Marc Elias: GOP has surrendered trying to win a majority of the vote. We talk to him on The Brief

Remember all those lawsuits pre-2020 election making it easier to vote, whether by vote by mail, or increased early vote, or myriad other such measures? Remember after the election, the case after case after case that Republicans lost, leading to tweets like “Republicans are now 1-50 in election challenges”? The man behind those legal efforts was Mark Elias, founder of Democracy Docket—an organization focused on information and advocacy about voting rights, elections, redistricting and democracy.

Unfortunately, Elias is very busy these days, and he is so busy for one simple reason. As he explains in this excellent blog post, “[T]he Republican Party has turned to a model that relies not on persuasion of voters, but on slicing and dicing the electorate—and erecting more and more severe and onerous barriers to broad participation in elections—to help ensure that they remain in power, regardless of whether they have majority support.” The Republican Party isn’t even pretending to seek majority support! All that’s left of their bankrupt movement is structural machinations to keep the “wrong” kind of people—youth, communities of color, urban voters—from exercising their right to vote. 

In 2013, the RNC lamented in its public autopsy of the 2012 election that “Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.” But, by 2016, Republicans were boasting about how they won the presidency in 2016 while losing the popular vote by 5 million votes.

In the wake of the 2020 election, the Republican Party has completed its transformation into an anti-majoritarian party. It not only fails to win majorities; it no longer tries. Anti-majoritarian governing is no longer seen by the Republican Party as a flaw to be fixed, but a feature to be exploited.

Elias is a genuine American hero, a superhero fighting for core American ideals that never should’ve become partisanized. There’s nothing “liberal” or “conservative” about voting, but Republicans have decided that they can’t win the battle of ideas, they don’t want to surrender their bigotry and biases to appeal to the nation’s emerging demographic majority, and so they’re responding in kind. How serious is this challenge, and what can we do about it? Join in today for the live YouTube show, 1:30 PM PT/4:30 PM ET, or catch it tomorrow when it hits all the podcast platforms. 

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