The Democrats Will Do Voter Suppression

If we're realigning, we're realigning all the way

The story

The story begins with two parties. The first party is called Blue. The second party is called Red.

The Blue party is a populist party that cares for the common man. This party wants to protect the working class, and it aligns itself with their values and interests. That means that they support unions, question free trade, are skeptical of large corporations, and want higher taxes for the rich which go on fund programs that redistribute money to the poor. This party likes it when lots of people vote because they’ve got lots of people on their side. The more people vote, the better the party does in an election.

The Red party is an elitist party. They are more educated and wealthy, and they have an ideological commitment to capitalism and free trade because they understand positive-sum relationships and tradeoffs. As a result, they want corporate taxes lowered and regulations loosened to make their country more innovative and competitive. They think unions are harmful and would rather grow the pie than cut it up in a way that steals from some to give handouts to others. They are skeptical that the masses know what’s best for the country. It’s not that they are opposed to democracy, per se, but they want to ensure that there are filters between the common man and the man making decisions.

Gradually over time, and then suddenly, as it often happens, the parties started to drift in opposite directions. The common folk who supported the Blues started supporting the Reds, and the elites who used to be Red suddenly found themselves more more aligned with the Blue party. Maybe it was the leaders of one or both of the parties that started the drift by changing what the party supported, which then led to the electorate changing their vote from one to the other. Maybe it was the electorate that changed first, and the parties needed to catch up to obtain enough votes to get into and stay in office. More likely, it was an incredibly complicated process that has no easy monocausal explanation.

Either way, there are two parties. The first party is called Blue. The second party is called Red.

The Blue party is now an elitist party, and all of a sudden they find themselves incentivized to find ways of minimizing voter turnout in elections because voter turnout helps the Red party. The Red party is now the populist party, and all of a sudden it no longer wants to put up barriers in the way of people voting because barriers make it harder for them to win.

It’s hard to make changes when you’ve been doing things one way for a long time. The Red party was elitist for decades, for generations. They said things and did things that were in line with their sincere beliefs about what the role of government is and how high taxes should be. But now that they find their political power emanating from a totally different place — from masses of people without a higher education and with sentiments that don’t align with the Red party’s old economic platform — they need to radically alter their party, make a total 180 degree turn, so that they maximize their chances of getting into and staying in office.

The Blue party faces the same problem. They used to appeal to the common man, but the common man no longer votes for them. Instead, their political power comes from a smaller, but more active voter base of educated, well-off elites. Much of the Blue party’s old rhetoric from prior years no longer has any relevance to their new voters. Not only do they need to reevaluate their policy platform, they also need to utilize their voters in a different way. Regardless of whether the Blue party likes it or not, it will need to maximize the number of their own voters in every election as a proportion of the entire electorate in order to win, and that means they will need to minimize the number of voters from the side of the common man.

Vestigial traits

In evolution, vestigial traits are things left over from a bygone era. Today’s modern species had ancestors that lived a very different life and were adapted to that environment. As the species evolved over time, adaptations took place that physically altered the members of the species, but there remained markers of their old traits that were left behind. Snakes no longer have the limbs their ancestors did, but their skeletons still have the place where their limbs would have been. Some dolphins have a pelvic bone, and other dolphin and whale species exhibit lots of odd leftovers from their land-walking ancestors. The human tailbone is the remnant of what used to be a full tail.

At this point in domestic American politics, we’re caught somewhere in the middle of the process. It’s hard to tell where because it’s not a fully gradual process. We can’t measure the voters and the parties continually. Instead, we measure them election-by-election, primarily via general elections with presidential races every four years. So what we have is a weird mix of pre-realignment policies on both the Democratic and Republican sides with a post-realignment voting base. Those policies that don’t have relevance to today’s politics I like to call vestigial traits.

Every passing election is an opportunity for evolution. The party that loses often has to look at itself hard in the mirror and ask tough questions about what it did wrong and what it can change to alter the results of the next election. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the party will make the right choice every time, they can continue to fail to evolve, but the drive to drop old, outdated policies and pick up new popular ones is pre-programmed by a similar incentive structure to evolution. If the party wants to stay alive and “reproduce,” it must change itself to stay competitive.

Modern political vestigial traits include the Democratic party’s support of unions and the Republican party’s support of voter ID laws. Union members no longer vote Democrat like they consistently did in the ‘70s. The working man no longer feels himself represented by the modern Democratic party. The Republican party is shooting itself in the foot when it tries to make it harder to vote by requiring ID or putting up other barriers because it now has the numbers advantage, and it would be better served by lifting all restrictions so that the average Joe can make it to the polls.

To use another evolutionary analogy, there are niches in politics. If you and the candidate opposing you are both vying for the same limited set of votes by appealing to a specific type of voter, you are competing inefficiently. You can maximize your chances of winning by trying to get the votes of other types of voters who your opponent is not courting. There are a limited number of niches. You can’t be a populist candidate in more ways than one. At the end of the day, either you are the candidate promising people free money or you’re the candidate who opposes the candidate promising people free money. This incentivizes sorting parties and candidates into only a couple open categories that are politically viable.

At the end of the day, the incentive structures are such that both parties will have to drop elements of their old platforms in order to maximize their chances of winning. This does not mean that it will happen instantaneously. Biological evolution is measured in generations and speciation takes more years than we can comprehend. Political evolution is not a sudden switch, it is a gradual process in which a party faces wins and losses that force it to make choices, which in turn influence their next decisions. Individual personalities, big events, and a myriad of other factors play a role. There is no guarantee that the party makes the “right” choice — nothing is stopping the Republicans or the Democrats from failing to evolve in a way that earns them political power — but if they do want political power, sooner or later they will have to face the reality on the ground and occupy one or more of the few available niches and accept everything that comes with that.

Are we realigning or not?

My prediction is that, if we see the modern American political realignment through to its logical conclusion, the Democratic party will become a party of urban-dwelling, highly-educated, disproportionately white elites and the Republican party will become a populist party that appeals to the poor, working-class, less-educated, more rural-dwelling electorate. That means that the Republicans will abandon their old free trade, pro-capitalism, lower taxes for the rich positions to advocate for more trade restrictions, more anti-corporatism, and higher taxes on the wealthy. The Democrats will abandon their prior leftism in favor of neoliberal (free trade, pro-capitalist) positions, the niche that will be left open as the Republicans drift towards appealing to their new voter base. This is the inevitable conclusion of the realignment.

Both parties would be doing themselves a disservice if they continued to keep to their old ways, which no longer reflect the desires of the electorate. The cultural shift precludes the latte-sipping yuppie from voting Republican. Truck-driving, country-music-listening, camo-wearing rednecks will not vote Democrat. This will not be the place where I state which theories I support about what’s driving education polarization and the culture war, but I insist that we take a serious look at where this road leads. There is no universe in which we stop this process part of the way through and remain with a Democratic party that promises to raise the minimum wage when so little of its electorate earns minimum wage while the Republican party continues to oppose raising the minimum wage because of its ideological libertarianism while so many of its voters would benefit from raising the minimum wage. They will swap their positions. Maybe not this election cycle or the next, but eventually the Republicans will support raising the minimum wage.

This is why I predict that the Republicans will stop all efforts at what’s broadly referred to as “voter suppression” after realizing that it hurts them electorally and the Democrats will start doing things that will be called voter suppression by their opponents for the same reason.

Why wouldn’t they? Because the Republicans are so racist that they can’t help themselves? They have such an innate desire to prevent the enfranchisement of non-white voters that they will destroy their chances at victory? Hispanics already swapped to favoring Trump in 2024, and that trend will only continue because Hispanics are overrepresented among blue collar, working class Americans. If the Republicans don’t pick up on that, they will lose. If they lose, the next election offers them a new opportunity to correct their mistake. Sooner or later, the shift will happen.

Why would the Democrats not engage in minimizing voter turnout? Low voter turnout helps the Democrats win. The only thing preventing them from doing it right now is a vestigial trait. The liberal commitment to opposing voter ID laws rests on the faulty assumption that it prevents poor and non-white voters from voting, and that those voters vote Democrat. If poor voters stop voting Democrat and non-white voters are no longer a reliable block of support, why would the party oppose voter ID requirements? If the realignment is fully complete and having a high school education and working with your hands ends up being the primary determinant of your (Republican-favoring) vote instead of your skin color, the incentive structure pushes the Democrats away from their old position and towards the only other available position.

I am not saying that the Democrats are going to sit down behind closed doors and say out loud “the plebes used to love us, but now they hate us, so we hate them too and want to take away their right to vote.” I am, however, saying that it’s not a big leap to go from culturally despising the rubes who wear their stupid red MAGA hats and have their clearly uneducated opinions on important issues to asking yourself if maybe it would be better if fewer of them voted. After all, it’s not that you hate them, it’s just that they don’t know any better. The just don’t have the educational background to know what’s best for the country, what’s best for them, even. Maybe it would be better if we made those decisions for them.

Things that support my theory

Trump’s tariffs are an affront to Ragan-era Republicanism. Those Republicans who used to publicly support free international trade now either find themselves kicked out of the Republican party or violently switching their opinion to the polar opposite of what they said just a few short year ago. Hypocrisy is expected. If you want to win, you will abandon a losing position in favor of a winning position, regardless of what you used to ardently espouse.

Biden’s attempted student loan forgiveness is a regressive tax on poor people. Most Americans do not have a post-secondary education. The Americans who have the most student loans also make the most money (e.g. doctors). Yet Biden was willing to take tax money collected from all Americans to pay off the loans of a few highly-educated, financially well-off Americans. This is the clearest example of a straight up patron-client relation ship in modern American politics, and goes directly against what Democrats from decades ago would have supported.

Trump’s promise to remove taxes on tips. This is essentially the Republican equivalent of student loan forgiveness. Workers in positions that earn tips do not earn a lot of money and don’t have a college degree. That is why they work as a waiter, or whatever. They are more likely to vote Republican. Promising to remove federal taxes on tips is an attempted direct reciprocal cash transfer from an elected representative to the people who elected him. Not everything Trump promises will happen, to say the least, but I believe this is in line with my theory.

Corporations are woke. The American elite, the one that I believe is now squarely in the Democratic camp, is woke. Or at least it was until 2024, perhaps this will change, but the point is not so much in the details of the actual woke phenomenon as much as it is in what wokeness represents; a strong cultural difference between blue and red America. The people who work for corporations have degrees, earn a lot of money, and live in urban areas, which makes them disproportionately member of blue America. Red Americans are not represented internally, and corporations are a reflection of their employees in many ways, particularly in the way they signal their cultural allegiance. The consequent disgust for corporate America from the Republican side is understandable; they are the enemy. So when Ron DeSantis goes after Disney, it makes sense.

Never Trump conservatives and moderates teaming up with the Democratic party to take on a new Trump-era Republican party. I will touch on this more below, but the realignment is forcing constituent parts of both party’s coalitions to break off and reexamine their allegiance to the party they used to think of as their own. Former Republican-supporting conservatives (e.g. Bill Kristol) are now finding themselves aligned with Joe Biden, of all people, because they are so disgusted at the new Republican party under Trump that no longer represents them. In the other direction, leftists like Batya Ungar-Sargon have become MAGA.

Foreign policy shifts. The Democrats are suddenly a lot more hawkish than I remember them. The days of protesting the invasion of Iraq are over. Instead, it is the Republicans that are questioning our involvement in Ukraine and asking whether Americans should be willing to die for Taiwan. The Washington D.C. establishment is strong and will always find a way to get what it believes is right for the country. If the Republican party is not a reliable ally, those elites have no issue shifting to the Democratic party. It makes perfect sense that the party representing the people who would have to send their sons to die in foreign wars do not want those wars to start and the party who sees the world through the lens of geopolitical chess feel comfortable playing games with human lives.

Things that don’t support my theory

This is a tougher list to make because I don’t want to include what I believe are vestigial traits. Instead, I think the real measure of whether I’m right is in how the two parties face new questions.

For example, when the H1B drama was kicking off online, I thought this would be a good opportunity to test my case. If I am right, then Democrats would support H1B visas and educated foreigners moving to and working in the US. The Republicans would, in my view, would oppose it because their base would oppose it. Working class people have been openly anti-immigration, both because for economic reasons (they compete for their low-pay jobs) and for cultural reasons (racism). Instead, the internal debate within the Republican party was settled by Trump in favor of H1B visas. I do predict, however, that a JD Vance presidency would look very different.

A really good counter to my theory is Musk gutting the federal government. Entitlements are popular, and lots of people who voted Republican get a lot of money from the government in various forms. A completed realignment would mean that the Republicans support taxing the rich to fund government redistribution to the poor. Instead, you have a multibillionaire threatening to destroy Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. This is simply not in line with my theory and a lot of things would have to change to bring reality more in line with what I predict.

Another example is Trump’s tax cuts from his first term. While that was earlier on in the realignment and the Republican party looked different internally, it was a tax cut for the rich at the end of the day, which is the exact opposite of what I predict the Republicans will be supporting.

In general, there are still a lot of leftover pre-alignment efforts that are still running. The Republicans pass referendums to enact voter IDs. The Democrats curry favor with unions, at least in the 2024 election, to obtain union member votes. The Republicans sill want to downsize government as if it’s still the days of Paul Ryan. The Democrats still try to support raising the minimum wage. A big reason why the realignment is leaving both sides so discombobulated is because America’s two parties are not monoliths, they are cobbled together alliances between various smaller factions who have set aside their differences to join forces and win power.

The Democratic party is not a single ideology, it includes lots of constituent parts that fight internally to get their way within the party and have to come to compromises that don’t appease everyone. As a result, you have socialist leftists working together with neoliberal capitalists within a single block. Similarly, the Republicans include religious theocrats and ideological libertarians on the same side trying to find a mix of policies and candidates that are internally agreed upon and externally politically viable.

As a result, the realignment is not simply a total shift of all the members of the Democratic coalition from one side to the other. Instead, the parties that make up the full coalition from both sides are bein forced to reexamine their positions and ask themselves if it would be wiser to leave their former team to join the opposition. There are instances where the shift makes sense, as mentioned above, but other instances where the parties have not recombobulated in a way that aligns with my predictions. Many progressives are still economically populist and have not shifted to the Republican side. The black constituency within the Democratic party doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere, and I think it will be a long time before enough black Americans start voting Republican and the black American political class reevaluates its position. The anti-government wing of the Republican party is still around and finds ways of getting what they want as is the pro-business wing, which still manages to cut taxes for large corporations and eliminate regulations.

Synthesis

None of the things listed above, whether I claim they support my prediction or not, are static. Politics is dynamic, and every day brings a new opportunity for the realignment to rear its head. We don’t necessarily know how exactly the coalitions will reestablish themselves in the new era. Perhaps the religious right will disappear entirely. After all, the trends indicate that poor Americans are decreasingly religious as opposed to wealthier Americans. Perhaps the progressives that currently support both cultural leftism and economic leftism will be forced to chose one or the other.

But I continue to insist that we simply draw the line forward and see where the realignment through to its inevitable conclusion. If the hoi palloi vote Republican, the Democrats have to stay competitive. In order to stay competitive, they will have to do things that they maybe used to oppose when it was the Republican party that occupied that niche. If the only way to win an election is to maximize the votes from your constituency and minimize the votes from the opposition, particularly when the opposition is more numerous, wouldn’t you do the only sensible thing and try your best to make it hard for the opposition to vote?

I know that if a sincere Democrat from today reads what I wrote he will scoff. I actually presented this theory to my Democratically engaged friends and they did scoff. It seems anathema to do something that the bad guys do. We’re the good guys, after all. We like voting, the people support us. Without launching into psychoanalytics, I think that this will shift slowly and suddenly. At some point in the near future, elitist members of the Democratic party will come to the realization that the people are not with them. One by one they will have to stop lying to themselves about their alignment with and care for the working class, and they will become more and more disgusted with people who are culturally distant from them. It will become easier to justify ignoring their concerns and minimizing their opinions. Eventually there will come a moment when a choice will have to be made — maybe some specific election that’s really close and really important in a swing state somewhere — and that sincere Democrat will suddenly agree that it’s best not to let the people vote so much because the choices they make are wrong. It’s not that they are opposed to democracy, per se, but they want to ensure that there are filters between the common man and the man making decisions.

Perhaps an idealogue will refuse. He believes in democracy, full stop. Just because it becomes impossible to win elections doesn’t mean that the elections should be undermined to grant him political power, even if he thinks power in his hands is better wielded. But idealogues are few and far between. It should not be so surprising to see Republicans do a 180 on positions they held up until yesterday. Those who disagree leave the coalition, and the rest have no trouble looking themselves in the mirror and denying any claims at hypocrisy. The Democrats are not immune from this. Elites have been suppressing the votes and wills of the masses for generations. This will not be an exception. Particularly as people hype themselves up over fears that the US is descending into “literal fascism,” justifying breaking the rules you once thought were unbreakable will become easier. Eventually, the realignment will become complete. If we’re realigning, we’re realigning all the way.