Following the 2016 elections, Republicans gained complete control over the state governments of Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire. They have swiftly used their newfound power to attempt anti-union legislation in all four states, while Republicans have plotted a slew of new measures intended to make voting more difficult. These aren’t isolated incidents, nor are the two sets of policies unrelated. As Demos’ Sean McElwee details in an extensive recent report, voter suppression, anti-union laws, and gerrymandering are part of a coordinated multi-state effort to eviscerate the Democratic Party’s organizational strength.
Since their 2010 midterm wave election, Republicans gained power in a multitude of states across America. Since that election determined control over redistricting, Republicans were able to implement ruthless gerrymanders that locked Democrats out of power in both Congress and myriad state legislatures. The GOP additionally passed new restrictions on voting itself. Several battleground states in the crucial Midwest also enacted laws that will likely undermine union power by limiting their bargaining rights or their ability to secure dues-paying members.
Taken together, these measures are a nationally planned attack on the Democratic Party’s capacity to organize opposition to Republicans. The GOP intends to make voting more difficult for Democratic-leaning demographics, to have Democratic votes matter less than Republican ones, and to prevent a key progressive constituency from being able to mobilize workers to turn out and vote according to their class interests.
Gerrymandering
Daily Kos Elections has previously written extensively about the impact of gerrymandering. As shown on the map below, states with 55 percent of congressional districts were drawn to favor Republicans in the 2010s round of redistricting, but just 10 percent for Democrats.
This situation is just as bad at the state level, as the second map below illustrates. The redistricting process in 48 state legislative chambers was designed to favor Republicans, including both chambers in 23 states amounting to 50 percent of the population. Mapmakers intended to favor Democrats in just 23 chambers and only both of them in 10 states with a mere 15 percent of the population. That means Republicans had the opportunity to draw three times as many districts as Democrats did.
The GOP’s lopsided advantage in congressional redistricting led to a situation where Donald Trump and Mitt Romney each won a decisive majority of House seats even though both Republican presidential candidates lost the national popular vote. This discrepancy is important in an era where ticket-splitting remains at historic lows, limiting Democrats’ ability to win a House majority despite a popular vote edge. Gerrymandering likely cost Democrats control of the House in 2012, and it made 2016 a foregone conclusion despite the close presidential race.
Rampant and one-sided partisan gerrymandering has consequently shut Democrats out of power at the state level too. In 2012, Democratic candidates effectively won the overall popular vote while Republicans obtained more seats in the U.S. House and state legislative chambers across Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These gerrymanders persistently allow Republican votes to count more than Democratic ones do.
Voter Suppression Laws
Not only have Republicans aggressively gerrymandered most of the country, but they have also passed scores of laws that make it harder to cast a ballot itself. These most notoriously include voter ID, but also such measures as cutting early voting availability, repealing same-day registration, closing polling places in Democratic-heavy areas, ending the straight-ticket voting option, and purging Democratic-leaning demographics from the registration rolls. Republicans even took legal action to maintain lifetime felony disenfranchisement, which was originally an explicit tool of white supremacists.
Rather than preventing nearly non-existent impersonation fraud, voter ID is designed to disenfranchise predominantly poor, black, or Latino voters who might have trouble obtaining the necessary documentation. Cuts to voting hours, locations, and the straight-ticket option are all intended to make voting more burdensome by dramatically increasing the time and distance it takes to cast a ballot. These hurdles particularly hit hard for those who lack transportation options or cannot afford to take off work to stand in line for five hours on Election Day. They effectively constitute a poll tax.
Felony disenfranchisement has a dramatic racial disparity that has taken on a partisan lens thanks to racially polarized voting. In states like Virginia, where Republican legislators unsuccessfully fought Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s 2016 actions to restore voting rights for those who had completed their sentences, an astonishing 80 percent of the disenfranchised had fully served their time, while African Americans were five times more likely to be barred from voting than whites.
What makes these voter suppression efforts even more pernicious is how systematic they are. Republicans have relied on draft legislation from conservative interest groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council to introduce near-identical bills in state after state not long after they assumed unified control over state government. As shown on the map below from the Brennan Center for Justice, 20 states imposed mostly GOP-backed voting restrictions ahead of the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. Other states attempted to do so, but only failed because of court rulings against them, or have passed new restrictions since 2016.
Among those 20 states, Republicans had gained unified power in Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin only after Barack Obama became president. They furthermore used newfound conservative control over the governor’s office in Florida and Iowa to significantly impede the ability of those with felony convictions to regain their voting rights upon completion of their sentence.
Republicans immediately introduced new restrictions in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire as soon as they gained control. Iowa’s state House has already passed a voter ID bill, and Missouri Republicans recently implemented their own voter ID law. New Hampshire Republicans proposed tightening voter residency requirements, which could disenfranchise students, eliminating same-day registration, and gerrymandering the Electoral College. Kentucky’s GOP governor overturned his Democratic predecessor’s executive action to restore voting rights for those with past felony convictions when he took office in 2015.
While federal courts struck down several of these state-level restrictions in 2016, Trump’s election and his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court could see the high court enable a new wave of voting restrictions without the fear of federal interference. This very thing happened after the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
Attacks on Unions
While gerrymandering and voter suppression have long dominated the spotlight in the voting wars, union-busting plays an indispensable role too. Unions have long been part of the backbone of the Democratic Party, especially in politically competitive Rust Belt states with a history of manufacturing and industry. Unions often spent heavily on politics, doing their part to modestly counteract big business spending on behalf of Republicans.
Crucially, unions don’t just organize workers to fight for better pay and conditions, they also mobilized them for political participation by conducting get-out-the-vote operations and endorsing candidates. In an era of declining trust in a broad variety of public institutions, unions are an increasingly uncommon organization that can activate their members’ political awareness about issues and mobilize that energy into political action.
So-called “right to work” laws prevent unions from automatically deducting fees from the workers whom they bargain for but who aren’t dues-paying members. This prohibition creates a strong incentive for workers to free-ride since they can enjoy the benefits of the union bargaining on their behalf without having to pay the agency fees for that bargaining (which are still less than full membership dues). Consequently, these laws can lead to a sharp drop in union membership and financial capacity, while they of course doesn’t actually guarantee that people have the right to work by ensuring that they can obtain a job.
While Republicans undoubtedly want to crush unions because they believe businesses should take a bigger slice of the economic pie, their doing so comes with the bonus of hurting Democrats electorally. McElwee cites political science research that finds that states adopting “right to work” laws could reduce the vote share going to Democratic candidates by 2 to 4 percent in presidential elections and 3 to 5 points in Senate races. While this research is far from definitive, even a modest impact could have been devastating in 2016 when Republicans only narrowly won the Electoral College and Senate.
As shown below, Republicans have passed “right to work” laws this decade in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, while they only narrowly failed to do so in New Hampshire in 2017.
They have additionally passed laws that limit or end collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Voters successfully vetoed that attempt in Ohio in 2011, but many of these states lack ballot referendums or have seen Republicans prevail in them anyway. Without fail, every single one of these states where Republicans attacked unions had seen their party gain unified control of state government only in 2010 or subsequent elections.
Now that Republicans wield complete control over the federal government and will soon regain a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the GOP could advance these voter suppression and anti-union laws nationwide, just like they have done in the states. There is already a significant likelihood that the Supreme Court will effectively impose “right to work” for public-sector unions once Gorsuch replaces the late Antonin Scalia. Additionally, some Republican Congress members have proposed passing a federal “right to work” law for all unions.
Republican-appointed justices are also extremely hostile to voting rights, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions is also a longtime voting rights opponent. His Justice Department is likely to persecute Democratic-leaning demographics over nonexistent voting fraud and defend voting restrictions in court. Trump himself falsely claims that there are millions of fraudulent voters, which could give congressional Republicans a pretext to pass changes to federal voting laws that could further impose burdensome voter ID or proof-of-citizenship requirements, which could disenfranchise many eligible voters.
It has become undeniable that Republicans simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of their political opposition. Democrats must act accordingly to actively push back against voter suppression laws and anti-union measures. While Democrats control few state governments, they must pass laws to protect and expand voting rights where they can, or rely on ballot initiatives to circumvent hostile Republicans. With our very democracy itself at stake, Democrats cannot afford to sit idly by.