GOP Obstruction Is the Ultimate Voter Suppression Tactic

Nearly 25 years ago, P.J. O'Rourke wrote

Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.

Does low voter turnout produce bad government, or does bad government produce low voter turnout? You would think that a 12 percent approval rating for Congress would have hundreds of members being turned out of office. Barney Frank describes voters as a big part of the problem of gridlock.

But there’s another, perhaps deeper reason, one that’s both a cause and an effect of the political dysfunction from which we now suffer: a sharp decline in the public’s belief that government works.

But where does that decline come from? And who benefits when voter turnout is low? It may not always be clear. Generally, groups that tend to vote Democratic are less likely to turnout when barriers to voting are enacted. Frank acknowledges that

there is an asymmetry when it comes to party behavior. Nonvoting is more often the response of the angry left than of the angry right.

The more the prevailing narrative blames the failures of political insiders for gridlock, leading to voter alienation, the deeper the gridlock and the greater the advantage to the right.

And yet, he claims that most Republican voters do want good governance and that we need greater turnout from all groups to hold politicians accountable.

Bill Curry agrees that

[w]hen it comes to suppressing turnout nothing beats good old fashioned alienation.

And it's pretty clear who has benefited from recent lower turnouts.

In 2014, 81.6 million votes were cast, a stunning 50 million vote drop from 2008 in the lowest turnout since World War II. Since 2008 Republicans have picked up 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats and 12 governorships, one of the three biggest partisan growth spurts in American history.

These gains give Republicans no motivation to do anything differently. Obstruction is a deliberate strategy. The confirmation of judges gets delayed or passed over just because they can get away with it. Even incompetence doesn't mean you can't win elections. And you can always rig the system to make sure nothing gets done.

The Republicans know what they're doing even if some candidates take things too far. In defense of the one percent, anything that turns people off of politics works in their favor. Yet Curry doesn't let Democrats off the hook and sees a way past the alienation (although it's also a battle against skewed media coverage).

The good news: It still presents in most voters as anger rather than hard-to-reach glacial despondency. Some say voters moved right but in fact many have moved left. Their anger is over economic decay and political corruption, and is empirical, not ideological. Democrats can’t accept that voters’ anger at government is fact-based. To win them back we must show them we know how to fix what’s broken, and that this time we really mean to do it.

Update (January 16, 2016):  Eliza Webb cites polling evidence that majorities of Americans support a progressive agenda.

Americans concur: a compassionate, fair land where babies grow up in equality and human beings are treated with respect and dignity is the country for us.

To make our values fit our reality, all we have to do is vote.

Because, after all, as studies show, when people vote, liberals win.