Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.
The state of the GOP is not good.
Former President Donald Trump’s stronghold over the Republican party remains. His refusal to concede the 2020 election and calls of widespread fraud have raised doubts about the integrity of its results among his Republican base. Consequently, 56% of Republicans believe the election was rigged or the result of illegal voting, and 53% think Donald Trump is the actual President, not Joe Biden. Only 30% of Republicans feel confident that absentee or mail-in ballots were accurately counted, compared to 86% of Democrats and 55% of independents. As a result, 87% of Republicans believe it is important that the government place new limits on voting to protect elections from fraud. Finally, 63% percent of Republicans think Donald Trump should run for President again in 2024, compared to only 8% of Democrats and 23% of independents.
Daniel Dale at CNN:I'd love to see the cross-tabs showing the extent of overlap between the 48% of Rs who said the 1/6 insurrectionists were mostly law-abiding and the 54% who said they were Antifa. https://t.co/iDszVxMpTn pic.twitter.com/HSbiCHJ8IO
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) May 22, 2021
Perhaps the most consequential result of Trump's lies about what happened in 2020 is the slew of 2021 efforts by Republican state legislators to make it more difficult to vote.
Among other things, Republican proposals would reduce the availability of ballot drop boxes, shorten early voting periods and absentee voting periods, make it harder for voters to obtain mail-in ballots, increase voter identification requirements, prohibit 24-hour voting and drive-through voting, eliminate Election Day voter registration, limit who is allowed to return someone else's absentee ballot and more aggressively purge voter rolls.
In many cases, it's not clear whether Republican legislators actually believe the 2020 election was fraudulent or whether they are cynically using voters' own misapprehensions about the election as political cover. The distinction is irrelevant in practice, since the lies are turning into suppressive bills no matter what the real reason is.
