Angry white men know their days are numbered. Even as Republicans tried to pre-empt the recounts in Florida and Georgia with baseless accusations of “fraud,” demographics in the South, the West, and across the country are slipping away from them.
The 49 percent turnout in the midterm elections was the highest in more than 100 years, with young voters increasing their participation by 56 percent over the 2014 midterms, a surge that strongly benefited the Democrats. So did an outpouring from women voters, who went from 4 percent more likely to vote for Democrats in 2014 to preferring Democrats over Republicans by 19 percent in 2018.
Across the South, home to ten of the nation’s fifteen fastest-growing cities, the black population grew by 2 million from 2010 to 2016. The Latino population grew by 3 million over the same period. And the average age of people in the region has been going down. One quarter of Southerners are now under twenty. In the era of Donald Trump, young voters of color have been getting more politically active.
The 49 percent turnout in the midterm elections was the highest in more than 100 years, with young voters increasing their participation by 56 percent over the 2014 midterms
Those shifts, which propelled Beto O’Rourke to his near-win in the Senate race against Ted Cruz in Texas, and pushed the Florida and Georgia governor’s races to recount, spell doom, over the next few years, for the Republicans’ Southern Strategy.
By leaning into racism and voter suppression, the Republicans are trading their future for a few hard-fought, short-term victories. Win or lose in Florida and Georgia, people of color, women, and citizens who have been galvanized to defend democracy are growing more powerful.
Republican bullying is daunting. In Florida, where the state is recounting both the governor’s race and the Senate race, outgoing governor and current Senate candidate Rick Scott is overseeing the process. Scott claimed, without evidence, that his opponent, three-term U.S. Senator Ben Nelson, was “clearly trying to commit fraud to win this election.” His own Department of Law Enforcement rebuffed his demand that it investigate supposed fraud in Democratic Broward County, and a judge rejected his request to impound voting machines there. The League of Women Voters and Common Cause have filed a lawsuit to force Scott out of his election oversight role.
Trump jumped into the fray, tweeting, with zero evidence, that in Florida, “An honest vote count is no longer possible—ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”
But the recount continues.
In Georgia, Republican accusations of fraud and efforts at suppressing the vote are equally egregious. Until last week, the Republican candidate for governor, Brian Kemp, was still holding onto his office as Secretary of State, overseeing elections and voter registration. Just before the 2018 election, Kemp’s office quietly cancelled 53,000 voter registrations, mostly in African American voting precincts. (Some of these cancellations were overturned by a federal judge just before the election.)
“Through a process that Kemp calls voter roll maintenance and his opponents call voter roll purges, Kemp’s office has cancelled over 1.4 million voter registrations since 2012,” the Associated Press reports. “Nearly 670,000 registrations were cancelled in 2017 alone.”
This is the backdrop to the fight the Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams, is waging to count all the votes in her race to become the nation’s first African American woman governor.
The irony of Republican officials claiming “rampant fraud” by black and Latino voters in 2018 is hard to overstate. People of color are not engaged in a massive conspiracy to stuff the ballot box. These voters have enough trouble getting to the polls even once.
Low voter turnout, political disaffection, and hurdles to voting deliberately engineered by Republican officials, had a depressing effect on African American and Latino voter turnout in 2016. But overt racism in the 2018 campaign and attacks on voting rights may be a motivator.
Overt racism in the 2018 campaign and attacks on voting rights may be a motivator for voters of color.
Black voter turnout dropped in 2016 by 7 points—the largest number for any group of voters—after reaching a historic high in 2012, when Barack Obama was on the ballot. After the 2016 election, the Pew Research Center reported that the number of eligible Latino voters who didn’t vote had exceeded the number who had voted since 1996. Those trends appear to have shifted in 2018, with increased black and Latino voter turnout making the difference in key races.
The long and sordid history of racism and attacks on African American voters in the South didn’t stop Republicans in Florida and Georgia from making racist comments during the 2018 campaigns. After Andrew Gillum won the Democratic primary for governor in Florida, Republican candidate Ron DeSantis warned voters not to “monkey this up” by voting for Gillum.
And while DeSantis denied charges of racism, Gillum pointed out that, in Florida, whatever DeSantis himself said, “The racists believe he’s a racist.”
In Georgia, Oprah Winfrey campaigned for Stacey Abrams after Abrams was the target of racist robocalls sponsored by a white nationalist group that imitated Oprah’s voice, saying “This is the magical negro, Oprah Winfrey, asking you to make my fellow negress, Stacey Abrams, the governor of Georgia.” The same neo-Nazi group targeted Gillum with racist calls in Florida.
Oprah came to Georgia in the closing days of the campaign and highlighted the South’s history of denying voting rights to black people: “For anybody here who has an ancestor who didn’t have the right to vote and you are choosing not to vote, you are dishonoring your family,” she said.
Only by preventing people from voting can the party of Trump hang on to power. And that strategy cannot succeed against a determined and empowered electorate.
In 2018, across the country, organized citizens made significant progress in an election that, increasingly, looks like a rebuke to the Republicans and Trump.
In Wisconsin and Arizona, people overcame the power of organized money to defeat Scott Walker, ALEC, the Koch brothers, and entrenched Republican regimes.
In New Mexico, an entire state government turned blue.
In New Mexico, an entire state government turned blue in a sweep propelled by local activists who had been building toward their goal for years. A formerly Republican-controlled, purple state, New Mexico flipped control of the governor’s mansion, as well as key posts including the land and water boards, which had been dominated by the oil and gas industries, and are now controlled by environmentalists. The state supreme court also changed hands, turning from conservative to progressive.
“A lot of what happened began with the Bernie Sanders campaign,” says Paul Gibson, director of Retake Our Democracy, a New Mexico-based citizens’ group that helped canvass and get out the vote in 2016 and 2018.
After working through an initial, bitter split between the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders factions, Gibson says, a large group of energized citizen activists got involved in the state party.
A coalition of groups, including Emerge New Mexico, which trains and supports women candidates, Our Revolution, which emerged from the Sanders campaign, the Working Families Party, and environmental, civil rights, and pro-choice groups, worked together to change the face of politics in the state in 2018.
That included sending Deb Haaland to the House of Representatives from New Mexico’s First Congressional District, to join Sharice Davids of Kansas as the first two Native American women elected to Congress. Haaland is part of a historic House delegation from New Mexico comprised entirely of people of color—the first for any state with more than three U.S. Representatives in Congress.
A raft of women and people of color were elected to state offices up and down the ballot.
On election night, Gibson says, after feeling depressed that stars like Andrew Gillum in Florida and Beto O’Rourke in Texas hadn’t won, he turned on the television late in the evening to find out, in his state, “We won everything.”
“Suddenly things we dreamed about forever are actually being discussed as viable policies,” he says.
New Mexico Democrats have promised to raise teacher salaries and fund early childhood education, as well as aggressively expand access to health care, and pursue renewable energy and tougher environmental protections. There are few checks on the Democrats’ “unbridled power” in the state, the Associated Press fretted after the election.
It didn’t happen overnight. After 2016, activists who had helped elect the Democratic legislature were disappointed that bills they supported never became law, Gibson says. They sat down with lobbyists from 350.org, Planned Parenthood, and other groups to learn more about the legislative process and why their priorities were getting buried. Then they created a survey to ask other activists around the state about their priorities, and to sign up to canvass.
The canvassing turnout in 2018 was impressive. “We had so many people who had never canvassed before,” says Gibson. “We had people canvassing who had never voted before.”
The result was a sea change in New Mexico, and an encouraging sign for the rest of the country.