4/5/21
As Election Day approached last year, President Donald Trump had put one very specific group of people in a remarkably difficult position. Trump’s repeated insistences that the election would be riddled with fraud — at least, if he lost — made it inevitable that some officials would be stuck between the actual results in their states and the president’s claims. For Democratic governors in blue states, this was not a problem. For Republican governors in red states, this was also not a big risk; their states would vote for Trump. It was, instead, a looming problem for governors in swing states, particularly Republican governors whose voters were more likely to listen to the sitting president. In other words, it was a potential problem for people such as Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who led purple states. And so it was. Both Ducey and Kemp became frequent Trump targets in the weeks after the election, with the sitting president both explicitly and tacitly encouraging his supporters to attack the governors for their insistence on upholding the results in their states. Had Trump simply conceded on Nov. 7, the day it became certain that he had no path to victory, the fallout would have been limited. What emerged? Trump’s supporters, encouraged by months of falsehoods about the election results, stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington seeking to prevent the Republican’s loss.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, lawmakers in 47 states have introduced more than 360 bills including new restrictions on voting. “The states that have seen the largest number of restrictive bills introduced are Texas (49 bills), Georgia (25 bills), and Arizona (23 bills)," the organization's analysis concludes — three states with Republican governors and increasingly purple electorates. Kemp, unlike Arizona’s Ducey, is up for reelection next year. His unavoidable war with Trump has damaged the likelihood of his having a second term. In an interview last week, Kemp insisted that “a lot of this bill is dealing with the mechanics of the election. It has nothing to do with potential fraud or not.” In Georgia, there is no rational motivation for the passage of its new election law other than demonstrating fealty to the false claims elevated by Trump. Why did Raffensperger need to be replaced on the elections board now? Why did the rules governing absentee applications need to be tightened now, only a few months after an election in which repeated review and extensive scrutiny showed no improprieties had occurred? Once you accept the obvious answer to those questions, it’s awfully difficult to assume that the changes presented in the new law were simply good faith efforts to streamline the state’s election process. All politics is political, but some politics is more political than others.
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