Republicans Have Failed in Their Messaging on New Voting Laws
The introduction of laws to prevent Sunday voting have been particularly harmful to Republican branding.
The vast majority of Americans support Voter ID laws and the establishment of early voting access. While Republicans have successfully passed new voting laws in many states that have expanded access to voting relative to pre-pandemic era laws, the vast majority of media headlines have been critical of the new laws and successfully criticize Republicans as the party of voter suppression and disenfranchisement.
For example, Georgia’s new law expands early voting by allowing for 17 days of voting to occur before election day. At the same time, Delaware has never allowed early voting and has now only recently proposed a new law to allow 10-days of early voting, considerably less time than Georgia. Take also Connecticut as a Democratically controlled state with no early voting.
Why is it then that Republicans and their elected officials are successfully being labeled as racist, advocating for voter restrictions to suppress minority turnout? It isn’t because the average Republican voter is racist. In fact, the majority of Republicans and the vast majority of independents support codifying early voting access. The reason the Democratic narrative is winning, and that the media is allowed to easily run with it, is due to the few imbecilic Republicans who introduced one of the original Georgia voter bills this year.
The original bill introduced by Republicans in Georgia would have eliminated early voting on Sundays. While voting on Sundays before election day is clearly not a requirement in all states, especially Democratically controlled ones like Delaware and Connecticut, Republicans should have known that the elimination of this Sunday provision would be used as a club to beat them with.
Whether introduced with racist intent or not, why give your opponents both in the legislature and in the media a provocative and viral weapon to use against you? Did these few Republicans think preventing Sunday voting was imperative to securing free and fair elections? Or are there a few truly racist Republicans in the Georgia legislature who hope to prevent black churchgoers from voting?
Here are the Republicans who thought it wise to introduce Georgia House Bill 531 with restrictive access to Sunday voting: Rep. Barry Fleming [R], Rep. Jan Jones [R], Rep. Alan Powell [R], Rep. Shaw Blackmon [R], Rep. Lynn Smith [R], Rep. Ricky Williams [R], Sen. Michael Dugan [R].
These legislators are either foolish, impolitic, racist, or some combination thereof. No matter which flaw led them the decision to propose the elimination of Sunday voting and thereby Black church “souls to the polls” opportunities, these politicians are too incompetent to be representative of a majority of Republicans who support early voting. While the final Georgia law that was passed allows for early voting, including Sundays, the initial proposal has caused irreparable harm. Republicans have a messaging problem and it starts by replacing poor messengers with competent ones.