In Georgia, where Democrats not only defeated Trump in November, but shook the US Senate in the runoff elections, the Republican-controlled state Senate on Tuesday passed a bill requiring an ID card when requesting an absent ballot . The next day, it was a bonanza across the country. The Iowa House passed a bill designed to limit early voting. In Missouri, the Republican-controlled House passed legislation that would require photo identification at the ballot box, while a legislative committee in Wyoming moved forward with a similar bill.
The Brennan Center for Justice is monitoring more than 250 bills to restrict voting by lawmakers in 43 states.
Benjamin Ginsberg, an electoral lawyer who represented former Republican presidential candidates, lamented the death of “Factory of ideas” at GOP.
“Tell me what innovative Republican policies have been lately?” he said. The focus on litigating the last election again is “probably a sign that the Republican Party is stuck in a wasteland and doesn’t know which way to go to get out.”
Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general of the George W. Bush administration, said that “all Americans should be concerned with electoral integrity”. But with no evidence of widespread fraud other than normal irregularities, he said, the focus of some on the Republican Party in the latest elections is a “major distraction” from issues that are most urgent for the electorate.
“I think it’s a great distraction,” said Gonzales. “And I fear it will continue to be a major distraction, as long as a certain individual makes claims that he has been stolen.”
There is nothing to suggest that Trump, who will speak at the convention on Sunday, is giving up – or that the party’s base is prepared to deviate from its claims that the election was stolen from him, despite more than 60 losses in electoral processes that question the presidential election.
It was not always like that in the Republican Party. Last year, the CPAC theme was “America vs. socialism”. In the previous year, there were no fewer than three panels focusing on the challenges posed by a rising China. This year, the CPAC has not gone without showing the party’s greatest successes: trade, China, immigration and abortion. And there were screams for Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. But the November aftermath was the main problem – in the Republicans’ frustration with the reduction of the platform and the seven-part exploitation of “protecting the elections”.
In part, the party’s lack of a more forward-looking stance is a consequence of its sudden powerlessness in Washington. The GOP is establishing itself as an opposition party – with conservatives constituting what Senator Ted Cruz of Texas described in CPAC as “the Rebel Alliance”. But there is little room for innovative, policy-oriented conservative thinking in a party so enslaved by a leader – a leader obsessed with the idea that he lost in a rigged election.
Ken Khachigian, a former adviser to Richard Nixon and Reagan’s chief speechwriter, said that the Republican Party today does not have “a single voice like that of Reagan, for example, or Bill Buckley, the conservative movement that could rise. against staging and moving everyone like Jack Kemp did in the past. ”
“There is always hope,” said Khachigian, suggesting that “when you have idiots like AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] on the other hand, it is not difficult to find someone. “
But the focus on the past in November and its aftermath, he said, is to “shoot blank.”
This can come at a cost. As the Republican Party prepares for the midterm elections and the upcoming presidential primaries, it is doing so as a shell of itself, having lost the White House and the two houses of Congress in the space of four years. The last time he had the popular vote in a presidential election was in 2004, and the demographic changes in the United States are making it increasingly unlikely that this will happen in 2024 – regardless of attempts to raise barriers to voting.
“It is a party that has been shaped along the lines of Trump – the message of Trump, the tactics of Trump – and it is perfectly comfortable to be a party defined by what it is against,” said Kevin Madden, a former adviser to Mitt Romney.
The difficulty for the party, said Madden, is “you become almost toxic as a party brand for larger and growing parts of the electorate. … The limitation of a message and a platform that almost disagrees with the opposition is that it does not address the broader concerns or anxieties of a large part of the electorate ”.
It is possible that the party’s fixation on electoral fraud and the perception of the silencing of those who tried to overturn the result will disappear. Trump’s effort to challenge the election postponed the traditional period of post-election mourning for the defeated party. And since most Republicans still approve of Trump and believe the election was not free or fair, there is a political imperative for the party to calm them down.
Sal Russo, a former Reagan aide and cofounder of the Tea Party Express, said, “Sometimes you have to give some deference to where your base wants to go. … Do I think Republicans have to overcome issues in the electoral process? Yes, because you don’t win on ‘let’s restrict eligibility for absenteeism votes’. It is not to vote. “
“I think there is a catharsis that needs to happen,” he said, adding that “it is probably good that CPAC is spending too much time” on the issue.