it's from this Waldman piece, excerpt
washingtonpost.com
To simplify things into their broadest terms, in recent elections the Republican always gets around 60 million votes; the question is whether the Democrat can bring out more voters or not. If they can, as Obama did twice, they win. If they can’t, as Clinton and John Kerry failed to, they lose.
So why did this happen? There are many explanations and many factors that likely played some part. First, Clinton didn’t inspire the same kind of enthusiasm among Democrats as Obama had. Second, it seems likely that FBI Director James B. Comey’s well-timed announcement that the bureau was investigating Anthony Weiner’s laptop, leading to days of screaming headlines about “CLINTON EMAIL REVELATIONS!!!” led some voters to conclude that both candidates were corrupt and there wasn’t much point in going to the polls.
Third, this was the first presidential election since conservatives on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which allowed Republican-controlled states to pass a series of measures meant to suppress the votes of those who were likely to vote Democratic, particularly African Americans, Latinos and college students. In some of those states on which Trump built his victories, Republican-designed voter suppression laws, including ID mandates, limits on early voting and a reduction in polling locations, seem to have had their intended effect. As Ari Berman noted:
27,000 votes currently separate Trump and Clinton in Wisconsin, where 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked strict forms of voter ID. Voter turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest levels in 20 years and decreased 13 percent in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives.
And the Trump campaign itself had an explicit strategy to demoralize Democrats, developed by Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported two weeks ago:
Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. ‘We have three major voter suppression operations under way,’ says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.
How much credit they can take is open to debate, but there’s no doubt that they got the result they were after. |
