From November 2020 to January 2021, the history of the state of Georgia was pro-Democratic: all Democratic candidates for the presidency and the United States Senate. But most importantly, it was pro-democratic. Joe Biden, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won in part because of aggressive efforts by grassroots groups in the state to increase the number of people who voted compared to Georgia’s previous elections. Two of the state’s top elected Republican officials, Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, rejected a major push by then President Trump and other Republicans to effectively overturn the state’s presidential election results because Biden had won. The events in Georgia, along with a similar rejection of Trump’s false allegations of Trump fraud in Arizona by Republican Governor Doug Ducey, were perhaps the clearest examples of how America’s democratic systems stood firm and prevented Trump from betraying his way to a second term.
A lot has changed since then.
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Now, Georgia’s democratic position in 2020 looks more like a temporary victory in a broader struggle for American democracy that remains very contested. On Thursday, Kemp signed an important electoral law passed by Georgia Republicans. Among other things, the law removes some of the power of directing elections in Georgia from the secretary of state and local counties and transfers it to a state council that is likely to be dominated by conservative Republicans. It includes a ban on providing food and water to people waiting in line to vote. And Kemp justified the new law by suggesting that there were unresolved questions about whether the election in Georgia was conducted fairly.
In short, Trump lost Georgia in 2020. But his narrative about that election – which was stolen from him – won among state Republicans and has now been effectively codified in state law.
Republicans are trying to enact laws that make voting difficult across the country, and it is unclear whether Georgia’s will be among the most aggressive when all of them are finalized. But, considering what happened in Georgia from November to January, the enactment of this law in that state it is a particularly alarming sign that the Republican Party’s attacks on democratic norms and values continue and, in a way, are accelerating.
Democrats changed their state, and the Republican Party in that state responded by promulgating a law designed to make it more difficult for Democratic-inclined voters to vote and count. A former Confederation state changed its electoral laws after a coalition of heavily black voters played a large role in the election of its preferred candidates for president and for the United States Senate, which included the historic election of an African-American senator. in the state. A Republican official (Raffensperger) placed the country on top of the party and was then removed from part of his authority.
Have it was already a sensible action to prevent this Georgia provision from entering into force. And even if the law goes into effect, it is difficult to say exactly how it would affect the Republican and Democratic electoral prospects in Georgia – it seems clearly designed to make it more difficult for Democratic-inclined voters to exercise that right, but Democrats may still be able to win . Therefore, we do not know exactly what this law will mean in the electoral sense. But, in a democratic sense, there is already a clear result: America is a country with a declining democracy, because it has a large party that increasingly does not respect the results of the elections it loses or the voting rights of those who oppose .
In other words, Georgia’s Republicans have not come out of the 2020 elections with the aim of finding new messages or policies to attract Georgia’s growing black population. Instead, they chose to imply that these voters participated in the Georgia elections in an improper way that should be avoided in the future. The Washington Post suggests in its motto that “Democracy dies in darkness”. But based on the actions of much of the Republican Party today, it may be more accurate to say that it is dying in broad daylight.