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Don’t Rock the Vote - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion

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For many years, I’ve heard Democrats fret that Republicans were trying to reduce voter turnout in order to win elections. This rhetoric kicked into high gear after 2020, with some Dems even framing measures like voter ID laws as assaults on democracy itself. I was always a bit suspicious of this line. Of course I want to make it as easy as possible for qualified people to vote, but lots of countries have voter ID laws, and states that have implemented voter ID laws haven’t seen much change. But more fundamentally, data I was seeing, and analyses I was reading, suggested that suppressing voter turnout now generally hurts Republicans instead of hurting Democrats. So GOP vote suppression measures seemed likely to backfire. But I am not a political analyst, and so I hesitated to write about this. Instead I asked my friend Wally Nowinski, who wrote an excellent guest post for Noahpinion about NIMBY environmental groups back in 2022, to do a deep dive on the voter turnout issue. He did not d

Democrats benefit from low turnout now Don't rock the vote. Wally Nowinski Jul 21, 2024 262 119 30 Share " TRUMP barn " by dankeck , CC0 1.0 For many years, I’ve heard Democrats fret that Republicans were trying to reduce voter turnout in order to win elections. This rhetoric kicked into high gear after 2020, with some Dems even framing measures like voter ID laws as assaults on democracy itself. I was always a bit suspicious of this line. Of course I want to make it as easy as possible for qualified people to vote, but lots of countries have voter ID laws , and states that have implemented vo

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