It puzzles me … I’ve never worked for a Republican candidate who thought it was a good idea to make it hard for people to vote.”
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For Trump, however, the maths makes sense. In 2016, he won Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – five of this year’s most important swing states – with under 50 per cent of the vote.
In two others, Georgia and North Carolina, he captured exactly half the votes. Having failed to expand his base beyond a committed – and sizeable – core in his first term, the president stands to gain from a diminished turnout, particularly among voters of colour.
Elections have long been marred by legal and illegal forms of voter suppression. But the coronavirus – and Trump’s baseless warnings about widespread voter fraud – shifted a once-ancillary feature of campaigns into overdrive. Democrats pushed to ease voting rules amid the pandemic, and Trump pushed back.
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It wasn’t just in court, either. For more than three decades, the Republican National Committee had been hamstrung by a consent decree limiting the RNC’s ability challenge voters’ qualifications at the polls, after the committee was accused of efforts to discourage African Americans from voting.
After the order was lifted in 2018, Trump and the RNC began assembling a massive poll-watching operation. And Trump is heavily invested in its success.
On Tuesday morning, he tweeted: “Philadelpiha [sic] MUST HAVE POLLWATCHERS!”
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The RNC and the Trump campaign bristle at the idea that they are engaging in voter suppression or that there are strategic motivations behind their actions. They frame it as resistance to a Democratic assault on election integrity.
Nick Trainer, the Trump campaign’s director of battleground strategy, called it “the height of hypocrisy that Democrats call our election transparency efforts ‘voter suppression’ – they’re the ones who scared voters away from the polls for months.”
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at University of California Irvine School of Law, said “trying to make voting harder during a pandemic is pretty tough to justify”, suggesting instead that “the Trump wing of the party thinks keeping the electorate smaller helps Trump”.
The effect is often to disadvantage Democratic-leaning constituencies. In swing state Florida, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature slapped additional restrictions on felons trying to register to vote after voters in 2018 approved a measure designed to restore most felons’ voting rights.
In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott limited ballot drop-off sites to one in each county, a measure with outsize effects on the most heavily populated – and more Democratic – areas like Harris County, which includes Houston.
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“They’re open about it,” said Stuart Stevens, who was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in 2012 and who is now working against Trump’s re-election. “They’re not even pretending not to rely on voter suppression.”
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Trump’s public comments about the electoral system in the years since have been no more encouraging for voting rights activists.
Benjamin Ginsberg, a nationally recognised elections lawyer who has represented past Republican presidential nominees, said it is Trump’s language that makes his approach to voting unique.
“What’s different about this election is the president’s rhetoric,” he said. “We’ve never had a president who has said our elections are fraudulent or rigged, and based on all the years I was doing Election Day operations, there’s just no proof to support that.”
Ginsberg said: “The real problem is that fraud and suppression has become part of each party’s get out the vote operation”, noting that such rhetoric could be an animating factor for the bases of each party, but could depress turnout among low propensity voters.
Still, Democrats remain wary of the possible effects of Trump’s efforts to shrink the electorate in his favour.
In a memo circulating among Democrats late last week, one party strategist described Trump’s narrow path to an Electoral College victory as relying on “a surge in support from voters who skipped 2016 and the midterms and a substantial relative depression in Democratic turnout”.
Among reasons for concern, the strategist said, “the scale and scope of the Trump campaign’s unprecedented voter suppression activities”.
“It’s the only way they can win or at least come close to winning,” said Andrew Feldman, a Democratic strategist in Washington. “We’ve seen them continuously try legal means – however unfair or grotesque the legal means are – that are nothing short of voter suppression.”
While Republicans are trying to limit ballot access, Democrats are in an equally furious effort to expand it – and to answer Trump’s poll-watching effort with a counterforce of their own. And Republicans say Democrats brought many of this year’s legal fights on themselves.
“Democrats in a lot of states tried to change the rules that governed an election 90 days before an election,” said Trainer.
Poll watchers, he said, “will be trained to ensure all rules are applied equally, all valid ballots are counted, and all Democrat rule breaking is called out – and if fouls are called, we’ll go to court to enforce the laws, as rightfully written by state legislatures, to protect every voter’s right to vote.”
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