Paul cites a stupid "article" from The American Conservative and highlights this bold claim:
How to steal an election: “Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.”
The stupidity and gall of this statement has been thoroughly pilloried online, but it's a useful marker for where the bulk of the GOP resides or is quickly moving towards. The article is simply describing an aggressive GOTV effort in Wisconsin. Ironically, the GOP has traditionally benefitted from mail-in voting, because their voters are older. Their efforts to make it harder for people to vote by mail will therefore have to be targeted towards cities and encourage it in rural areas that are already overcounted in our federal structure.
Lots of people on Twitter are claiming that American democracy is slipping away. That's a bit of a misread. Truly universal democracy in America is about 55 years old. Yet, America was plausibly a democracy, even if we wouldn't call it that today. It was certainly more democratic than most countries in the world by a large margin. The second wave of democratization that occurred after World War II forced America to extend democracy to its Black citizens. The third wave led us to believe that democracy was largely inevitable and irreversible. Neither are true.
I don't think democracy in America is doomed, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned. For the most part Trump and Trumpism is a political and demographic dead-end, but the idea that an election that Republicans lose is illegitimate could poison America for a decade or more.
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