[Doug64]

It looks like the Left might actually push Liberals and Conservatives into alliance to deal with it--at least, likely enough to scare Democrats paying attention (the ones not planning to vote for Republicans, of course).

A Middle Class Rebellion Against Progressives Is Gaining Steam

A specter is haunting America, a great revolt that threatens to dwarf the noxious rebellion led by Trump. The echoes of a another potentially larger pushback can already be heard in progressive America. But it's not towards socialism, as many suggest. It's the opposite: a new middle-class rebellion against the excesses of the Left.

This new middle-class rebellion isn't rejecting everything that progressives stand for; the Left's critique of neo-liberal excess is resonating, as is the need for improved access to health care. But the current focus on "systemic racism," coupled with a newfound and heavily enforced cultural conformism and the obsessive focus on a never-ending litany of impending "climate emergences" are less likely to pass muster with most of the middle class, no matter how popular they are with the media, academics, and others in the progressive corner.

And this new middle-class rebellion is being bolstered by a wide-ranging intellectual rebellion by traditional liberals against the Left's dogmatism and intolerance. Indeed, what we're about to see has the potential to reprise the great shift among old liberals that had them embracing Reagan in reaction to the Left's excesses of that generation.

In a way, this should not be surprising. After all, the progressive base is limited: According to a survey conducted by the non-partisan group More in Common, progressives constitute barely eight percent of the electorate. The report also found that fully 80 percent of all Americans believe that "political correctness is a problem," including large majorities of millennials and racial minorities.

Party line journalists may see President Biden as the new champion of the middle class, but every time he adopts central tenets of the new Left, he undermines his pitch. And this happens not infrequently: The Biden Administration has adopted elements of the "anti-racist" agenda, for example, by explicitly favoring Black farmers for subsidies, rather than focusing on all farmers in need. Race issues may be popular on college campuses and in the human relations departments of giant corporations like Lockheed and Amazon, but a recent Yale study found that language based on inclusivity around class was far more popular than one focused largely on race, even with progressive voters.

This is not the message coming out of the Biden administration, which has put a premium on diversity hiring and "equity," despite the fact that racial quotas, in hiring or in college admissions, are unpopular with three out of four Americans, including African-Americans and Hispanics; 65% of Hispanics, 62% of black Americans and 58% of Asians oppose affirmative action in college admissions.

Biden is similarly losing the middle class on immigration. Already many Latinos, particularly in Texas and Arizona, fear the loss of border control that accompanied the shift from Trump to Biden administrations. The crisis at the border has the potential to overwhelm the economies, health and welfare systems in heavily Hispanic border communities, which is sparking alarm among border state Democrats.

None of this is to suggest that minorities will vote for Republicans en masse in the near future, particularly if the party cannot transcend its embarrassing Trump worship. But the growing chasm between what people want and what Biden is offering could prove a potentially immense challenge that could undermine future Democratic gains.

Major pushback on how the progressive Left sees American history is also brewing. Americans by and large remain patriotic, including the poor and working class. This patriotism stands in stark contrast to the prevailing view among progressives, which casts America as the intrinsically and irredeemably evil spawn of slaveholders and racists. This simply does not constitute a popular program to the middle and lower classes, a gap that could become more and more meaningful—especially as the message of the Left spreads.

Take, for example, Hollywood, which used to promote the virtues of the Republic and the heroic struggles of diverse Americans. Now, dominated by people scared to contravene woke progressives, the big media companies have been pushing far Left plotlines and characters—and they have lost markets as a result. The devolution of the once glamorous Academy Awards into a minor, sparsely watched proto-spectacle reflects how much Hollywood's hold is fading.

Of course, it's not just Hollywood. Much more consequential—and potentially more disastrous for the Left—has been the attempted takeover of public education, and, with the support of the Biden Administration, attempts to inject critical race theory into secondary school curricula. This has created a mounting pushback in school districts across the nation, many of them voting to ban critical race theory altogether.

The progressive case also increasingly suffers from its own manifest failures in urban bastions like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, which have been losing residents and attracting far fewer immigrants while suffering among the poorest job recoveries since the onset of the pandemic. Meanwhile, there's a clear acceleration of growth in less dense, lower cost "boomtowns" like Nashville, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Austin, Nashville, Columbus and Des Moines.

Democrats who wish to remain in power will need to address critical challenges like a steady rise in urban crime and massive homelessness; citing systemic racism won't clean the streets of New York, San Francisco and central Los Angeles from drug addicts, the mentally ill and the destitute. A failure to solve these problems will impact investment; Walgreens, reeling from thefts and disorder at its San Francisco stores, just announced its intention close 17 shops in the next five years.

But already these failures are beginning to incite opposition. Last month, Austin, the true blue bastion in Texas, overwhelmingly rejected a Council edict to allow camping on city streets. Austinites may want San Francisco's tech jobs, but they absolutely do not want its social rot. Equally revealing is the focus on crime in the New York City mayoral election, as well as recent surveys that found that violent crime has once again become the biggest issue facing the nation. At such a time, the progressive cry to "Defund the police" comes across as unpopular; the proposal is supported barely 18 percent of adults—just one in three Democrats and less than one in three African Americans.

But it's climate policy that may prove the most damaging aspect of the Biden agenda, and the one most likely to inspire a significant backlash. Policies pushing massive electrification are likely to accelerate the current surge in energy prices, and these will hit the household bottom line long after the stimulus checks have stopped coming. And this despite the fact that relatively few Americans—barely three percent, Gallup found— view climate as their primary concern and, according to one recent survey, barely one in ten registered voters would spend $100 a month on climate mitigation.

California provides a precursor for the emerging climate regime. Our state's fixation on renewable energy, along with the closure of natural gas and nuclear plants, has helped drive the cost of electricity and gas to the highest in the continental U.S. It has also systematically undermined key blue collar industries like energy, construction and manufacturing, which have stagnated or shrunk, while regulations designed for climate reasons have helped boost home prices to the nation's highest.

Attempts to squelch fracking could also cause even more havoc in places like the Rockies, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma. In Texas alone, as many as a million good-paying jobs would be lost. Overall, a full national ban would cost 14 million jobs, according to a Chamber of Commerce report, which is far more than the 8 million lost in the Great Recession and has the potential to turn even vital smaller towns into instant slums.

You should not expect the middle class to take that quiescently. Indeed, they should not take it quiescently.

More pragmatic Biden advisors will hopefully try to shift course and focus on basic lunch pail concerns like health care, industry and improving worker skills. But they should expect a fight from on the relentlessness, well-financed Left fringe whose maximalist demands are likely to grow.

Without a Trump to unite them, the Democrats, led by a radical fringe unrepresentative even of their own party, may find themselves increasingly isolated. Only then, when reality asserts itself, can sensible alternatives, social democratic or conservative, again gain currency.

[JohnRawls]

It looks like the Left might actually push Liberals and Conservatives into alliance to deal with it--at least, likely enough to scare Democrats paying attention (the ones not planning to vote for Republicans, of course).

A Middle Class Rebellion Against Progressives Is Gaining Steam

This is good news because it will decimate Trumpsters and some of the extremists leftists. Win-win in my book. Making Biden a president for the 2nd turn and giving him all states. (This will never happen though)

[Doug64]

@JohnRawls, you don't find many Progressives voting for Trump or his supporters, how is it supposed to devastate "Trumpsters"?

[JohnRawls]

@JohnRawls, you don't find many Progressives voting for Trump or his supporters, how is it supposed to devastate "Trumpsters"?

Because conservatives are voting for Trump.

[Doug64]

And another flag that ought to be worrying Democrats:

Texas mayoral win shows Republican gains with Hispanics are real

A Republican mayoral win last weekend in McAllen, Texas, proves GOP inroads with Hispanic voters are real – a demographic shift that should worry Democrats.

President Joseph R. Biden won Hidalgo County, home of McAllen, by 17 points in 2020. The border town has 140,000 residents, 85% of them Hispanic. Although it was a narrow victory for Republican Javier Villalobos, it demonstrates a macro-realignment happening within America, where more Hispanics are flocking to the Republican Party.

In 2020, President Donald J. Trump received more votes than he did in 2016 in 78 of the nation’s 100 majority-Hispanic counties. In Texas, Mr. Trump increased his overall vote count in areas where Hispanics comprise at least 80% of the population by 10 points. And for the first time since Reconstruction, Mr. Trump was able to flip and win Zapata County, which is located along the southern border.

In McAllen, the open border policies the Biden administration are undertaking became a central local issue – Vice President Kamala Harris who has been tasked to oversee the crisis, has yet to visit the region.

Still, nationally, Republicans are making inroads with Hispanic voters, as culturally, the GOP is proving to have more in common with them than leftist progressives, who are advocating a socialist agenda.

“The argument from the left is that this country has not been good for people, other than the majority, over much of our history,” Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told RealClearPolitics. “And Hispanics just don’t buy it. And the reason they don’t buy it is very simple: They know what life is like in another country.”

In Florida, Mr. Trump did 23 points better than in 2016 in Miami-Dade, the state’s largest county with the largest Hispanic population and captured 55% of Florida’s overall Cuban-American vote. Fifteen percent of Cuban-Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 switched their vote for Mr. Trump in 2020.

Democratic data-scientist David Shor said 2020’s results should worry Democrats, who traditionally have had a stronghold on the demographic, and that the Hispanic shift from blue to red is because of how far left “white liberals” have gone.

“[W]e’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of ‘racial resentment,’” he said. “So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.”

Democratic strategist James Carville agrees, saying progressive “wokeness” his hurting the Democratic Party.

“You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like ‘Latinx’ that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like ‘communities of color.’ I don’t know anyone who speaks like that,” Mr. Carville told Vox in April. “I don’t know anyone who lives in a ‘community of color.’ I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods…. This is not how voters talk.”

Sen. Rick Scott wrote Monday in an op-ed in Fox News that Hispanic realignment into the Republican Party is here to stay, and it’s Democratic hubris to believe Mr. Trump’s results in 2020 among the demographic was a fluke.

“Democratic leaders have taken their party in a direction that increasingly reflects the views of wealthy, urban, coastal elites, while failing to truly understand working-class Americans and the values and aspirations of Hispanic voters,” Mr. Scott wrote. “Democrats are out of touch, and assumed that all Hispanic voters just hate Republicans, as they do.”

Indeed, polling from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, proves Mr. Scott’s conclusion. In it 68% of Hispanic voters in battleground states view capitalism as the best form of government. Seventy-two believe more should be done to secure the southern border and stop the surge of illegal immigration; 67% feel America is losing its traditional values of faith, freedom and family; and 58% believe too many people no longer want to work and are happy living off of government assistance.

NRSC’s survey shows a whopping 80% of Hispanics – four-fifths of all Hispanic voters – believe America’s public schools are failing them and that we’re falling behind other nations.

Only one political party is talking about these issues and giving voice to Hispanic Americans’ concerns — the GOP. So as the left continues to push critical-race theory, more government spending and federal welfare, open borders, defunding the police and places an emphasis on climate change over organized religion, they will continue to lose Hispanic voters. That’s great news for Republicans heading into 2022.

One thing the article doesn't mention is that while yes, Biden won Hidalgo County by 17%, Obama won that county by 39% in 2008, 42% in 2012, and Clinton carried the county by 41% in 2016! That 24% drop in support is not something to be proud of....

[Rugoz]

Democrats vs. Republicans, and the latter party is a complete joke.

Seriously, Americans should change their political system, it's fucking boring.

[Potemkin]

Democrats vs. Republicans, and the latter party is a complete joke.

Seriously, Americans should change their political system, it's fucking boring.

It's anything but boring, @Rugoz. I for one found the Sacking of the Capitol on 6th January 2021 hugely entertaining.

I think 'dysfunctional' may be the word you're looking for.

[Istanbuller]

And another flag that ought to be worrying Democrats:

Texas mayoral win shows Republican gains with Hispanics are real

One thing the article doesn't mention is that while yes, Biden won Hidalgo County by 17%, Obama won that county by 39% in 2008, 42% in 2012, and Clinton carried the county by 41% in 2016! That 24% drop in support is not something to be proud of....

Historically speaking, the president's party always does poorly in midterms. Plus, districts are redrawn so it will last for next 10 years.

[Doug64]

Historically speaking, the president's party always does poorly in midterms. Plus, districts are redrawn so it will last for next 10 years.

This year's census had the fewest number of House seats reshuffled in history (only fourteen), and Sean Trende estimates that the result is likely to be a net pick-up for the Republicans of only two. So the redistricting isn't helping much. Besides, if the last election is representative, the mutual efforts at gerrymandering are pretty much balancing each other out. But you are right that the party in power typically loses seats, sometimes substantially so, so based on history alone the Republicans are likely to take back control of the House. And Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball's analysis using current House boundaries gives Republicans only two districts in the toss-up category while Democrats have nineteen. Add in problems like the article I linked to hint at, and you're looking at serious problems for the Democrats.

[Rugoz]

It's anything but boring, @Rugoz. I for one found the Sacking of the Capitol on 6th January 2021 hugely entertaining.

I think 'dysfunctional' may be the word you're looking for.

It's an entertaining circus, but politically boring as a voter.

[JohnRawls]

Hmm Uncle Joe just made some +++ PR points by apologizing. Are we sure that we wasn't a set up of sorts? Usually it is hard for politicians to do it this fast but looks pretty good.

[Istanbuller]

Hmm Uncle Joe just made some +++ PR points by apologizing. Are we sure that we wasn't a set up of sorts? Usually it is hard for politicians to do it this fast but looks pretty good.

Not unusual for undisciplined politicians. Do you think that conservative voter will go and vote for Biden because of this?

[JohnRawls]

Not unusual for undisciplined politicians. Do you think that conservative voter will go and vote for Biden because of this?

Extremist no, moderates yes.

[Istanbuller]

Extremist no, moderates yes.

What is a moderate?

[JohnRawls]

What is a moderate?

A person who is not heavily in to the cool aid. -

[Istanbuller]

A person who is not heavily in to the cool aid. -

I know you don't have deep knowledge in politics. But at least I thought you would try to say something meaningful.

[Doug64]

One thing I somehow missed in the chaos of the 2020 election was Alaska's passage of Ballot Measure 2, making it the second state to have state-wide ranked voting for all federal and state offices--and unlike Maine, Alaska doesn't have a constitutional provision getting in the way of using ranked voting for state offices. In Alaska's case, An open primary will send the top four vote-getters to the general election, where ranked voting will be used to select a final winner. I would be happier if ranked voting was used in the primary as well for determining those top four winners (though I can understand why they didn't, with as many candidates as primary elections generate), but it'll be interesting to see how this plays out next year.

[PataOneil]

Any one else notice how people have been fighting over elections for fifty years in this country as the deck tilts and the ship goes under?

Elections don't have consequences. They are simply a ritual we are put through to prop up the idea that the USA is a free and democratic country... instead of what it is: A fascist police state that locks up more of it's people than any other country in the world. Including China, which has over three times our population.

The last time America was free was 1491.

[Doug64]

There's more than a hint of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, but in 2022 and beyond the Republicans will be ready:

GOP Stands Up ‘Permanent’ ‘Election Integrity Operations’ Nationwide to ‘Kill’ Democrat Takeover Attempts ‘in Their Infancy’

The Republican Party has built a “permanent” structure to battle the left nationwide on election integrity over the last eight months and is winning the longer war with Democrats, senior Republican National Committee (RNC) officials revealed exclusively to Breitbart News through lengthy interviews and documents detailing the efforts.

Justin Riemer, the chief counsel of the RNC who is overseeing the party’s efforts, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News last week, broke down the GOP’s election integrity push into “three separate categories” which include a permanent staffed infrastructure nationwide and a broad law-fare legal strategy to counter Democrats.

“The first is what we’re doing in the courts and litigating,” Riemer said. “The second is sort of our operational organization out in the field to send teams into the states and the third is the more sort of communications and efficacy efforts we’ve made at the state level and pushing back on HR1 and the congressional overreach that we’ve been pushing back with.”

Riemer told Breitbart News that Republicans have learned much from what happened in 2020 after seeing what the Democrats did in a months-long tumultuous and coordinated push from long before Election Day until weeks afterward filled with mail and absentee voting, drop boxes, a lack of ID and signature matching requirements all combined with kicking poll watchers out of counting rooms, and massive funding surges from leftist big tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg who funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into state and local election offices nationwide through popup nonprofits he and his wife established. The Republicans, as such Riemer said, recognize now that elections are not fought in just one day but over a longer period of time — election day has become election season in other words — and Riemer said Republicans are responding by standing up a permanent structure to fight back.

“The RNC has basically decided election integrity operations need to be a permanent thing,” Riemer said. “In the past what would happen was every four years, because it was really every presidential election year where our side would gear up and to a lesser extent in midterms, but what would happen is it would be the presidential campaign every four years that would set up an operation to do the monitoring and the lawsuits and all these issues. It was just sort of improvised, like a pop-up tent, and then it went away and some of that was because we had a lawsuit against us from the DNC that prevented the RNC from doing anything like poll watching and preventing voter fraud and all of that. That basically was in effect for 40 years — 2020 was the first year we could actually engage in this stuff and what we decided was it makes no sense to just set up an operation every two or four years. It needs to be permanent. That’s why we have permanent staff now working on this stuff, and it’s why we have permanent litigation. If you have litigation going on permanently, and if it becomes a permanent thing it’s just that it’s an ongoing process — we’re always monitoring what’s happening, we’re always monitoring the legislative changes, we’re always in the courts. It just doesn’t end. Part of it is because the election calendar has expanded so much. It’s not even just the mail-in voting, so much of the problem is sort of hatched months before the election like a state cleaning up its voter rolls. That’s not a problem you should just start paying attention to a month before the election. You need to be on that like six months or a year or more before the election. So that’s why we’ve made it a permanent operation to make sure we’re keeping tabs on all of this.”

Litigating election integrity battles — whereby Republicans are defending effective state laws like those in Georgia; fighting to stop bad practices like a recent win at the U.S. Supreme Court against ballot harvesting in Arizona; on down to challenging leftist anti-poll watcher pushes from election boards in places like North Carolina — is proving to be a fruitful battlefield for the GOP, Riemer said.

“On the litigation side we have engaged in all the major lawsuits that have been filed against the states that have enacted reforms in the last several months,” Riemer said. “So, Georgia is the most famous one where they passed their legislation and were immediately sued. They actually have several separate lawsuits against them right now including one by the DOJ who sued them and we have been actively what’s called intervening in these lawsuits which puts us shoulder to shoulder with Georgia and defending the state law. The courts have allowed us in these cases and we’re actively pushing back and fighting back making sure the state stays honest in defending their laws and making sure they don’t settle them and cause problems that way. So we’re doing that in Georgia, in Florida, in Iowa, and as other states get sued which they undoubtedly will as they pass these reforms we will engage in those lawsuits as well.”

A memo the RNC prepared detailing said efforts, also obtained exclusively by Breitbart News, noted the RNC spent more than $30 million in 2020 in dozens of lawsuits — 59 in particular last year — but that the party is expanding and bolstering that legal strategy now heading into the 2022 midterms and eventually the 2024 presidential cycle. Already, the RNC has engaged in at least 19 lawsuits more than a year before the 2022 midterms — with lots more planned on the way. The operation has a multimillion dollar investment from the party as well, and it is a broad effort that the RNC is overseeing in coordination with other party committees like the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), and perhaps most importantly, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC). The RSLC is a key part of all of this because that committee is a clearing house for state leaders like attorneys general, secretaries of state, and state legislators to work together and connect up with national Republicans in Washington. State parties are also key to the strategy, according to both Riemer and this memo — as the RNC has coordinated with state parties like the Arizona GOP and the North Carolina GOP and others to fight the left on election matters most famously so far in the U.S. Supreme Court decision shredding ballot harvesting in Arizona. Riemer believes the Republicans — despite what happened in 2020 and a dejected GOP base since then — have turned the tide and are winning the war, while the Democrats are losing overall.

“I think they’re absolutely losing,” Riemer said of the Democrats. “States are enacting these laws and we feel very confident the courts are going to uphold them. We are organized earlier than ever before. We are working with the other party committees, we’re working with other outside groups on the right to make sure we have a unified approach. People are so serious about this and I see how desperate the Democrats are. The DOJ suing Georgia for their law — it is really absolutely ridiculous. I can just see Biden calling up Merrick Garland saying ‘you guys just have to sue now.’ And I think it reeks of a desperate move especially if you read the complaint. Any decent lawyer would read that and just say ‘wow, this is a public relations exercise.’ So, we’re doing everything we can to fight. And, I think we’re going to win. I think we’re winning now. This Arizona decision was a huge loss for them and that’s going to have ramifications moving forward in a lot of other lawsuits so I think the fact where we are right now in early August a year and three months before the next election is incredible.”

Structurally, to help oversee and corral the immense resources the party is putting into this effort — tens of millions of dollars per the memo also obtained by Breitbart News — Riemer said the RNC has stood up a fully-staffed structure nationwide with full-time election integrity directors in key states coast to coast.

“On the operational side, we are already in the process of setting up our election integrity teams at the state level,” Riemer said. “We’re already staffed up here at the RNC. But what we’re doing is setting up state election integrity directors in all the major states where there will be close elections in 2022. So we have sort of a political organizer who’s responsible for recruiting poll watchers and showing up at the county board of election meetings and that sort of thing. We’re pairing them with an attorney as well who can help. Really, what the point of this is is ultimately for election day everywhere across the country to make sure we have poll watchers and that no polling place we need to be at observing is missing a poll watcher. But we’re also monitoring what’s happening at the state and local level. A lot of this stuff is the devil is in the details, like the secretary of state can come up with some policy that basically waters down something or makes it harder for our poll watchers to be in the polling place or whatever. So what we’re trying to do is make sure we’re watching everything and getting ahead of it, submitting Freedom of Information Act requests and that stuff.”

Then, more broadly from a public relations standpoint, Riemer said the party is conducting polling and releasing ads on digital and television and radio platforms to help support the push for election integrity measures in states and to fight back against Democrat overreach from Washington—and to fight leftists in particular states whenever they cause problems for election integrity, like the Texas Democrats who fled Texas to deny the legislature a quorum for a special session. The goal is to harness the enormous energy on the right after what happened in 2020 for productive purposes on election integrity, and bring together what he called “the whole conservative, Republican ecosystem” on the push.

“Then, on the communications and advocacy side, this is slightly less legal but we’ve done everything from running ads to doing polling to targeting legislators that have been attacking some of these state laws and also going after congressional Democrats on HR1 — I guess they call it the ‘Corrupt Politicians Act,’” Riemer said. “I think it’s a great example of not just the RNC but the whole conservative, Republican ecosystem banding together and fighting back on HR1. Obviously they’re still fighting to pass something but it’s a huge success they haven’t pulled anything off yet. But going back to the beginning of HR1, when we saw they were really going all in to pass HR1, we actually started drafting a complaint to challenge it in the event it did pass. And we know they’re going to keep coming back on it, so we have a sort of ‘break glass in case of emergency’ lawsuit that will be ready to file and challenge this federal overreach because — no surprise here — we believe states should be running their own elections and that Congress shouldn’t be sort of micromanaging the states and making bad policies.”

The communications and advocacy side of things — while less about legal precedent or the big law-fare fights playing out in courtrooms and state legislatures across America — is also important because it helps push Democrats on issues they are losing on, like voter ID. It can also help in the courtroom, Riemer said, because judges want people to have confidence in the outcome of elections.

“I think it’s really important — it does play into the legal stuff for sure,” Riemer said. “One of the things a state can say when it’s defending its laws that are under attack is that the law promotes the confidence of the election and a court thinks that is important. The Supreme Court has basically said that a state trying to protect its voters’ confidence in the election is really important. Knowing how popular these laws are makes it a lot harder for the courts to attack them and strike them down. It’s nice knowing the public is on your side. We have the wind at our sails here and I think you’re seeing examples of it changing policy. You’re seeing Stacey Abrams suddenly saying she is for voter ID and James Clyburn saying he is for voter ID and Governor Wolf in Pennsylvania doing this remarkable turnabout where he says voter ID is not so bad. It’s remarkable. Rarely do you see people flip-flop like this on policy so it’s working.”

Asked to detail a sampling of the GOP’s “micro wins” so far — places where this new structure from the RNC has already had an impact in stopping the left and securing elections — Riemer pointed to several cases around the country including Supreme and Appellate Court decisions against ballot harvesting in Arizona and against busing voters in Michigan, as well as an effort to stop election officials in North Carolina from blocking GOP poll watchers from being near enough counting of ballots in that state. He also cited some early indications that GOP litigation on Georgia’s landmark election integrity law will be likely upheld in the end.

“So a couple come to mind just in the last few months,” Riemer said when asked to detail GOP wins on election integrity. “In Georgia, I mentioned all these lawsuits they filed challenging the law. The Democrats tried to go in and basically put that law on hold for some recent special elections they had. We were in that lawsuit and pushed back on that. The court basically said ‘no we’re not putting that law on hold — it’s going to stay in effect, all these provisions that are important for the integrity of the election are going to remain in effect.’ It was a good sort of leading indicator of where we think these lawsuits are going to end up. That was just a few weeks ago. Sometimes they will use these minor elections to try to score a win and that failed there. In Michigan, just the week before last, we had a big win at the federal appellate court on the issue of busing people to the polls so there’s always that kind of legend or myth that Democrats bus people in to the polls and they vote even if they’re ineligible. We had a win on that. Michigan has a ban on that practice, which the Democrats challenged and we got a win on that at the appellate court just a couple weeks ago so they’re not allowed to pay to bus people around to the polls which was a nice win as well. Last one I would mention is in North Carolina the board of elections is notorious for making policy that contradicts state law and the legislature — it’s a very partisan, Democrat board — and they were proposing regulations that would have made it a lot harder for our poll watchers to poll watch. We caught it with this monitoring and state structure that we’ve developed. We saw it when no one was paying attention to it and we worked with the state party and we basically went full blast. We sent them a letter saying you can’t enact this regulation, you can’t restrict our poll watchers and it’ll contradict state law — and basically made a threat that we would sue them if they followed through on it. So, when the time came to finalize the regulation they basically rewrote it in a way that was not going to be a problem and was not going to restrict our poll watchers and honestly I’m pretty convinced that wouldn’t have happened had we not engaged in it and engaged in it with the state party.”

Riemer said overall the GOP strategy is to “kill” bad Democrat ideas “in their infancy” rather than letting them fester and get worse.

“So those are the kinds of — micro-win is a great way of describing it — those are the kinds of micro-wins we’re looking for,” Riemer said. “Honestly, the best way to deal with a lot of this is to stop these problems before they become bigger problems. Kill them in their infancy. It’s not as sexy a win as in the Supreme Court, but I’d rather deal with it then when it’s a small problem than when it’s a big problem. So that’s exactly the kind of stuff we’re going to be doing confronting these issues when they happen.”

Riemer, the point man for the GOP on election integrity as the RNC’s chief counsel, also said he thinks that Democrat lawyers particularly Marc Elias of Perkins Coie are overrated. Elias got tons of attention last year as he litigated lots of places, and it looked like he was winning lots of decisions — he certainly won some — but Riemer said Elias lost more than he won. And, now, as the Republicans formally counter that law-fare strategy from the Democrats who were led in part by Elias, Riemer said he aims to expose the fallacy that the Democrats are winning the broader fight on this front.

“It absolutely is a huge part of their electoral strategy,” Riemer said when asked about the Democrats’ law-fare battles. “Some of it is substantive in that they are legitimately trying to go after these laws and strike them down. I think we kind of know what they are trying to do in trying to water down the system and create more uncertainty. But, at the end of the day a lot of it for them is symbolic. They know when they claim voter suppression or say Republicans are engaged in voter suppression, it’s political and very powerful for them because it riles up their base. It’s the main thing they’re talking about right now. It’s the number one thing they’re talking about — Republicans ‘suppressing the vote,’ even though the public is clearly with us on the issue.”

Having the public on the GOP’s side on election integrity — polls show wide scale support for voter ID and other security measures — is a breath of fresh air for Riemer, as the corporate and special interests are all aligned behind the Democrats and their well-funded lawyers.

“There are few issues that are so lopsided, where the public is way more for us on some issues including some Democrats being with us, as this issue,” Riemer said. “It’s a big part of what they want to do. In 2020, as you mentioned, they filed a lot of lawsuits and they often used COVID [Chinese coronavirus] as an excuse. A lot of this stuff they would have liked to try before but COVID gave them an excuse to say voting is getting harder so all these requirements like voter ID, witness requirements, and signature matching — whatever it may be — need to be struck down. I think kind of one of the myths of the 2020 election is that they, I think their success was overstated actually. We actually beat Elias in most of the lawsuits we were engaged in. We completely shut them out of entire regions like in Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Iowa. They filed tons of lawsuits — Arizona — and they didn’t win any of them there. But what happens is if you file 20 lawsuits and you lose 18 and you win two, you only hear from Marc Elias on the two he won. We haven’t been as good at trumpeting our wins. I think that’s something we’re getting a lot more aggressive about. I think this stuff blows up in their face too, their law-fare strategy. I don’t know if you saw what happened down in Arizona, the recent Supreme Court case on ballot harvesting. We were defending that state law against the Democrats for several years. We helped finance the defense of that law, and helped make sure the right arguments were put in front of the Supreme Court. We were coordinating that behind the scenes and what you saw was — that was a Marc Elias lawsuit. It totally blew up in their face and they ended up with a really bad decision for them and you even have leftwing lawyers now like some at the ACLU who are pissed off at Elias for bringing that lawsuit because of the fact it was so weak and now they have a really bad Supreme Court decision hung around their neck and so you can see it blowing up in their faces and I think we’re getting to pushing back on the public narrative that he just comes in and wins all these cases because it’s just not true.”

Riemer also noted that RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in February created an election integrity committee filled with RNC members and experts on election reforms to conduct “soul searching after 2020” — recommendations are soon forthcoming from this committee which has been generally, Riemer said, involved in helping steer the party forward after bruising losses last year to Democrats on this front.

“A lot of it was to hear from members and hear from experts on what the RNC should be doing on all these issues and what policies we should be recommending states enact and hearing from people in the states,” Riemer said. “What are people in the states and grassroots saying we should be doing? Having a set of recommendations that we’ll carry out and that work is pretty close to being finalized — we’ve been really busy, and we’re really excited. That work is going to make a huge difference.”

But overall Riemer said the message he wants GOP voters across America to hear is that Republicans hear them loud and clear on election integrity matters, and they are fighting back — and that they are winning.

“We’re fighting and we’re winning,” Riemer said. “We wake up every day and it’s the first thing we think about. That might sound depressing but it’s true. That’s the bottom line — and we’re going to keep winning. We’re in the right here and we’re looking forward to bragging about it when we do.”

[Drlee]

That was a very long, wordy article to simply say, "yes, we have decided to exercise voter suppression in 2024 and we will be targeting people of color especially".