But they want to never lose.
© Spencer Platt/Getty Images Lost cause? Spencer Platt/Getty Images The GOP holds every elected, statewide office that Texas has to offer — from railroad commissioner to comptroller to attorney general to governor. The party has controlled the state’s Senate for a quarter century, and its House for 19 years. Last November, Texas voters backed Donald Trump over Joe Biden by nearly seven points, while sending an overwhelmingly Republican delegation to Congress. And yet, the Texas Republican Party is waging war on the democracy it dominates. On Sunday night in Austin, Democratic lawmakers fled the state legislature to delay an assault on their state’s form of government. In the wake of Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election — and his subsequent campaign to delegitimize U.S. democracy — Republicans have pushed anti-democratic election reforms in states across the country. But SB-7 lends credence to the claim that everything is bigger in Texas — even partisan attacks on free elections. Governor Greg Abbott’s bill doesn’t just feature all of the GOP’s latest innovations in voter suppression (novel restrictions on early voting, absentee voting, drive-through voting, etc). It also contains a variety of measures that abet election subversion. The law would make it easier for state officials to throw out voters’ ballots on the basis of signature mismatches, a demonstrably unreliable and subjective means of identity verification. It would make providing an absentee ballot to a voter who has not requested one a criminal offense, punishable by prison time, while imposing no similar penalty on officials who deny eligible voters a chance to cast a ballot, thereby incentivizing election administrators to err on the side of disenfranchisement. But the most troubling part of the legislation is its apparent attempt to lay the groundwork for the invalidation of ballots en masse. As my colleague Jonathan Chait explains: The measure creates protections for poll watchers and criminal penalties for state officials who in any way obstruct or impair their “free movement” throughout polling areas. Recall that in 2020 Republicans deployed thousands of poll watchers, many of them with brains addled by Fox News and brimming with absurd claims of fraud. Relatedly, the state also lowered the evidentiary bar for judges to declare elections fraudulent. The two aspects work in tandem: one generates more potential rule violations and more people to claim they witnessed rule violations, and the other more easily enables those claims to cancel the election. The Texas GOP’s war on democracy is one of choice, not necessity. The party just demonstrated its capacity to dominate a high-turnout election. Republicans do face some demographic headwinds in Texas, with the state’s Hispanic population set to become a plurality in the coming years; the specter of Californication haunts Lone Star State reactionaries. And yet, in the 2020 election, the party made its biggest gains with Hispanic Texans. Between 2016 and last November, the Democratic presidential nominee’s vote share went up in Texas’s most urban, suburban, and rural counties; it was the state’s heavily Hispanic border counties that kept the state solid red, as Joe Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton by 16 points in such areas. All of which is to say, the notion that Texas Republicans must choose between subverting democracy and allowing demographic change to render their party a permanent minority in the Lone Star State is a paranoid fantasy. In truth, SB-7 may actually be contrary to the GOP’s best interests. The primary threat to Republican power in the Lone Star State is the leftward drift of highly educated suburbanites, who are exceptionally difficult to disenfranchise through voting restrictions due to their social power and economic security (there aren’t many lawyers who lack photo ID, or middle managers who will struggle to find transportation to a polling place). Of course, simply invalidating adverse election results is one solution to the party’s suburban challenge. But it’s a pretty elaborate and dicey approach to the problem. And if it doesn’t succeed, then pursuing blatantly anti-democratic measures, in tacit support of Trump’s insurrectionary cause, will only reinforce college-educated moderates’ alienation from red America. As one Republican operative said of Georgia’s voter-restriction bill in a February interview with the Washington Post, “There’s still an appetite from a lot of Republicans to do stuff like this, but it’s not bright. It just gives Democrats a baseball bat with which to beat us.” Why then, have Texas Republicans made legislative priorities out of voter suppression and election subversion? Because a large percentage of their most engaged voters and activists believe that the 2020 election was literally stolen, while a less-deluded subset simply believes that democratic governance must be subordinated to Democratic disempowerment.
