Democrats Are Running Out of Time
A contractor works to count ballots during the Arizona election recount. (Courtney Pedroza / Getty)
Voting-rights advocates are scared that the White House isn’t taking Republican threats to the ballot seriously enough.
Anxiety is growing among a broad range of civil-rights, democracy-reform, and liberal groups over whether Democrats are responding with enough urgency to the accelerating Republican efforts to both suppress voting and potentially overturn future Democratic election victories.
With the congressional calendar dominated by President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending proposals, these activists are expressing concern that neither the administration nor Democratic congressional leaders are raising sufficient alarms about the threats to voting rights proliferating in red states, or developing a strategy to pass the national election standards that these groups consider the party’s best chance to counter those threats.
These worries haven’t yet reached a breaking point: The wide range of activists I spoke with almost uniformly consider Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi personally committed to combatting the red-state offensive. Most of them also expressed cautious, if wavering, optimism that Democrats can still find a way to pass into law at least some election-standards provisions, which are stalled in the Senate, primarily because of resistance from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. And a senior White House official I spoke with insists Biden is focused on the threat, even if the administration doesn’t view it in terms as dire as most liberal groups.
Even so, these activists have become more and more uncertain that Democratic leaders have a strategy to overcome Manchin’s hesitance, not to mention his (and other Democrats’) refusal to pare back the filibuster, which Republicans are certain to employ against any voting-rights legislation. What’s more, these activists fear that by focusing relatively little attention on red states’ actions, Democrats aren’t doing enough to create a climate of public opinion in which Manchin and others could feel pressure to act on the issue of voting rights if and when Senate Republicans filibuster against it.
“From my conversations, I believe they understand” the magnitude of the problem in the White House and the Senate, Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil-rights group Color for Change, told me. But “I have not yet seen it being addressed at the level it needs to be in order for us to deal with the problem.”
In a conference call with reporters last week, Beto O’Rourke, the 2018 Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, didn’t mince words when I asked him whether the White House and Democratic congressional leaders are showing sufficient concern about the GOP’s moves. “The short answer is no,” he told me. He said he’s confident that Biden will eventually speak out more forcefully. But, O’Rourke added, “This is the Voting Rights Act of our time. To pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, President [Lyndon B.] Johnson used all of the political capital he had … We need that level of moral clarity from the president. Bring this country together, and connect the dots for all of us.”
When I spoke with him, Fernand Amandi, a longtime Democratic pollster based in Florida, expressed a level of alarm most activists will share only in private. “I fear that perhaps some Democratic leaders may be suffering from … the idea that this cannot happen here and are bordering on dereliction of duty in not sounding the alarm to the American people and to the community of nations about the existential threat that the Republican Party now presents to American democracy,” said Amandi, whose GOP-controlled home state is one of many that have passed legislation curbing access to the ballot.
White house officials dismiss the idea that Biden is insufficiently concerned about red states’ maneuvers, which have included reducing access to mail balloting and early voting, imposing new voter-identification requirements, purging voters from registration lists, limiting the use of ballot drop boxes, blocking state-court oversight of voting laws, and increasing Republican state officials’ authority to override the decisions of local election officials, many of whom are Democrats. “I can assure people there is no one that worries more about the effect of these things on the 2024 election than the president, who will be running and who went through 2020,” the senior White House official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, told me. (The official said Biden is planning to deliver a speech to underscore his commitment to voting rights that will likely come within the next few days.)
Still, it’s clear that the White House is operating at a more tempered level of concern than other Democrats about the threats to small-d democracy emerging in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election. Based on my conversations with them, officials there seem to take a more nuanced and restrained view of what’s happening. They do not believe that more assertive public denunciation from Biden would dissuade any of the Republican governors or legislators who have moved to restrict voting rights. And although White House officials consider the laws offensive from a civil-rights perspective, they do not think most of those laws will advantage Republicans in the 2022 and 2024 elections as much as many liberal activists fear.
The senior official noted that the Biden campaign repeatedly adjusted its tactics as the electoral rules changed throughout the 2020 election, and that Biden ultimately won more votes than any president in either party ever has. Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, “I think our feeling is, show us what the rules are and we will figure out a way to educate our voters and make sure they understand how they can vote and we will get them out to vote,” the official told me. Through on-the-ground organizing, “there are work-arounds to some of these provisions,” said a senior Democrat familiar with White House thinking, who also spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Contrast their comments with those of Fred Wertheimer, the president of the reform group Democracy 21 and former president of Common Cause, who told me that Republicans’ actions since Biden’s election constitute “the greatest attack on the democratic process in the 50 years I’ve been working on these issues.” Or with those of Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group studying threats to the electoral system: “I think we are in a far more precarious place just five months later than we were even from November through January. If that trajectory continues, you can see where it’s headed by November 2022 or November 2024.”