Speaking at the historically black Texas Southern University earlier this month, Hillary Clinton gave a fiery speech on voting rights. She accused Republicans of spearheading “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.”
Clinton’s rhetoric is pure demagoguery, a cheap ploy to scare black voters into backing her as strongly as they supported Barack Obama. But the problem for the GOP is partly of its own making. So long as the party remains ambivalent about the concerns of black voters, Democrats like Clinton will easily castigate their opponents in the harshest terms.
Typically, the claim that Republicans are trying to stifle the black vote has three premises: The GOP is reducing early voting; it favors requiring identification for voting; and it will not update the Voting Rights Act. On each point, the Democrats are carrying on like Chicken Little.
True, several states have recently reduced early voting, but they’ve done so without seeing a drop in black turnout. North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin all reduced early voting before the 2014 midterms (Ohio and North Carolina also eliminated same-day registration), and none recorded a decline in black turnout relative to white. Perhaps in North Carolina, this can be explained by the fact that the Tar Heel State had an uneventful contest in 2010 but a highly competitive Senate race in 2014. Wisconsin, however, had exciting races for governor both years, while Ohio had exciting Senate and gubernatorial contests in 2010 but a boring, one-sided race for governor in 2014.
In general, the consensus of political scientists is that early voting does not produce net new votes, although there are outlying results on both sides. Some scholars have seen an increase, but two recent studies found a negative relationship between early voting and turnout. One group of researchers theorized that early voting makes Election Day less special and hampers mobilization efforts in surprising ways. The different results seem to reflect the different research models used.
The same is mostly true of voter identification laws. Political scientists struggle to find solid results that are consistent across research designs. Moreover, voter identification is popular with all racial constituencies, including African Americans, though barely. A Fox News poll last year found that 51 percent of black voters supported the proposition that “voter identification laws are needed to stop illegal voting,” while 46 percent opposed it.
Regarding the Voting Rights Act, when the Supreme Court held portions of it unconstitutional in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, the left went ballistic. The New York Times claimed that the Court had “effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
The Voting Rights Act accomplished several important tasks. Crucially, it made altering election laws with the intent to discriminate illegal, and it set up a neutral process for determining intent to discriminate. (Previously, violations of voting rights had been determined by local juries, which never ruled against the segregationists.) In 1982, amendments to the Voting Rights Act forbade election laws that have a discriminatory effect, a change that gave rise to majority-minority congressional districts.
In its 2013 decision, the Supreme Court left these provisions alone. The Court’s focus was the requirement that certain jurisdictions receive “preclearance” from the federal government before making any changes to election rules. The purpose was to bar changes that would lead to a weakening of the position of minority voters (known as “retrogression”). In 1965, this was an important innovation because it placed the burden of proof on the segregationists, who had to receive federal sanction for any new rules. But the formula for determining which jurisdictions must obtain preclearance is now terribly outdated; the last time it was adjusted was 40 years ago. The Supreme Court threw it out, arguing that long-gone discrimination is insufficient ground for burdening local governments.
The Supreme Court’s point is eminently fair. Why should the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of segregationists be subjected to a federal mandate if they have manifestly secured the voting rights of all citizens? Moreover, many jurisdictions covered under preclearance have been transformed by northern immigrants who have no history of discrimination. Why should they be burdened?
Importantly, the Court did not strike down the principle of preclearance or the retrogression standard, only the outdated formula used to carry them out. Thus, Congress could pass a new formula. Republican Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin has written an amendment to the Voting Rights Act that would implement what he calls “a rolling, nationwide formula” to determine who must receive preclearance. Republican leaders have been lukewarm to this proposal, with House Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte asserting that the Voting Rights Act is strong enough even without a preclearance formula.
You will never hear any of this from Hillary Clinton, who apparently believes that simplistic, Manichean distinctions will increase her share of the black vote. But Clinton is merely taking advantage of a weakness that the Republican party itself has helped create.
Republicans open themselves up to left-wing demagoguery by not trying hard to win the black vote. The struggle for voting rights is a sacred story for African Americans. Is it really asking too much of congressional Republicans to develop a new formula for preclearance? And how about early voting? It does not seem to influence turnout either way, so why meddle with the issue at all? Is the benefit of reduced early voting—saving the state some money in managing elections—really worth alienating the black community? The same goes for the strictest voter identification laws. Voter fraud is certainly a worry, but are voter ID laws the most sensitive way to deal with it? They can be softened with hardship exemptions or provisional-ballot allowances that might increase their appeal to hesitant black voters. South Carolina has taken this approach.
There has been a lot of talk since 2008 about how Barack Obama created a new governing majority of young people, single women, and Latinos. Much of this is wild overstatement, and it actually overlooks the true accomplishment of Obama’s campaigns: They massively increased the black vote as a share of the electorate and poached about half of the GOP’s existing black voters.
This, in a word, is stunning. And it is unsustainable for the Republican party in the long haul. Republicans can hold their own with Latinos, and young people get older. But if the Obama shift in the black vote proves durable, Republicans will struggle to win Florida, Ohio, and Virginia; Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan will fall forever out of play; and Democrats will consistently contest North Carolina and eventually Georgia.
Republicans have to start taking the black vote seriously, and their rhetoric on voting rights simply does not cut it.
Take a corollary example. A recent study by the Congressional Research Service found that accelerated depreciation appears to have no net benefit for the economy. Are Republicans therefore talking about eliminating it? Of course not—because core GOP constituencies believe accelerated depreciation is good for the country. Why doesn’t this logic apply to voting rights? Because the voting rights laws matter to a constituency that the GOP tends to slight.
Or how about farm subsidies? This summer, Republican presidential candidates will trip over themselves to reassure Iowa farmers that they support subsidies, despite overwhelming evidence that farm subsidies are superfluous or damaging. Why do black voters not merit such deference?
More broadly, the Republican party needs a positive agenda that addresses the specific problems faced by the black community. But that is largely lacking. The GOP’s 2012 platform had lengthy planks about all sorts of subjects, from energy to small business to education to agriculture—but hardly mentioned the unique challenges facing African Americans. Farmers are about 1 percent of the American workforce. Why should their issues merit mention in the platform, but not black issues?
Clinton’s rhetoric on voting rights is an overheated and insulting signal to black voters that Republicans don’t care about them. It is time for Republicans to signal, clearly and unequivocally, that they do care.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
