GOP red states launch a war on voting rights | Will Bunch Newsletter

The hoopla over the looming debate in Philadelphia has been obscuring a ton of non-political news. Stop me if you’ve seen these headlines in America before: A high school massacre. A man with a troubled past nonetheless buys an AR-15 and go on a shooting spree. A Black celebrity is pulled over by cops and roughed up in what should have been a routine traffic stop. It’s becoming Groundhog Day with these stories! Where are the solutions?

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It wasn’t really that big a deal for a Florida man named Isaac Menasche last year when someone at a farmers market in the Gulf Coast city of Cape Coral asked him to sign a petition for a voter referendum that would guarantee abortion rights in the Sunshine State, undoing a six-week ban on the procedure signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“I’m not a person who is going out there protesting for abortion,” Menasche would later tell the Tampa Bay Times. “I just felt strongly and I took the opportunity when the person asked me, to say yeah, I’ll sign that petition.”

That’s why the Lee County, Fla. man was stunned last week when a plainclothes police officer abruptly showed up at his door and started grilling him about the petition, asking if the signature was really his. The officer told Menasche he was investigating potential fraud. According to the Florida newspaper, the encounter left Menasche “shaken.”

And he was not alone. The Tampa Bay news outlet said other rank-and-file voters got unexpected knocks on the door from officers in Florida’s one-of-a-kind election police force — a controversial effort by a high-profile Republican governor who sought the presidency in this year’s early primaries to use the power of law enforcement to prove the GOP’s unfounded theory there is widespread voter fraud.

The voter interrogations are part of a sweeping, highly unusual effort led by DeSantis to investigate the referendum just two months before Election Day, even after abortion-rights activists gathered more than a million signatures — more than required by law — and Florida election officials certified the measure for the November ballot. The Florida Department of State under DeSantis — who is also fighting to defeat the referendum at the ballot box — has reportedly asked officials in at least six counties for copies of signed petitions as part of the fraud probe.

DeSantis told reporters on Monday there seem to be issues with some of the signatures, making an unverified claim that some were signed with the names of dead people. But Florida Democrats and supporters of the referendum are outraged, claiming the fraud probe is an effort to either use lawfare to prevent the public from enshrining abortion at the ballot box, or to intimidate voters who now will fear they could be questioned by election cops.

“This is unhinged and undemocratic behavior being pushed by Governor Ron DeSantis in an effort to continue our state’s near total abortion ban,” a Florida state lawmaker, Anna Eskamani, posted on Facebook last week. “It’s clear voter intimidation and plain corruption — continue to call it out and fight back.”

The probe seems to again confirm the worst fears about Florida’s election cops — who caused a furor in 2022 by arresting 20 mostly Black voters on fraud charges that were almost all later dropped — and about DeSantis generally, that he is an authoritarian turning Florida into a police state and not afraid to use the power of the government to shape elections through intimidation. But in 2024, the scare tactics are also part of a national crusade by Republicans to curb voting rights every which way, in service of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

In the case of Florida, Team DeSantis seems terrified that voter enthusiasm for overturning the abortion ban — especially among women voters and the young — will create Republicans’ worst nightmare: High turnout. Most experts believe that support for reproductive rights is the reason for recent shock polls showing that Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris is in striking distance of Trump in his adopted home state, and that the upstart challenger to Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott — former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell — has pulled into a dead heat. An upset loss by Scott would all but doom Republican efforts to reclaim the Senate and, if Trump won, install right-wing judges and Cabinet members.

Call this “the other election.” While all eyes this week are on Philadelphia, the ABC News debate between Harris and Trump, and whether the two White House hopefuls can muster substantive answers on policy quandaries from inflation to climate change to war in the Middle East, to woo swing voters, leaders of Republican states are seeking a victory in November by hoping many people won’t vote at all. And they are using any means necessary — Orwellian fraud investigations, laws that either make it harder for people to cast ballots or for election officials to count them, or seeking to prevent popular voter referenda from even happening. Consider:

— Kafkaesque door knocks from detectives are not unique to Florida. In Texas, where Democrats are posting similar gains, Attorney General Ken Paxton — a MAGA Trump enthusiast who’s survived both indictment and impeachment, like his hero — has infuriated Latino political activists by sending agents, guns drawn, to the homes of elderly Hispanic volunteers and seizing the phone of a legislative aide in what the AG calls a probe into “vote harvesting” but critics call rank intimidation.

— In Missouri, a furious GOP-led effort to block a popular ballot measure that would legalize abortion is headed to the state’s Supreme Court on Tuesday after a Republican judge declared the vote illegal and then GOP Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who’d initially certified the measure as valid, announced Monday night he was removing it.

— In Tennessee, a controversial legal interpretation by Republican state officials has all but halted efforts to restore voting rights to citizens with felony convictions, in a state where 21% of African Americans are barred from voting by their criminal records.

The patterns and practices across these Republican red states are diverse, but two goals are clear. The first is old fashioned voter suppression — the belief by modern conservatives that it’s best to win elections not by the power of popular ideas but by choosing who gets to vote. Nothing chills democracy faster than convincing citizens that signing a petition or making a mistake in registering might get them handcuffed by the election cops.

But the second motive in 2024 is arguably even more insidious: to aid Trump and his minions in creating a false notion that widespread voter fraud is somehow corrupting the election, setting the stage for challenging an actual loss on Nov. 5 and again convincing millions of his MAGA supporters that his Big Lies are somehow true.

“Americans are being impacted by the authoritarian threat right now,” Amanda Carpenter, the disaffected former aide to Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, posted on X/Twitter, referring to assaults on voting rights in Texas and Florida. “Believe it. This is what authoritarians want to put on steroids and enact on a federal level.”

I couldn’t agree more. The whole thing — the real-world voter suppression and the make-believe lies about “a stolen election” — reeks of fascism and a democracy that is crumbling before our eyes, even before we know who takes over the Oval Office in 2025.

Question: What probability do you give a second Prez debate? — Todd in Santa Monica (@Toddinsm) via X/Twitter

Answer: Next to none, which is a shame because just one debate between the two main fall contenders would tie 1980 (Reagan-Carter) for the all-time low in the modern era of presidential debating that launched, inauspiciously, right here in Philadelphia in 1976. (We won’t count June’s Trump-Biden debate, which will go down as one of the great oddities of U.S. election lore). Neither Trump nor Harris seem that eager to debate at all — probably because of Trump’s growing incoherence and Harris’ “post-media” strategy of avoiding questions that go off-message. Also, if one candidate seems the clear winner in this first debate there’ll be little or no incentive for that campaign to book another one. So pay close attention to what’s probably the only showdown we’re going to get.

I got some fascinating and very thoughtful responses to last week’s question about a winning campaign strategy for Kamala Harris for November. Although a couple of folks want to double down on attacking Trump’s awfulness, most responders think it’s critical for Harris to bring reluctant Democrats back into the fold after the Joe Biden near-debacle, and perhaps differentiate herself from the 46th president. “This election will be a close one and candidates that win elections decided by narrow margins mostly do it with ‘base turnout’ strategies,” wrote Daniel Hoffman, referring to young and Black and brown voters and women energized over protecting abortion rights. Charles Clauser applauded Harris taking a more moderate stance than Biden on taxing capital gains, arguing that “separating from Biden’s business and tax policies while not moving too far from the Democrat platform may possibly win her votes among independents and business leaders.”

📮This week’s question: I hate to be Captain Obvious, but who won the Trump-Harris debate, and what does it mean for the rest of the campaign? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Debate winner” in the subject line.

Maybe it was when the New York Times wrote a straight-faced story about housing policy in the presidential race that treated Donald Trump’s authoritarian scheme for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants as a plan to lower rents. Or when multiple outlets failed to make any kind of big deal about the GOP nominee’s utterly bat-guano crazy assertion that kids are going to school and getting gender-reassignment operations there, without their parents knowing about it. It probably peaked with Trump’s lengthy and totally incoherent answer to a question about his child-care policy — “Child care is child care!” he blurted out at one point — which was initially characterized by the Times as, “Trump Praises Tariffs, and William McKinley, to Power Brokers.”

There’s a word for this. “Sanewashing.”

If you follow politics closely, you probably know what it means. It’s the tendency of journalists to take the insane ramblings of a political candidate — OK, Trump, to be specific — and try to fit them into the tidy box of normal policy debates, often by paraphrasing him instead of quoting his odd language, or just ignoring the most wackadoodle stuff. These practices have come to symbolize the media’s broader failings in 2024 in covering Trump by failing to raise tough question about his frequent incoherence as the oldest major-party nominee for president at age 78, or by not conveying the dangerous nature of his proposals when he is coherent.

The terms “sanewashing” is not exactly brand new. According to Columbia Journalism Review, it first appeared in 2020 during an obscure discussion about the press downplaying the radicalism of that year’s protests. But it’s been all over cable TV and online media criticism since a piece in The New Republic by Parker Malloy, who pleaded that, “Instead of contorting themselves to find rationality in incoherence, journalists should simply present politicians’ words and actions plainly, complete with fact-checks.”

I think sanewashing has all but clinched Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2024 — not just for its cleverness, but because finding the right language may be having a positive impact on our politics and our future. On Monday, a metro newspaper — the Orlando Sentinel — showed the big guys how it can be done when it took Trump’s threat on social media to lock up election workers and campaign donors and made it the paper’s lead story, with the headline: “Trump Threatens To Jail Adversaries.” And even the usually aloof Times may be starting to get it. By Monday night, the paper had posted a hard-hitting analysis of Trump’s seeming mental decline as well as a piece about the online prosecution threat after initially ignoring the story. Maybe the solution to sanewashing was simply to name it.

Here’s a great message for the debate from a truly great American. “The Dems needed to lay out in detail what their thwarted plans would have meant for the American economy, jobs, social safety net, the future, etc. What they needed to say was THESE are the guys who voted against all this good stuff and if you don’t get up off your [butt] and VOTE THE BAGGERS OUT — NOTHING WILL GET DONE FOR ANOTHER FOUR YEARS!” The crazy part? Those words were uttered on Sept. 10, 2012, when Barack Obama was seeking reelection against Mitt Romney. The speaker was Steven Van Zandt, a.k.a. Little Steven (among other nicknames) — guitar player for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band (among other things). Read the rest: “C’mon up for the rising (of liberalism).”

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