What’s Going on With Trump’s Big Fascistic Arch Near the National Mall?

[Report]

The right is eroding its own voter turnout by attacking early voting

You might be shocked to learn that the all-out assault on early voting by Trump and his Republican allies has officially backfired.

In Georgia’s primary election — which saw Republican voters decide to send ultra-MAGA deniers to positions that will oversee state elections — Democrats outperformed Republican voters by nearly 151,000 votes, according to unofficial turnout data from the Georgia Secretary of State. That lead began after 580,000 Democrats voted early, compared to 430,000 Republicans, a difference of 150,000 people or 15 percentage points. GOP voters never closed that early gap, which occurred even as mail-in voting rates fell for both parties.

Georgia’s WABE reported that Gov. Brian Kemp said he was “definitely concerned” about the state’s energized Democratic base.

It is not crazy to say that the low turnout of Republicans was a predictable and natural consequence of the far right’s promotion of false electoral security conspiracies. To promote his categorically false claims that U.S. elections are tainted by fraud and that noncitizens are illegally voting and affecting election results, Trump has repeatedly targeted mail-in voting. Of course, he waited to launch this full-scale attack until he was done promoting early and mail-in voting before his own 2024 elections.

In March, Trump went so far as to sign an executive order banning mail-in voting for everyone except a limited group of people. Election officials from Trump’s own party have turned against the president and expect the order to be overturned by the courts. Never mind that Trump himself votes by mail. He is president and has said that no rules apply to him except those that are in his heart and mind.

The turnout results in Georgia are even more striking because it is a complete reversal from the 2022 primaries, where Republicans voted more by mail and in total than Democrats. At the time, former President Joe Biden was in office and post-pandemic inflation prompted Americans to express their dissatisfaction with the administration during the election. The opposite is expected to happen this year. Yet the scale of the about-face is striking.

At the first level, Georgia voters broke the state’s early voting record. But Democrats saw a 53% increase in early voting, while Republican early voting turnout fell 13% from 2022, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Hispanic voters made a major coalition shift. This year, 72% of Hispanic voters were registered Democrats, up from 47% in 2022. More white and Asian voters also shifted their allegiance to the left, the AJC reported.

The 15 percentage point partisan difference in early ballots cast this year is exactly the same gap by which Republicans dominated Democrats in 2022, when the GOP swept statewide offices, suggesting that Democratic enthusiasm could signal danger to the right.

The right’s demonization of mail-in voting and early voting is not the only counterproductive anti-voting measure the party advocates. The GOP’s SAVE America Act would require Americans to show a birth certificate or passport before registering to vote. As a result, the right risks alienating its own base: the working class, white voters in Central America who do not have passports and may have limited access to birth certificates, as well as conservative women who have married and failed to change their last name on official documents. As we’ve previously reported, states that went for Trump in 2024 have the largest percentage of residents without passports.