For more than a decade, Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project have pursued the cultural and political priorities of the social conservative manual, one supporting laws to ban abortion as soon as the fetal heartbeat can be detected and the other if opposing civil rights protections for LGBTQ People. From their shared offices in the Virginia suburb, they and their affiliate committees spent more than $ 20 million in last year’s elections.
But after Donald J. Trump lost his candidacy for a second term and convinced millions of Americans that it was the fault of non-existent fraud, the two groups found that many of their donors were thinking of throwing in the towel. Why, the donors argued, they should give some money if Democrats wanted to take advantage of the system, recalled Frank Cannon, the senior strategist for both groups.
“‘Before I give you money for anything, tell me how this is going to be resolved,'” said Cannon, summing up his conversations. He and other conservative activists – many without training in electoral law – did not take long to come up with an answer, which was to make reversing access to voting the “party’s center of gravity”, as he said.
Passing new voting restrictions – in particular, stricter limits to early voting and mailing – is now at the heart of the right’s strategy to keep donors and voters engaged while Trump disappears from public view and leaves a void in the Republican Party that no other figure or question filled in. In recent weeks, many of the most prominent and well-organized groups that drive the Republican Party’s vast electoral participation efforts have directed their resources into a campaign to restrict when and how people can vote, focusing on the emergency policies that states have enacted in the last year to facilitate voting during a pandemic. The groups believe that this may be their best chance to regain power in Washington.
His efforts are intensifying against the objections of some Republicans who say the strategy is cynical and short-sighted, arguing that it further compromises his party to legitimize a lie. It also sends a message, they say, that Republicans think they lost mainly because the other side cheated, which prevents them from honestly fighting what went wrong and why they can lose again.
Some also argue that establishing new voting restrictions could undermine the party, just as it was making significant gains with black and Latino voters, who are more likely to be prevented by these laws.
“Restricting the vote is just a short-term run. It is not a strategy to strengthen the future, ”said Benjamin Ginsberg, one of the Republican Party’s most prominent electoral lawyers, who criticized Trump and other party members for attacking the integrity of the voting process.
“See what this really means,” added Ginsberg. “A party that is getting older and older and white, whose base is a smaller and smaller portion of the population, is invoking accusations of fraud to erect barriers to the vote of people it fears will not support its candidates.”
As notable as the well-known conservative groups that are raising money from Trump’s revisionism – Susan B. Anthony List, the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, the Tea Party Patriots – are some of the heavyweights who are sitting in this fight Out. Americans for Prosperity, the political organization financed by the Koch fortune, is not supporting efforts to pass more ballot laws, nor other groups on Koch’s multi-million dollar political network.
The debate over voting laws is also part of the larger struggle over the future of the Republican Party and whether it should remain so focused on making Trump and his radical voters happy.
For now, many conservative groups are opting for the ex-president’s side, even at the risk of harboring corrosive falsehoods about the prevalence of electoral fraud.
It is certainly the most financially secure path and, some say, the one where they will encounter the least resistance. With polls showing that at least two-thirds of Republicans have doubts about President Biden’s legitimacy or believe that Trump somehow won more votes, despite receiving seven million less than his opponent, Republican consultants said they were following his party. .
Some expressed a certain resignation at the situation: Trump created a perception that it is now the reality of his party.
“I am not someone who thinks China has hacked the polls,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project. But at the same time, he said: “If you are a conservative organization and have low-cost donors, you are hearing this from everywhere: ‘Well, what’s the point of voting?'”
A major focus for conservatives is to reverse the Covid-related changes that states have enacted to facilitate voting for absentees last year. Schilling said his group’s intention was to “restore lost faith” in the process with policies that do not allow these emergency procedures to become permanent. The American Principles Project, like other groups on the right, supports states to verify signatures on absentee ballots with the signatures they have in their voter databases and wants the ballots to be sent only to those who request them.
Voters in Georgia who were disillusioned after Trump’s defeat – many of whom believed his far-fetched and unmasked allegations of voting for pets, dead people and other irregularities – helped to cost control of Senate Republicans. Georgia Republicans are now promoting a series of new voting restrictions that Democrats have called political revenge under the guise of “electoral integrity”.
Many of the conservative organizations that are participating have a large network of activists in churches and anti-abortion groups across the country.
Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project recently announced a joint “electoral transparency” campaign and set a $ 5 million fundraising goal. They hired a leading conservative activist who is a former Trump administration official to lead him. They have organized conference calls for activists with other conservative social groups across the country and say the participants are excited to get involved, even if the electoral law is entirely new to them.
The Family Research Council, which advised the Trump administration on policies such as ending military eligibility for transgender people and expanding the definition of religious freedom, recently dedicated one of its regular online organizing sessions, the “Pray Vote Stand Townhall”, to encourage people to lobby their state legislators.
Tony Perkins, the group’s president, expressed optimism about the number of bills in progress and suggested that the results of last year’s elections were contaminated. “We have 106 electoral bills that are in 28 states at the moment,” he told the audience. “So, here’s the good news: there is an action underway to go back and correct what was discovered in this last election.”
Next to Perkins on stage was Michael P. Farris, the president of the powerful Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. He agreed with the approval: “Let me just say, ‘Amen,'” he said.
Also throwing its weight behind the campaign is the influential Heritage Foundation and its political wing, Heritage Action for America, which recently announced that it planned to spend millions of dollars to support electoral policies popular with conservatives. This includes laws that would require voter identification and limit the availability of absentee ballots, as well as other policies that, according to Heritage, “would guarantee and strengthen state electoral systems”.
Several Republican strategists said that while the “stolen” election card was widely accepted among Republican voters, they were surprised to find how deeply attached they were to major donors, who seem most convinced of his truth and eager to act.
Groups that are fighting these attempts to restrict access to the ballots said the right-wing organization was so new that its impact was difficult to assess. Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, said that Republican legislatures seem to understand the power of this issue on their own and do not need much persuasion to act.
“Are we seeing a lot of new lawsuits, new lobbying, other things on the ground?” he said. “The answer is basically no. We are seeing a lot of fundraising. “Still, the number of groups involved and the relevance of the issue were impressive, he said.
“There is a huge organizational infrastructure behind this,” said Waldman. “It is difficult to identify many unifying issues now in the Republican Party. But this seems to be one of them. “
As contentious as some of the conservative-led campaigns to restrict voting have been, this time around it is even more emotionally and politically charged, given how closely associated it is with Trump and the January 6 Capitol riots he incited. Some conservatives said the association with that day complicated what could be relatively uncontroversial changes to regulate how the missing ballots are sent, collected and counted now that many more people are likely to request them in the future.
“We also took a look at the election results and we don’t believe it was stolen. But that does not mean that we do not believe that there are things that can be improved, ”said Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project. The group supports a number of changes: Some would regulate postal voting on the margins, such as requiring ballots to be mailed no earlier than three weeks before the election and received until the polls close on the day of.
Others would undoubtedly be more controversial, such as banning the organized collection of ballots from third parties that conservative critics call vote collection.
Snead said it is problematic that the 2020 election and its aftermath have cast a shadow over the whole issue. “There is definitely a recognition that we don’t want this to be tied to the last election,” he said. But as someone who started his work with electoral law before Trump was elected and shares the broader goal of establishing more conditions for voting, he acknowledged that the environment has never been more conducive.
“He achieved a degree of prominence that he probably never had,” said Snead.