Republicans would rather subvert democracy than lose

By Francis Wilkinson

Political analysts haven’t had a difficult time interpreting the string of high-profile defeats that Republicans have experienced on abortion since the Supreme Court jettisoned Roe v. Wade last year.

As journalist Ronald Brownstein notes, the Ohio GOP’s attempt this month to short-circuit the statewide referendum process — a political bank shot intended to undermine an abortion rights referendum in November — got clobbered in cities and suburbs. The “escalating political struggle over abortion,” Brownstein writes, “is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.”

Brownstein is referring to the GOP falling behind in areas that power the U.S. economy. Hillary Clinton won counties accounting for about two-thirds of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2016. Four years later, Joe Biden won counties accounting for 70%.

That lopsided result is a window on the two parties’ divergent coalitions. The chief reason that the political struggle over abortion is escalating, however, isn’t so much the increasing alignment of economically dynamic areas with the Democratic Party, fusing liberalism to economic growth. It’s that the Republican Party is hostile to the views of the American majority and steadfastly uninterested in earning its support.

The GOP knows that its myriad efforts to restrict or eliminate abortion rights are unpopular. Poll after poll confirms it, and the party has now lost abortion-related votes in several states, including Kansas and Kentucky — neither of which represents the vanguard of American feminism.

In another stark example, voters in Wisconsin handed a liberal abortion rights supporter a decisive 11-point victory in the state’s Supreme Court contest earlier this year. The race was widely portrayed as a vote on reproductive rights.

The GOP has responded to its abortion defeats in a systematic fashion. But the system it deploys is not a democratic one. In Ohio, it sought to make it more difficult for voters to decide policies at the polls, putting more power in the hands of GOP legislators. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators are contemplating impeaching the newly elected Democratic Supreme Court judge if she doesn’t recuse herself in a case over the corrupt gerrymander that enables Republicans to dominate the legislature with half the vote. The cost, delegitimizing elections and disenfranchising voters who put the judge in office by a double-digit margin, is one that Republicans appear willing to impose.

Disenfranchising voters has become a standard GOP resort. Gov. Ron DeSantis has shown no qualms about undermining Florida voters, twice removing democratically elected prosecutors on the grounds that he doesn’t like their politics. Republicans in Texas, proponents of 10-gallon election lies aimed at disenfranchising 81 million Americans, are determined to manipulate local election oversight. In Alabama, Republican legislators are defying a U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring they stop disenfranchising Black voters, who have been gerrymandered out of representation by the GOP-dominated legislature.

This is not the way representative democracy is supposed to work. For a look at how a functioning democratic party handles unpopular positions, consider the case of former Democratic congressman Mondaire Jones.

During Black Lives Matter protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the slogan “Defund the Police,” a vague assertion with inconsistent meanings, gained currency among BLM activists. The slogan was an act of political self-harm guaranteed to bring aid and comfort to the very forces of police militancy that BLM sought to defang.

Republicans, careful students of the methods of Donald Trump, promptly assigned the slogan to the Democratic Party at large and accused Democrats of wanting to stop policing or prosecuting crime. A CNN fact check described subsequent GOP advertising connecting Democrats to “defund the police” as a “dishonesty-filled barrage.”

Yet a few Democrats were reckless enough to go there. One was Jones, who represented a moderate suburban congressional district north of New York City that’s now represented by Republican Rep. Mike Lawler. (After redistricting, Jones abandoned his district and ran, and lost, in another district.)

Jones is now running for the Democratic nomination to face Lawler in November 2024. However, Jones, who in office occupied the left side of the House Democratic caucus, has adapted to public opinion. In 2022, he told the New York Times that “defund the police” is a “terrible slogan.” In a more recent interview, he cited “poor choices” of words to explain how he came to be associated with it.

Another Democratic candidate for the same seat, Liz Gereghty, who is Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s sister, seems inclined to make Jones pay for such poor choices. “He’s taken positions that I think are going to cause him problems,” Gereghty told CNN.

This is evidence of a self-correcting mechanism in which the people seeking to represent the public absorb the public’s views to win support. It is the opposite of insulating your party from public opinion through gerrymandering and other subterfuges to disempower voters.

There is no perfect balance in representative democracy. Too much pandering to public opinion can rob politics of the power of conviction and prevent smart, appropriate, difficult choices from being made. Occasionally, moral stands in contrast to public opinion are courageous and necessary.

But the GOP is not taking moral stands and suffering the consequences of its convictions. It is both unwilling to lose power and unwilling to alter unpopular positions. Instead, it attacks democracy itself.