I’ve heard and read multiple voting rights advocates say that Texas is neither a red state nor a blue state...it’s a non-voting state. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not making a prediction that Texas is going to flip blue this year. I am, rather, pointing out that even in the Lone Star State, Republicans are holding onto their majority by a slim enough margin their power must be maintained by gerrymandering and vote suppression. Texas consistently has the lowest voter turnout or very close to it.
When Democrats vote, we win.
It’s not like Republicans don’t realize it. We don’t have all this gerrymandering and vote suppression by accident. There’s certainly no reason to let Republicans off the hook by pretending vote suppression is an unintended consequence of their deeply held principles. To the contrary, the principles Republican politicians, consultants, and strategists pretend to have are reverse engineered from their preferred outcome. In this case, how to get 50%+1 votes with policies few people want.
When Democrats vote, we win.
Now we have a massive number of voters who are primed to vote Democratic. The fall of Roe v Wade. End stage neoliberalism. Years of experience with Trump and widespread concern over the fascist movement he leads. A wildly out of control, corrupt, partisan majority of the Supreme Court. And on the other hand, a whole bunch of things that have gone well since a new tenant was signed for the White House. Environmental progress. Student loan forgiveness. Revitalized antitrust enforcements. Stronger support for worker rights including unionization than we’ve seen in two generations.
Republicans are getting desperate to maintain that red wall of minimized voter participation. So desperate they’ve turned to begging people not to vote.
When Democrats vote, we win.
On the 4th of July, the New York Times opinion section chose to publish an op-ed from a Michigan resident making his case to not vote in the 2024 election. One democracy expert slammed the national paper of record for its decision to run the essay.
The column, which is titled, "Why I Don't Vote. And Why Maybe You Shouldn't Either," is by Matthew Walther, who is a contributing editor to The American Conservative. With a noticeable tone of considerable disgust, Walther describes the term "civic duty" — which voting rights advocates often use when making the case to participate in the electoral process — as "off-putting."
"If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, civic duty is surely the first. Some version of the civic-duty line is trotted out by the sort of do-gooder who hands out voter registration forms to strangers — an activity I find as off-putting as I would an invitation to sit down and fill out a handgun permit," he wrote.
Journalist Stephen Wolf posted an excerpt of the essay to his X/Twitter account with the text: "This is what the New York Times chose to publish on Independence Day just one week after the Supreme Court ruled that Republican presidents are above the law."
While quote-tweeting Wolf's post, History professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat — an expert on democracy and authoritarian governments around the world — admonished the national paper of record for its decision to publish Walther's column.
"This is just very sad and frankly just what the Autocracy Doctor ordered," she tweeted. "Not voting is a vote to let others decide your fate, and we know that many elections are decided by relatively few votes. The goal of many autocracies is 'demobilization': people detaching from politics so they don't resist."