Morning Consult released its GOP tracker poll yesterday. It’s Trump’s primary to lose— which explains why he’s toying with the idea of not participating in any debates. If the election were today, 58% of Republican primary voters would cats ballots for Trump. In second place— DeSantis with 21%, then 7% for Pence and tied with 3% each Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney and Vivek Ramaswamy. The other “contenders” are at 1% or below. This graphic shows favorability for each candidate.
Nikki Haley’s early campaign start is having an impact— probably not enough to make a difference, but she might be able to leverage it into another job. The media has been very sympathetic towards her and often try to make her hard core conservatism seem vaguely “moderate.” It isn’t. She may be slightly more realistic than some of the other candidates, but she’s no less conservative. Yesterday her hard right anti-Choice speech from the Susan B. Anthony headquarters was widely reported as “moderate” when it was no such thing. She wants a consensus— but a consensus built on the far right anti-Choice position. Her reactionary views fly right in the face of what Americans want. She just tries to pretend that she’s less hard core about it. Bloomberg reported that he bullshit speech “lacked policy specifics, but sought to differentiate her from other 2024 GOP candidates, calling abortion a ‘deeply personal issue’ that should be discussed without ‘judgment or contempt.’ At the same time, she touted her anti-abortion record, vowing that as president her goal would be ‘to save as many lives’ as possible.
She said “We have to face this reality. The pro-life laws that have passed in strongly Republican states will not be approved at the federal level. I do believe there is a federal role on abortion. That’s just a fact notwithstanding what the Democrat fearmongers say… Whether we can save more lives nationally depends entirely on doing what no one else has done today. And that is to find consensus. They say Republicans are about to ban all abortions nationwide and send women to prison. These wildly false claims amplified by a sympathetic media are not designed to do anything other than score political points.”
Those claims are based on 147 Republican members of Congress signing an Amicus Brief to the Supreme Court urging the Court to make mifepristone illegal, not something “what the Democrat fearmongers say.” She also said “They say Republicans are about to ban all abortions nationwide and send women to prison.” Guess where that comes from? South Carolina; her state.
Rob Sand was reelected Iowa state Auditor last year. He beat Republican Todd Halbur 600,719 (50.12%) to 597,826 (49.88%). Sand attracted far more votes than the Democratic candidates for U.S. Senator, Governor, Attorney General, AgricultureSecretary or any other office. And of the 8 biggest counties in the state, he won 7 and only lost Scott County by a handful of votes.Iowans wanted him for the job, the state watchdog which makes sure tax dollars are being handled properly.” They don’t want a completely one-party state. But Iowa Republicans decided to tell the voters to go screw themselves and last week passed a bill limited the auditor’s traditional access to information and making it impossible for him to do the job he was elected to do, stripping away the last check on it’s power. It’s part of the Republican Party’s war against democracy.
A Republican Party war against democracy? Really? Oh, yes, really. Jamelle Bouie devoted his column to it yesterday— changing the rules. And he started with Nikki Haley, but before her pretend moderate abortion announcement. He quoted her saying that the Republican Party had “lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.” That, she said, “has to change.” Other GOP elected officials don’t agree. Why should they? They’re safe in their carefully Supreme Court-sanctioned gerrymandered districts. “Across the country,” he wrote, “Republican officeholders and activists have abandoned any pretense of trying to win a majority of voters. Last week, for example, Cleta Mitchell— a top Republican lawyer, strategist and fund-raiser— told donors to the Republican National Committee that conservatives had to limit voting on college campuses and tighten rules for voter registration and mail-in ballots. Only then, she said, could Republicans level the playing field for the 2024 presidential election. ‘The left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side— theirs,’ she said in her presentation. ‘Our constitutional Republic’s survival is at stake.’ The Republican Party’s hostility to popular government is most apparent on issues where the majority stands sharply opposed to conservative orthodoxy. Rather than try to persuade voters or compromise on legislation, much of the Republican Party has made a conscious decision to insulate itself as much as possible from voters and popular discontent.”
The initiative and referendum processes were envisioned at the start of the 20th century to circumvent an unrepresentative and recalcitrant legislature. And in the year since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, voters have used both to do exactly that. As my newsroom colleagues Kate Zernike and Michael Wines noted on Sunday, “Voters pushed back decisively after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, approving ballot measures that established or upheld abortion rights in all six states where they appeared.”
In the face of public opposition to their unpopular views on abortion, Republicans had three choices: make the case to voters that tough abortion restrictions were worthwhile; compromise and bend to public opinion; or change the rules so that their opponents could not protect abortion rights against the will of a legislature that wants to ban the procedure.
…Ahead of an effort to enshrine abortion rights into the state Constitution with a ballot measure that would go to voters in a November general election, Ohio Republicans are advancing a ballot measure that would raise the threshold for passing such a measure to 60 percent. If they get their way, the measure could go to voters in an August special election (previously, Ohio Republicans had opposed August special elections). This new rule requiring a supermajority would take only a simple majority to pass.
In the wake of successful ballot initiatives to adopt the Medicaid expansion and legalize recreational marijuana, which passed in 2020 and 2022, Missouri Republicans also want to create a new supermajority requirement for ballot measures. One proposal would require 60 percent of the vote; the other two would require a two-thirds vote. Another related proposal would require any ballot initiative to receive a majority of the vote in half of Missouri’s 34 State Senate districts, most of which are sparsely populated. It would create, in essence, an electoral college for ballot initiatives.
Republicans in Florida want to raise their state’s threshold for amending the Constitution through ballot initiative from 60 percent of the vote to nearly 67 percent. And after voters in Arkansas rejected a ballot measure to put new restrictions on future ballot measures, Republicans under Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders simply passed the changes into law, using the legislature to do what they could not accomplish with the ballot measure.
…With gerrymandering, Republicans in several otherwise competitive states have built a nearly impenetrable wall around their legislative majorities. Through restrictions on the vote, they can keep as many of their opponents from the ballot box as is feasible. With fanciful doctrines like the so-called independent state legislature theory, they could have a pretext for amassing even more power to shape elections— even if the Supreme Court rejects the theory in its strongest form. And if all of this isn’t enough to tilt the playing field, Republicans can, as we see, change the rules of referendums and initiatives to limit direct policymaking by the voters.
One of the many self-justifying myths about the counter-majoritarian features of the American political system is that they exist to curtail or prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” Americans today might want to remember something the framers never forgot: Much worse than the tyranny of the many is the tyranny of the few.