Monday, November 2, 2020

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter J



I’ve made this observation before but I thought it was worth calling out in a freestanding post.

We have lots of reason to believe that the relationship between voter suppression efforts or perhaps more precisely awareness of those efforts and actual turnout of the targeted groups is J-shaped. Making voting more inconvenient for certain people up to a point will have the effect of making them vote less, but eventually they get so angry at being disenfranchised that they actually become more likely to vote.

We have data, anecdote, and common sense telling us that we have reached the point where these efforts appear to have become massively counterproductive for the Republican party. The problem is the GOP is addicted to these tactics. If voter suppression has lost its effectiveness for sometime to come and the party doesn’t come up with something to replace it, they are absolutely screwed.



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