Paul Weaver/Sipa USA via AP Images
Anti-vaccine, anti-mask, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Republicans had better suppress a shitload of voters next year, because they’re beginning to piss off millions of the hitherto indifferent.
Many of the American Right’s causes, after all, are essentially niche causes, exciting their base while not particularly rousing the majority of Americans to militant opposition. Increasingly, the GOP relies on this asymmetry: Their voters may be in the minority, but if they care a great deal about the issues that Republicans can campaign on, they may outnumber the Democrats at the polls. That’s the strategy behind their current recall campaign against California Gov. Gavin Newson, but it now appears that the extremism of the Republicans seeking to replace him has created a counter-dynamic in Newsom’s favor. The fact that all the leading Republicans (not just far-right favorite Larry Elder) say they’ll end the state’s mask mandates and oppose any vaccine mandates has gotten the previously absent attention of Democrats and independents.
A similar dynamic may well imperil other Republican prospects. The determination of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to forbid schools and private-sector businesses from imposing mask mandates makes his presidential aspirations decidedly far-fetched. On matters of life and death, the presumably low-turnout voter is actually paying attention. What plays well on Fox News may be widely unpopular, but the niche concerns of Fox News guests and hosts don’t necessarily propel the left and center into furious opposition. But the Right’s crusade against masks and vaccines, by the evidence of all the polls, surely does.
So, I suspect, will be the case with the electoral consequences of last night’s Supreme Court semi-demi-ruling to semi-demi-repeal Roe v. Wade. The abortion issue has tended to work to the Right’s advantage because it brought anti-choice voters to the polls, and so long as fundamental abortion rights weren’t thereby threatened, didn’t really compel the nation’s pro-choice majority to turn out in great numbers. Now, however, it’s choice itself that the Court has rejected, and the Democrats are likely to turn out far more voters to oppose that epochal reversal than would have been the case had the Court merely delayed the implementation of Texas’s new law, which combines all the ills of anti-feminist rage with all the ills of privatization.
The Right has now gained enough power to move America decisively in its direction on issues that are no longer niche, but of existential concern to the American people. Try though the Republicans may to insulate themselves from public sentiment, they’re going to have to suppress tens of millions of votes to get away with this.
