By Michael Ginsberg
With Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona refusing to eliminate the filibuster and pass a pair of election reform bills, Democratic politicians are claiming that Republicans will prevent fair midterm elections in November.
The two bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, would effectively nationalize elections by preventing states and locales from setting limits on absentee ballots, prohibiting ballot harvesting and changing polling locations without federal approval, among other changes. Democrats claim that these changes are necessary to prevent local Republicans from engaging in voter suppression and throwing out validly cast ballots.
President Joe Biden cast opponents of the bills as the heirs of segregationists, and laws requiring voter ID and banning line-warming as “Jim Crow 2.0.” He also claimed that individuals who support the stricter ID standards “plan to subvert the election.”
“History has never been kind to those who’ve sided with voter suppression over voters’ rights, and it will be even less kind for those who side with election subversion,” the commander-in-chief said. “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? The side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? The side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” he asked.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina defended Biden’s remarks, while questioning whether Biden’s critics had the personal experience necessary to understand his comments.
“This is Jim Crow 2.0. That was one of the strongest points of the president’s speech that I agree with. So, this whole notion, when you walk around and no one has ever discriminated against you because of your skin color or you have never had to worry about having your vote counted, you can have those kinds of statements,” he said. (RELATED: Democrats Ramp Up Allegations Of Racism Against Kyrsten Sinema)
During her Martin Luther King Jr. Day address, Vice President Kamala Harris asserted that opponents of the legislation wish “to interfere with our elections, to get the outcomes they want and to discredit those they do not.”
Top Democrats have made these claims as polls and analysts suggest that Republicans are likely to take back the House and Senate by wide margins in the November midterms. A poll released Monday by Gallup found that Americans were more likely to support the Republican Party than the Democratic Party towards the end of 2021 than at any point since 1995, a year after the GOP netted 54 House and eight Senate seats.
Other polls have indicated that voters prefer generic Republican candidates to generic Democratic ones by as many as eight percentage points, with independents breaking sharply for Republicans.
Republicans need to pick up only five House seats and one Senate seat to win back both chambers, while the president’s party has on average lost 26 seats in the midterm elections conducted since the end of World War II, according to FiveThirtyEight. The only midterm elections in which the president’s party did not lose seats were 1998, as Republicans impeached former President Bill Clinton, and 2002, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
