Republicans Are Setting Off a ‘Doom Loop’ for Democracy

The insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 failed. Donald Trump is not the president. But at the state level, the Republican war on elections is posting startling wins. They are trying to do what Trump failed to do: neuter elections as a check on Republican power. A new report by three voting rights groups found that 24 laws have been passed in 14 states this year that will allow state legislatures to “politicize, criminalize and interfere in election administration.” And a May analysis from the Brennan Center found that Republican-controlled legislatures in 14 states have passed 22 laws that made voting harder, with dozens of others currently moving through the legislative process. This is an example of what I’ve sometimes referred to as the “doom loop of democracy”: highly gerrymandered Republican state legislatures in key swing states passing legislation that gives them more power to discourage Democratic-leaning groups from voting, throw out legitimate votes and overturn election results — all of it backed up by Republican-dominated courts. Ari Berman is a senior reporter at Mother Jones and the author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.” He’s done excellent coverage of these state bills. So I wanted to bring him on, in part, to understand these bills on a more detailed level: What do they actually do? What kind of impact will they have? But we also discuss the Republican Party’s minoritarian path to power, potential nightmare 2024 election scenarios, how voting rights became a culture war issue, whether the United States is becoming a “competitive authoritarianism” political system, why the biggest scandal in American democracy is what’s legal and even expected, what HR1 — even if it had passed — would and wouldn’t have fixed and much more. Mentioned in this episode: “What Georgia’s Voting Law Really Does” by Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein “The Insurrection Was Put Down. The GOP Plan for Minority Rule Marches On.” by Ari Berman “Call it authoritarianism” by Zack Beauchamp “Statement of Concern: The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards” by multiple “Advantage, GOP” by By Laura Bronner and Nathaniel Rakich “2020 Census: What the Reapportionment Numbers Mean” by Dave Wasserman Recommendations: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré Race and Reunion by David Blight Dirty Work by Eyal Press You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:18Ezra Klein?

  I'm going to ask for your indulgence here because I want to take a few minutes on my introduction today because what's going on right now, you know, this week, when we saw the Fourth of the People Act get filibustered in the Senate, what's going on right now, the bigger context, it's really important. And so I want to set this up a little more slowly than I normally do.

• 0:40Ezra Klein?

  So in 2018, Democrats sweep every statewide race in Wisconsin. They reelect Democrat Tammy Baldwin to the Senate, and after almost a decade of Republican dominance of the governorship, they finally elect a Democratic governor, Tony Evers. Change had come. The voters had spoken. One month later, just a month, the Republican-controlled legislature convened this unprecedented lame-duck session and stripped the incoming governor, the new Democratic governor, of key powers, of appointment powers, and shortened the early voting period to dampen future Democratic turnout. Now, it's not that Democrats had somehow failed at the legislative

• 1:22Ezra Klein?

  level in the election. Democrats had won 54%, 54% of votes cast for the state assembly. What had happened is that Republicans had gerrymandered the state so thoroughly that even though they won fewer votes than Democrats, they won almost 2/3, 2/3 of the assembly seats. And then they used those seats, they used that power to take back the power that voters had tried to strip from them. And the conservative state Supreme Court, it upheld nearly all of their moves. What happened in Wisconsin is a dynamic that I've sometimes referred to as the doom loop for democracy. And almost more than anything else in American politics, it keeps me up at night.

• 2:05Ezra Klein?

  The Republican Party has become a party that routinely wins power, particularly national power, even though they don't win the most votes. And a party that wins power while losing voters is a party that is going to turn against voting. A party is going to turn against elections. This was a key theme of my book, Why We're Polarized. That book, it came out in January of 2020, so I was working on it in the years before that. Although I should say right now, quick plug, that the paperback with the brand new afterword just came out last week. So if you've never read it and you want to get the full, the full version, now's a good time. But one of the things I was trying to do in that book was develop a causal story for why the polarizing environment we're in had affected the two parties so differently.

• 2:49Ezra Klein?

  Democrats had moved ideologically left and Republicans have moved ideologically right. That part's all true. But Republicans have radicalized against the political system itself and been able to sustain that radicalization, survive it in a way Democrats have not. And I'm going to give myself some credit here. I worked on this question of asymmetric polarization and radicalization for months because it turned out in the literature, there just wasn't really a good answer. And my answer, which I came to, which I think is now pretty widely accepted, but it wasn't very common then, was this. The Democratic Party is disciplined by internal diversity and by external democracy.

• 3:30Ezra Klein?

  It has to win more votes from more kinds of people if it's going to win power. Because of the geographic disadvantage it faces, it has to win the votes of definitionally right of center voters to win national power. And that affects who it nominates, it affects the strategic decisions it makes, it affects what the party allows itself to do. But the Republican Party doesn't have any of that. They've found a minoritarian pathway to power. They found a way to win power with a homogeneous coalition internally. And they found a way to win power despite not winning more voters externally. And that's meant that when the voters try to punish the Republican Party to send a message that Republicans need to change course, like when more people voted for Hillary Clinton

• 4:12Ezra Klein?

  than Donald Trump in 2016, or for Democratic Senate candidates over Republican ones in 2018, the Republican Party escapes those punishments. Either they win power anyway, or they don't lose enough of it to learn the lesson. What I argue in the book, though, is that this was going to become a kind of feedback loop. The more the Republican Party feared it couldn't win more votes in its current form, the more it would use the power it still has to weaken the role of voters in our system. And it still has a lot of power. It is a courts, it is a filibuster, it has more state legislatures and governorships, it has disproportionate Senate power because of the geography, disproportionate House power because of gerrymandering, and it is using all of that power to try to create a fortress

• 4:57Ezra Klein?

  around itself, one that voters, at least outside extreme wave elections, will not be able to break. That is the doom loop of democracy, and that is exactly what has happened. And to be honest, it happened faster, and it has happened more dramatically than I'd ever expected. The insurrection at the Capitol to try to put Donald Trump back in office on January 6th, it failed. Donald Trump, may have noticed, not the president, no matter what he says. But in the states, and arguably nationally, the Republican Party's war on elections, war on voters, war on the political system, on whatever democracy we have, is succeeding much more dramatically. They are trying to accomplish legislatively what they could not accomplish by force.

• 5:41Ezra Klein?

  The Brennan Center found that between January 1st and May 14th, 2021, at least 14 states passed 22 new laws that made voting harder. Every single one of them was passed by a Republican-controlled legislature. And there were another 61 bills with restrictive effects on voting, moving through 18 state legislatures. To give a sense of how much this is concentrated on the pivotal states Republicans know they can't lose if they want national power in the future, more than one-third of all of those bills are in just three crucial states: Texas, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

• 6:17Ezra Klein?

  Note, of course, that Michigan and Wisconsin went Democratic in 2020. But Republicans, because of gerrymandering and other things, they hold the legislatures. So Republicans are determined to use the power they have in those states to make sure they cannot lose future elections, even if they lose the voters. They're doing everything they can. And that's honestly not even the worst of it. The effort to make voting harder is now matched by an effort to give Republicans who believe in Donald Trump's election lies, who believe the election should have been overturned, more power over election administration and certification. A new report by three voting rights groups found that 24 new laws, 24, have been passed in 14 states this year that allow state legislatures to, quote, politicize, criminalize,

• 7:02Ezra Klein?

  and interfere in election administration. The most infamous of these is Georgia's SB 202, which strips key powers from Secretary of State Brett Raffensperger and gives additional powers to the state election board. But to be honest, similar laws have either passed or are moving through legislatures in plenty of other places as well. And even beyond that, Republicans who believe the 2020 election should have been overturned are primaring and replacing those who stood in their way. If you imagine the aftermath of 2020 with the Republican Party that is emerging now, the laws emerging now, the outcome might have been a lot worse. This is a Democratic doom loop at work. Highly gerrymandered Republican state legislatures in key swing states, passing legislation that

• 7:44Ezra Klein?

  gives them more power to throw out legitimate votes and overturn election results. Republicans in the Senate, where they have much more power than their vote totals would imply, blocking Democrats from passing national legislation to protect the vote, like H.R. 1, which just got filibustered this week. And then, of course, nationally and at the state level, Republican-dominated courts backing them up. Ari Berman is a senior reporter at Mother Jones, where he's done remarkable work covering voting rights and voter laws in the states over the past couple of years. He's the author of Give Us a Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. And he's just done a terrific job covering this recent slate of anti-democratic laws. So I wanted to bring him on, in part, to understand these bills on a more detailed, granular level.

• 8:29Ezra Klein?

  What do they actually do? Like, how might they play out in practice? But also to have the bigger conversation, which is, what does all this mean for American democracy? As always, my email is [email protected].

• 8:46Ezra Klein?

  All right, Berman, welcome to the show.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Hey, Ezra. Good to talk to you again. Thank you.

• 8:50Ezra Klein?

  So let's begin here. There was a Brennan Center analysis the other day that found that between January 1 and May 14, 2021, at least 14 states, 14, passed 22 new laws that made voting harder. So tell me about some of those laws. Where are they being enacted and voted they actually do?

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Well, they're being enacted in a number of really important Republican-controlled states, places like Georgia and Florida and Arizona and Iowa. And they take aim at all different aspects of the voting system. That's one of the things that's so interesting about this current push to restrict voting. It's not like it goes after one method of voting or another method of voting. It targets a lot of different methods of voting in terms of how these bills are structured. Georgia's legislation, for example, would make it harder disproportionately for Democratic-leaning constituencies to be able to vote. And I'm

• 9:52Speaker 01

  just looking right now, since you mentioned it, I just pulled up that Brennan Center report. And if you look at the ways they categorize what these bills do, it's really quite stunning how deep they reach into the voting process. I'll just give you an example. Shortening the window to apply for a mail ballot, shortening the deadline to deliver a mail ballot, making it harder to remain on mail voting lists, cutting down the amount of time that people have to request mail ballots, eliminating the ability of officials to send out mail ballot applications, cutting the number of drop boxes, things like that, stricter ID requirements for mail voting. That's all regards to mail voting. But then

• 10:36Speaker 01

  there's also laws that make it easier to purge people from the voter rolls, that ban the ability of groups to give out snacks and water to people in line, that cut the time for early voting, that eliminate election day registration, that cut the number of polling places, that increase access for partisan Poll watcher. So I think there's been this mistaken assumption that these bills only target male voting because that's what Trump complained about. And that's true. They do target male voting, but they also target early voting. They also target election day voting. So they're pretty sweeping in their scope. And I think that's what makes it different from the voting restrictions we had seen in years past.

• 11:13Ezra Klein?

  So I want to be, I want to make sure I'm being fair to the opposition here. So one defense I've heard of the Georgia bill, since you you brought that one up, is that sure, there are proposals that make voting harder, but there are also proposals that are more expansive. It opens up more weekend voting. It requires precincts with with long lines to take measures to reduce line sizes so that its net effect is is more mixed than the liberal panic over it would would suggest. How do you answer that?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I would say if you analyze the Georgia bill, it certainly bends to the scale of making voting harder. When you talk about banning election officials from sending out absentee ballot request forms, or dramatically cutting the number of drop boxes in places in metro Atlanta, or expanding access for partisan poll watchers, or allowing unlimited challenges to voter eligibility. I mean, there was one thing after another that made it more difficult to vote, and they got a lot of pushback to that. So they put in one or two provisions that would, for example, expand early voting. By the way, they tried to cut Sunday voting when black churches do souls to the polls. That got so much negative attention, they

• 12:22Speaker 01

  added a provision that would expand early voting. But those provisions are really offset by all the other provisions that make it more difficult to vote. And of course, the question was, why did they do this in the first place? The Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, said very clearly, there was no problem with election integrity in Georgia. The system worked as it was intended to. So why did they change the voting laws at all in Georgia if in fact, the 2020 election was as secure as Raffensperger said it was, and all the subsequent recounts and audits confirmed?

• 12:56Ezra Klein?

  So something you'll hear on the right is that, you know, all of these liberals like me, frankly, have their hair on fire about Georgia. We're attacking Georgia's voting laws, but there are all these blue states that have similar or worse laws on the books. So for example, Georgia's being attacked for limiting no excuse absentee voting. But if you look at Connecticut, you look at New Hampshire, you look at New York, all of them currently block no excuse absentee voting, which is a kind of broad mail-in voting altogether. You know, Georgia has 17 days of early voting. Connecticut and New Hampshire don't have any, some other blue states only have 10, that infamous provision you just mentioned it, banning third parties from giving away food and drink within 150 feet of a polling place. You can see it in New York, too. If liberals were just worried about access to

• 13:38Ezra Klein?

  the vote, the argument goes, they'd be just as hair on fire about a bunch of these blue states that have very, very restrictive voting laws, too. But they're not. So why?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  That's an interesting question. The liberals that I know in New York have done a lot to try to overhaul our voting system. I'm in New York, and I was very unhappy for many years about the fact that we didn't have early voting, or we didn't have automatic registration, or we didn't have no excuse absentee voting. And New York is moving in the direction of getting those things. New York is moving in the direction of expanding voting rights, and Georgia's moving in the direction of restricting voting rights. And for an individual voter, it doesn't really matter what the law is in another state. It matters what the law is in their state. And when you change voting procedures to make it more difficult, that disrupts voters in that state. So if, for example, in 2020,

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Georgia voters had absentee ballot request forms mailed to them, and that doesn't happen anymore, that's going to make it harder to vote by mail. If they just needed to sign their ballot in the past, but now they need new ID to get a ballot, then if they don't have that ID, that's disruptive for them. So I certainly believe that the East Coast in particular should have more progressive voting laws. I would like the East Coast states to have voting laws more like California, where you live, or more like Oregon and Washington. At the same time, I don't think that's an excuse for Georgia, or Texas, or Florida, to make voting more difficult, just because it could be easier in a place like New York.

• 15:10Ezra Klein?

  You're bringing up something there that I think is actually really important to evaluating this, which is directionality and motivation. So something I always think about in this debate is it is true. It is true that New York has had quite bad voting laws and it is hard to get things done in New York, but they are generally moving in the right direction. Whereas a bunch of these states, Georgia, Florida, Texas being good examples, they are moving in the wrong direction, but they seem to be moving in the wrong direction for a very clear reason. Like, they're being moved in the wrong direction. They're being moved towards more restrictive laws by Republicans who are upset about who is voting and what has happened. I mean, this really gets to actually redistricting, but like the famously in Wisconsin, the Assembly Leader saying, "Well, if you take

• 15:53Ezra Klein?

  out the big cities, we get the majority." And so I do think there's something fundamentally different between a state that has not, what I would think of as modernized its voting laws sufficiently, or even made them sufficiently expansive, given what we now understand about voting, and a state that is now trying to write new laws to change the composition of future electorates. Like, I think there is something about the way that tampers with what elections are supposed to be, of a voice of the people, that is fundamentally different, almost irrespective of whether or not the end result will be the single most restrictive voting state in the nation or not.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you look at a place like New York. We had a lot of inertia in our politics and a lot of machine politics in both parties. And that was one reason we didn't have better voting laws, because politicians in both parties didn't really want a system where they were held accountable. And that was problematic. And there's been a lot of effort by voting rights groups to change New York voting laws, so that we have these things that some other red states have and blue states are starting to adopt. That's different than an effort to change voting laws to try to hurt one party after the party in power tried to overturn an election. That is a fundamentally different situation. A status quo where both parties benefit based on machine

• 17:11Speaker 01

  politics is very, very different than trying to overturn an election based on lies and then trying to weaponize those lies to achieve the outcome you wanted in future elections.

• 17:23Ezra Klein?

  One thing that has struck me about this period is that voting laws are also becoming not just an instrumental policy, but also symbolic policy. They are a way of showing fealty to Donald Trump specifically. They're also a way of showing affinity with the Republican base and certain things it has come to believe in. And we're going to get to the election process and administration laws in a minute, but I want to stay on the voter ID laws for a bit. So it was really striking to me. So in Florida, which Donald Trump, of course, won, Governor Ron DeSantis, who is a very serious 2024 hopeful, he signed the state's omnibus voting bill SB 90, live on Fox News, live on Fox News. So there was a message

• 18:06Ezra Klein?

  being sent here. And that bill, as you were just getting at, is particularly focused on mail-in voting, which did not used to be a problem for Republicans. So can you tell me about a bit about SB 90 and both like what it does and what its political utility is for DeSantis?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, when Ron DeSantis signed that bill as a Fox and Friends exclusive, which I had never seen any governor do anything like that before, it clearly seemed to me like it was geared towards an audience of one, Donald Trump. And it also seemed like DeSantis was trying to be even more outlandish than his predecessors. Brian Kemp took a lot of heat in Georgia for signing the bill behind closed doors, and he was surrounded by six white male Republicans. And then when a black lawmaker knocked on the door to see the signing, she was arrested and dragged out of the Georgia Capitol in an image that many people thought of as how police treated civil rights activists in the 1960s. So DeSantis looked at that and said, how can I out Kemp Brian Kemp? And

• 19:08Speaker 01

  so then he signs this bill as a Fox and Friends exclusive. But if you look at SB 90, it makes voting by mail more difficult in a number of ways. Currently, under Florida law, if you vote by mail, you automatically get a mail ballot in two successive elections, which makes it really easy to vote by mail. That was eliminated, so you will only get it in one. It severely cuts the number of mail ballot drop boxes. Basically, you have to have an election worker monitor a drop box. 24 hours a day or have some sort of surveillance on it 24 hours a day that then can be monitored by an official. And that's just incredibly difficult for election officials to be able

• 19:49Speaker 01

  to do and sort of defeats the whole purpose of having a Dropbox, which is to make it convenient for people to vote and drop off their ballot whenever they want. It makes it more difficult to vote by mail by adding a new requirements in terms of how to get a ballot, how your ballot is counted. And this is a state where Republicans really pioneered mail voting. Republicans in Florida were at the forefront of trying to expand mail voting. Back in 2000, for example, they sent absentee ballot request forms to all Republican voters, which is something that was basically unheard of at the time. And they actually pushed the state to have no excuse absentee voting because their voters were more rural and older and they had a harder

• 20:32Speaker 01

  time getting to the polls, whereas Democratic voters were younger and more urban. And so mail voting was a Republican innovation in Florida. So when Republicans decided to change the mail voting laws in Florida, a lot of people were wondering, including some pretty smart Republican strategists, what are you guys doing here? Just because Democrats voted by mail and higher numbers in one election, you're going to change an entire system that was built by Republicans and has benefited Republicans quite well in the state?

• 21:01Ezra Klein?

  This gets to something really important, which is that the fact that a politician is passing a law that is supposed to, or at least symbolically supposed to make it harder for the people who would vote against them to vote, doesn't mean that that law will work. And one of the longstanding debates here is it the, the correct, I think, the appropriate outrage that comes from the, the normative violation of the right to vote, right? Being angry that politicians are trying to do that. Is somewhat out of proportion to how effective these kinds of of projects and policies really are. So there's a lot of studies that look at things like voter ID laws, that look at no excuse absentee voting, look at early voting. And I would say they mostly

• 21:46Ezra Klein?

  find, on average, that these things have little to no measurable effect on turnout or composition of the electorate, and often can have a backlash effect that moots them entirely. So I'm curious how you read that debate. These can be bad just because they're bad, but are they actually effective at helping Republicans get elected?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  I think it depends where you're looking. I think, for example, if the election is really close and you pass a new voter ID law or restriction on voting, and a lot of people can't comply with that, or it's done in a manner that you're not getting the new identification, or you're not informing people of what the rules are, then it can have a suppressive effect. There was data, for example, in Wisconsin in 2016, that their state's voter ID law prevented maybe 15,000 people or more from being able to vote in places like Madison and Milwaukee, when Donald Trump only won the state by 20,000 votes. There's evidence that certain things increase voter turnout. States that have election

• 22:49Speaker 01

  day registration, for example, tend to have higher turnouts, because a lot of people, particularly younger people, don't get it together to register to vote in time for the election. Often, states have 30-day cutoffs for registration. And so you could be watching a debate in October, and you can't actually register to vote anymore in a place like Ohio. And so having election day registration is really useful. But it's true. The data is mixed. Some things might increase voter turnout. Some things might decrease voter turnout. Some things might not affect turnout at all. But a lot of things go into voter turnout. As you know, Ezra, who the candidates are, how engaged people are around the election, how motivated they are to vote in the first place. All of those affect turnout as much,

• 23:33Speaker 01

  if not more, than the voting laws themselves. So that's why I look at it as a question of, why is this being done in the first place? We had the highest turnout in 100 Twenty years in 2020, which is pretty remarkable considering we had the highest turnout since 1900, when so many people couldn't vote in 1900. So we had the highest turnout that we've had since we have been a modern advanced democracy. And the question is, why didn't we try to make that the new normal? Why didn't we say all of these people turning out was a great thing for democracy? Let's keep the rules that made it happen. And I think one reason we had such high turnout was because people had more options to vote than ever before. Obviously, people felt very strongly about the candidates, but the

• 24:17Speaker 01

  fact that so many states expanded mail voting, there was such a push to get people to vote early, and we had traditional voting on election day, and so much work went into making sure that people could vote and their vote was counted. I think that really could have been a success story that we could have built on for future elections in both red and blue states. Instead, we've been moving in the opposite direction.

• 24:38Ezra Klein?

  Well, but we there is complicated, right? Because one thing that is interesting right now, there's a silver lining to this story that I think doesn't get emphasized. It is that blue states are have begun to get serious about making it easier to vote. So I mean, we've been talking about some of these states, but they have like on the flip of all the red states passing bills, the blue states are too. New Jersey has codified in person early voting. Washington and New York restored voting rights to people of past convictions. So that Brennan Center study noted that New York alone had 20 moving bills with more expansive provisions. Connecticut had 13, Oregon had 10. So I was thinking about this when I was preparing for this conversation, but one way of looking at what's going on right now, one reason there was less difference than you would have thought between a Georgia and a New York like 10 years ago, or maybe even not the directional difference you would

• 25:23Ezra Klein?

  have thought, is that voting rights just weren't that polarized. I mean, as you say, like in Florida, Republicans wanted to have mail in voting. And now voting rights are polarized. And so what you're seeing is states that are run by Republicans are trying to roll them back. But the flip of that is states run by Democrats are trying to roll them forward. They are trying to move them forward fast. And to some degree, I think voting rights are stickier in one direction than the other. So is there an upside here of this kind of polarization? Like, because there is expansion, and that becomes a new norm, and that becomes something other states are measured against. And over time, like we are actually as a country not moving in the wrong direction, but but the right one? Like, is there any case for optimism here, given the the reverse movement in the blue states?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  You can make a case for optimism if you're a voter who lives in one of those blue states that's expanding voting rights. If you live in a place like California, you're feeling quite good about voting rights. Your state has passed all sorts of reforms in the past decade to try to make it easier to vote. But that doesn't really do a whole lot if you live in a state like Texas, which had its highest turnout in 30 years in 2020 and still ranked 44th in voter turnout and is now considering a bill that's going to roll back voting access in all of these places. So while I do think it's a good thing that voting rights are being expanded in blue states, I worry that we are becoming a two-tiered society when it comes to voting, where it's

• 26:49Speaker 01

  really easy to vote in some places, namely bluer places, and it's really harder, getting harder, to vote if you live in a red state. And I think that's the exact situation the Congress was trying to get rid of when it passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, where if you lived in a more progressive-leaning state like Wisconsin, it was quite easy to vote. But if you lived in Alabama or Mississippi, it was near impossible for certain people, namely black voters, to be able to cast a ballot. Obviously, we're not there today, but if you look at the difference in how Oregon runs its elections versus how Texas runs its elections, it's pretty stark in terms of what the voting laws say. And that's a trend that I'm disturbed about, that depending on what party you identify

• 27:34Speaker 01

  and depending on what state you live in, that becomes a measure of how easy or how hard it is to vote.

• 27:58Ezra Klein?

  Let's move to the other side of this assault. We've been talking about things like voter ID laws and mail-in voting and a set of voting questions that would have been familiar to you if you follow these fights. It's called in 2015 or in 2017. But since the 2020 election and since the emergence of Donald Trump's lie that he won the election and that should have been overturned by election certifiers, et cetera, there's been a real effort to reconstruct and create more partisan input into election administration and election certification. Three major voting rights groups released a new report which found that 24 new laws

• 28:40Ezra Klein?

  have been passed in 14 states that allow state legislatures to, quote, politicize, criminalize, and interfere in election administration. Tell me about some of those laws and what specifically they do. What is being attempted here?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  That, to me, is the newest and most disturbing part of the assault on voting rights right now. It's what's different about 2020 and 2021 versus what was happening when I first started covering this issue in 2011. Back then, we were talking about new restrictions on voting, but we weren't talking about attempts to try to actually overturn elections or state legislatures taking over roles that were traditionally done by regular election officials. These really fall in a few different buckets when you talk about politicizing, criminalizing, and interfering in elections. One thing is actually making it easier to overturn an election.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  There was provisions in the bill that was introduced and nearly passed in Texas that would have quite literally made it easier for candidates to petition election judges to throw out election results and would have lowered the evidence that you needed to show to be able to overturn elections. So, I mean, they quite explicitly tried to put it in the bill. Now they're walking it back, but there's other states in which they've done this. In Georgia, for example, they stripped the Republican Secretary of State who stood up to Donald Trump. From being a voting member and chair of the state election board, which oversees voting laws in the states. Now, the legislature, which is heavily gerrymandered,

• 30:22Speaker 01

  will get to appoint a majority of members on the state election board. The state election board, in turn, can take over up to four local election boards that it deems as underperforming. Republicans have already talked about potentially taking over election administration in Fulton County in Atlanta, one of the largest and most Democratic counties in the state. And also, what has happened is 10 counties in Georgia have dissolved what were bipartisan county election boards. And now could be all Republican election boards, which means that when it comes time to certify election results, and it's a close election, they might decide not to certify an election if a Democrat wins.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  The very situation that Donald Trump wanted them to do in 2020, and that counties, state officials refuse to do, that's now on the table in future elections because of how the structure has changed. So there's attempts to try to overturn election. There's attempts to just try to usurp authority from people like secretaries of state or from powers that governors have. For example, if there's an emergency to have more polling places or to make it easier to vote by mail, things that were done because of COVID. Republican state legislatures in Georgia and Florida and places like that are saying, no, we have the authority to modify election rules. You can't do it. And then they're just taking over things that were traditionally done as election administration.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  In the bill that was introduced and nearly passed in Texas, for example, there's 14 different ways that election officials can actually be hit with criminal charges for trying to make it easier to vote. If you're an election official in Texas and you give a mail ballot request form to a voter who doesn't ask for one, that can be a felony for the election worker under the provisions of this law that nearly passed. So that's going to have an absolutely chilling effect on people who want to be election officials or people who want to work the polls. And so it really targets every aspect of the voting system, from taking over traditional election administration to taking over how elections are run, to taking over potentially how elections are even certified.

• 32:33Ezra Klein?

  So you did a piece and you wrote that these new laws quote, raise the likelihood of a nightmare scenario where GOP controlled state legislatures use their increased power to override a democratic victory in 2024 or persuade Republicans in Congress if they've gained power in 2022 to do the same. So I want you to walk me through that scenario because these are complicated laws, like the, you know, the board is going to be chaired, you know, not by the Secretary of State, but by appointees by the legislature. It's like, what is this amount to in practice? Like, I want you to, I want you to like, paint the picture for me. Joe Biden runs in 2024. He runs against Ron DeSantis. You know, election's pretty much a toss up in the end. What are you worried about happens? Give me the speculative fiction.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's a few different scenarios and it could play out different for local elections compared to the presidential election. For local elections, it could mean that, let's say, Stacey Abrams runs again against Brian Kemp in 2022 for governor and she wins very, very narrowly and Republicans allege voter fraud. What could happen is that local Republican county boards could decide not to certify the election for Stacey Abrams and they'll have more power to be able to do that now than they had in the past. That's definitely a possibility.

• 33:51Ezra Klein?

  But so I want to stop you there. What does that mean? So local, local county boards refuse to certify. And then what? So you have like a result in Atlanta, the relevant boards have either been taken over by the legislature, they refuse to certify. And now what happens? Like, what does it mean to refuse to certify? Take the next step with me.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Well, presumably it would then be kicked up. And one of the interesting things is probably the Secretary of State would weigh in, but the Secretary of State is no longer a member of the state election board. This would then go before the state election board and the state election board has a majority of members that are responsible to the state legislature. So the state legislature would have increased authority by virtue of appointing those members to achieve the outcome it wants. Likely all of this would go to court, right? I mean, that, that's the outcome here. Of course, Republicans have appointed the, the majority of judges. Both at the state level in Georgia and the federal level, if you look at who is filling the district courts, who is filling the Fifth Circuit, all the way up to the Supreme Court,

• 34:52Speaker 01

  it's controlled by Republicans. So I don't know if it will work, but this, I think, is on the table now in a way that it wasn't on the table for other elections. And then in the presidential election, what could happen is state legislatures just decide that they're going to appoint their own electors. That was a power they had, by the way, in 2020. They just didn't exercise it because it would be such a flagrant abuse to overturn the will of the voters. But that's on the table now, too, I think, just based on how Democratic norms have shifted. Trump was so open about wanting state legislatures to do this, but they didn't really have a strategy to pursue it. And now I think it's possible that state legislatures could decide not to follow the will of the voters if there's a very close

• 35:37Speaker 01

  election in a place like Georgia. And then if Republicans control Congress, they could say, we are going to accept the electors that are appointed by the Republican-controlled legislatures as opposed to the electors that are responsive to the voters. Now, again, we don't know how that would work out. This would probably go to the courts, too. It would likely go to the Supreme Court. But the lie is vague about that. There isn't clarity there. And so both of those scenarios, refusing to certify on a local level, and the legislators and potentially Republican members of Congress substituting their judgment for the will of the voters, I think both of those are on the table in future elections in a way that they weren't in 2020, even though that's what Trump wanted.

• 36:21Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you about the latter one of those, because you just gave a scenario that the people have talked about forever, where, I mean, there's very little information or guidance on what you have to do to choose your electors. And the point of having electoral college is to have a mediating layer that can decide to do something different than the voters did, right? Otherwise, we could just, it would be crazy, I know, just completely wild, but we could just choose the person who got the most votes, like they do in other countries, or at least, you know, some other countries that we consider pure democracies. But in general, the trick of stealing an election in a country that wants to imagine itself to be a democracy and wants to imagine itself as having free and fair elections is

• 37:02Ezra Klein?

  you have to do it without looking like you're doing it. And if you just elect your own electors to betray the vote outcome in your state, then you do it while looking like you're doing it, right? And so that's a big jump. I mean, what makes you think that is likelier in 2024, 2028 than it was in 2020 or 2016? Because that's not a place, as far as I can tell, where you're dealing with powers that Republican legislatures didn't have before. You're really dealing with a level of norm violation that as much as like some people occasionally mention it, nobody's really been willing to breach it because you can't do that one without anybody noticing. And it doesn't really look like a technicality, like you are acting to, as you say, substitute yourself in for the election itself. And I mean, that's

• 37:47Ezra Klein?

  the kind of situation where you get schisms and civil wars.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that's exactly why it didn't happen in 2020, because Republicans in places like Georgia and Pennsylvania, they weren't willing to go there. But just look at how much more anti-democratic the Republican Party has become. I mean, you have Stop the Steal advocates running an audit in Arizona. You have Stop the Steal advocates running for positions of Secretary of State to be the top voting official in places like Arizona and Georgia. You have Republicans changing voting laws they once supported because their constituents are so outraged that they believe the election was stolen. So far from there being a course correction in the Republican Party, there has been a

• 38:36Speaker 01

  purging of the people that stood up for democracy, that stood up against Donald Trump. I think it's a very good chance Brad Raffensperger is not the Georgia Secretary of State any longer after 2022. We could have Stop the Steal people being Secretaries of State, being prominent members of the state legislature, being members of county canvassing boards in a way that we didn't in 2020. Trump didn't really have a strategy in 2020. He didn't know what he was doing when he tried to do all these things. It was very much a seat of the pants operation. That's what we've learned from all the reporting about this. But they're going to have much more of a strategy going into future elections. I'm not sure they're going to pull it off.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  I think it would be very difficult, as you say, for them to just flagrantly overturn the will of the voters. It might even be illegal, although it's vague. If you look at the laws and there has to be, you could say the voters failed to make a choice in appointing who their electors were. That language is vague enough that it's possible that the legislature could say if there's disputes about the results, that they just don't know who won the election. So they have no choice but to appoint their own electors. And it's not hard to imagine that there's just going to be this giant clamor in the Republican Party to try to prevent a Democrat from winning at all costs in 2022 or 2024 in a way that they just didn't really have a strategy for in 2020.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  I don't know if it will succeed, but it's hard to see that it's not on the table.

• 40:04Ezra Klein?

  Let me try to get you to distinguish between two scenarios here, or tell me if it's a false distinction, because I do want to be very clear on operationally what is changing here. So there's one world in which what's going on in these bills is Republicans have figured out a clever new way that they can take over election administration. And in the case of a contested election, functionally change its outcome in some way that's murky enough that nobody can really say what has happened, right? That's one version. Another version is that they haven't figured that out at all. Just what they are doing, and the bills are simply a part of that, is that the faction of the Republican Party that does not want to abide by the outcome of elections is taking more power. They're primaring secretaries of state and they're trying to take those seats.

• 40:48Ezra Klein?

  You know, more of the governors and key members of the party have already at least pledged some fealty to the lie of 2020. And so it's not really that what is meaningful here is a change in the underlying administration laws. They would still need to do what they would have needed to do last time, which is the key people in the key positions would have had to basically stand up one day and say, eh, we've decided to steal the election. But that what is Happening, is it more of the people who would have done that are getting those positions? And so, you know, in this world, the point is not so much the change in the Georgia law. It's that the members of the Republican Party, like the Secretary of State in Georgia, who said no, will simply be replaced by people who would say yes.

• 41:31Ezra Klein?

  And so it's really a personnel change more than it is a legal change. Like which, which side of that, you know, interpretive divide are you on?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's both. I mean, you look at Georgia, both of those things are happening. Brad Raffensperger could be replaced by Jody Heiss, who's much more extreme than he is, who subscribed to Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the election. At the same time, the law has been changed to give the state election board more authority over taking over county election boards and has given county election boards more of an authority to potentially not certify election results. So both of those trends are happening in the same time. And that's why I don't think it's an either or situation. Laws have been changed tangibly in places like Georgia, in places like Arkansas, to give Republicans more authority over how elections are run and certified.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  At the same time, Republicans who are more extreme are running for those positions so they can be in positions of authority to potentially not certify the election outcome or to have some say in how elections are run or administered. So administered. So I think both of those things are happening concurrently and it's not necessarily either or.

• 42:40Ezra Klein?

  I know I'm getting us into the weeds on this, but I do think it's important. I want to get you to be very vivid, though, on what has changed. So let's stay in Georgia for a minute. What are you saying they can do in Georgia they couldn't before? Most people never come into contact with an election board, a county election board. They don't know what they do. So how are you saying one of these election boards, either taken over by the legislature or stalked by these new Republican appointees or players? Like, how could they change the outcome in one of these elections?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  So a few different ways. Number one, the number of counties have dissolved from mixed boards with both Democrats and Republicans to all Republican boards. So. It's easier if you're an all Republican board to try to certify the election in favor of a Republican candidate if there's no Democrats to object. That's one way the law has changed in a number of counties. Secondly, the state election board, which has the authority to take over up to four county election boards that it deems underperforming. And that's a new power they have that they didn't have in the past.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Now, they have to clear a relatively high bar to be able to do that. But it's theoretically possible that a state election board, over which the state legislature has more power, could then take over a county election board, like in Fulton County, Atlanta, and then decide not to certify elections there. Then they also said explicitly that a group can challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters. People weren't sure whether this was possible. But one thing that happened in the Georgia runoff was a right wing group called True the Vote started filing all of these challenges to the eligibility of voters, saying that people weren't actually residents in Georgia and their votes should be thrown out. And they challenged the eligibility of 350,000 voters.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  And almost all of these challenges were unsuccessful. But let's say they challenged a lot of voters. And let's say a sympathetic county decides to remove a bunch of people and say that they weren't eligible to vote. And that's bigger than the margin of victory. And then that gives them an excuse to either flip the election or to not certify the election result. That's also a possibility now. So I think there's a number of tangible ways in which you could challenge the legitimacy of the election that wasn't really possible in previous elections in a place like Georgia.

• 45:09Ezra Klein?

  I want to give voice again to the counterargument here. My colleague Ross Douthat, he wrote a column with a very different read of these bills. And he argued that, quote, "The Republican-backed bills that purport to fight voter fraud are obviously partially sophs to conservative paranoia. But as such, they're designed to head off cries of fraud, claims of ballots shipped in from China or conjured up in Italy." So in his telling- These laws don't actually do so much. Their real purpose is to restore Republican faith in election administration to prevent something like 2020 from happening again, because after Republicans have made all these changes, how can you say elections are not fairly administered? Do you think there's some legitimacy to that idea that Republican leaders are trying

• 45:52Ezra Klein?

  to inoculate themselves and their base against a rerun of the 2020 big lie argument?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  No, I don't buy that at all, because I think what Republican voters are objecting to is not election administration, but Democrats winning elections. I think at the end of the day, they don't like the fact that Joe Biden was elected president. And if you have different election administration and the same result happens, a Democrat wins, they're going to find new ways to try to challenge the legitimacy of the election. So I think the biggest problem is that Republicans fundamentally won't recognize Democratic victories as legitimate. And election administration was the scapegoat that Donald Trump used and that he got a lot of Republican voters to buy. But I don't believe that if you pass a new voter ID law, or you change mail voting, or you cut the number of mail ballot drop boxes, that's going to mollify people who

• 46:42Speaker 01

  believe the election was stolen. So I don't believe that that's what it was designed to do. And I also don't buy the argument that it's going to have no impact. When you talk about an election in Georgia being decided by 10,000 votes and then changing the law in Georgia to make it harder for predominantly Democratic constituencies to cast a ballot, I absolutely think that could swing 10,000 votes in another direction. I mean, our old friend Dave Weigel did a very good analysis for The Washington Post and found that just two changes, changing how out of precinct votes are counted, throwing them out in most cases, and eliminating mobile voting units, which made early voting very convenient, those two things alone affected more than 10,000 votes.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Now, that's not to say that voters won't adapt to the new system. I think they will in most cases. But it's to say that if you have all of these different provisions making voting more difficult and disruptive compared to how it was in the last election, and elections are razor thin, that I absolutely think that those could influence the outcome. ...of the election. That's not why they're wrong. To go back to our earlier point, it's wrong that you're making it harder to vote for no good reason. But I also don't believe that Republicans would be investing this much time and effort in places like Georgia to make it more difficult to vote if they didn't believe that at some level, it would have an impact on their opponents.

• 48:21Ezra Klein?

  So now I want to move to a broader context in which all of these elections are playing out. And this is a way in which part of the scandal here isn't what's changing, but what isn't changing, what's legal and is already happening. And that's the way the system is biased towards the Republican coalition right now and how the Republican coalition is actually adapting to that and trying to create a stronger bulwark of minority rule. And this was a big theme of my book, but you just wrote a great feature on this. And you started that feature by talking about what's been happening at the state level in Wisconsin over the last decade. So tell me a bit about the Wisconsin case.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Well, I think Wisconsin is really a case study in terms of how Republicans have engineered a grip on power through anti-democratic means. And if you look at what happened in Wisconsin, first off, Republicans won in 2010, so they were able to then draw redistricting maps in the state. And they did it in a very ruthless manner that froze Democrats out in a way that hadn't happened in the past. And so, for example, in 2018, Democrats were able to win 54% of the vote in Wisconsin for the state assembly, but Republicans were able to keep almost two-thirds of seats,

• 49:42Speaker 01

  which is really shocking that a party could actually win fewer votes, but retain a major hold on power. Then in 2018, Tony Evers elected governor. The first thing that the Republican-controlled legislature does is have a lame duck session to strip power. From the popularly elected governor. So you had a state legislature that is getting fewer votes than Democrats that are then stripping power from the party that is popularly elected. And that basically has been the playbook for how Republicans are now operating in Washington as well. I mean, you have a Senate where it's split 50 50, but Democrats represent 41 million more Americans than Republicans.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  But Republicans, by virtue of the filibuster and by virtue of the skew of the Senate towards wider, more rural, more conservative states. I mean, you have, you can have a small minority of Republican senators blocking the agenda of a popularly elected president, and more importantly, blocking really popular pieces of legislation from passing. What we saw in Wisconsin is that it didn't matter if policies had large public support. Didn't matter if expanding Medicaid was really popular or cracking down in gun violence was really popular. If it wasn't popular in the heavily gerrymandered districts that Republicans represented, they weren't going to do it. And they didn't care what the popularly elected Democratic governor had to say about it.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  They didn't care what the state had to say. And as you mentioned, they simply flat out said, if it didn't come to Milwaukee and Madison, if you just removed Milwaukee and Madison from the state, we would have a clear majority. So if you just took out all the Democrats, then we would control everything. And I think that really gets to how Republicans view democracy, but also just how both at the state level and the federal level, the institutions of democracy are just built in a way that fundamentally favors Republicans over Democrats.

• 51:40Ezra Klein?

  I want to draw out something here, which is that this minority rule thing, it exists in a feedback loop. I've called this in past columns, the doom loop of democracy. So you have a party that is not winning majorities, but is managing to hold power even though they're, they're losing in the vote. And that then creates an incentive for them to use that power to make it easier for them to hold power if they continue losing elections. So among other things, it creates this incredible pressure to do more. Jerrymandering, as you were saying, I mean, we talked earlier about how the Democratic Party nationally is the opposite version of this. They're they're winning power by winning voters. And so they're trying to make voting easier because that has become

• 52:23Ezra Klein?

  good for them. As you can see, healthy versions of this as well. But as this has become deeper in the Republican Party, it's got, I think, scary, particularly because Republicans do control most states, even as they don't control national power, for the most part, and definitely don't have the allegiance of most voters. So like, let's talk about redistricting nationally here, because that's about to happen again. According to Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, Republicans are going to have final authority to redraw 187 congressional districts this year. Democrats are going to control just 75. That's despite the fact that Democrats control the House. And he estimates that redistricting in just four states, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, that could be enough alone to deliver Republicans the five seats they need to win back control of the House, even

• 53:08Ezra Klein?

  if they don't win like, a single new vote in the country. You've talked about how you think redistricting this year could be a lot worse than it was in after the 2010 census. So can you like, lay out the redistricting picture for me?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, Republicans have a massive advantage in redistricting. And they're probably, as Dave said, going to be able to take over the House, just through gerrymandering alone, which is why you're not seeing Kevin McCarthy try to reach out to a broader swath of voters, because he knows, just by getting power at the state level, they can then take back power in one chamber. I think it's going to be worse, potentially, for a few different reasons. One, states with a long history of discrimination, like Georgia, they're no longer going to need to approve their redistricting maps with the federal government under the Voting Rights Act, because that part of the Voting Rights Act has been gutted.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  So I think that may have prevented a place like Georgia, or a place like Texas, for doing as extreme gerrymandering as they might have wanted, because they knew they had to get those maps approved. They don't have to do that anymore. The Supreme Court very explicitly has said it will not review partisan gerrymandering. The federal courts will not review partisan gerrymandering. So basically, Republicans know that if they just pass maps for what they believe are partisan reasons, Those maps are not going to be reviewed, let alone even struck down in federal courts. And I think they also realize gerrymandering works much more effectively than voter suppression. We talked about not knowing the impact of voter suppression. We absolutely know the impact of gerrymandering.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  In places like Wisconsin and places like Michigan, Republicans have routinely gotten fewer votes statewide, but have had majorities through the entire decade. And you look at Michigan, for example. In 2018, Michigan elected a Democratic governor, Democratic secretary of state, a Democratic attorney general, a Democratic lieutenant governor. But the legislature remained in Republican hands. Is that because the Republican legislature is so much more popular than the Republicans that are running in all of these other races? I would argue, no. I would argue it's just because they figured out who their voters were and drew maps that would allow them to be in power, no matter what the shifts were in this state. In Wisconsin, in 2020, everyone knew it was a toss-up.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  The goal in the state legislature for Democrats was to prevent Republicans from getting a veto-proof majority. So that's amazing to think that they believed the presidential election would be 50-50. But in the state legislature, they were worried that Republicans would have a two-third majority. And that just goes to show you how insulated Republicans have become from public opinion because of gerrymandering alone.

• 55:54Ezra Klein?

  Is the difference between Republicans and Democrats here that Republicans gerrymander harder or more or more aggressively than Democrats? Or is it that simply Republicans, because of their control of more states, more land, because they're advantaged by having a rural coalition in a political system biased towards rural power, they just have more opportunities to gerrymander? Like morally, is this sort of an equal opportunity thing? Or is there a partisan difference in how the parties approach it?

• 56:24Speaker 01

  It's both of those things. It's the fact that Republicans already have a geographic advantage because their voters are more dispersed. It's also because Republicans are more ruthless. But it's also because Democrats, when they've taken power, have adopted independent redistricting commissions because they believe that's better for democracy. There was just an article this week in Politico. Democratic strategists are complaining that the Democratic Party isn't tough enough when it comes to redistricting because they have backed these independent commissions in states they control while Republicans are ruthlessly gerrymandering in places they control. So it's all of those things combined give Republicans a major advantage. Democrats in general just don't like gerrymandering. Now, that's not to say they don't do it, so I don't want to just say that Democratic

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Party is the power of good government and the Republican Party is the power of bad government, for lack of a better word. But I think more Democrats are comfortable with taking the high road, even if it might hurt their party in the short term, than Republicans are. Republicans are never going to waste an opportunity to entrench their own power. I mean, that's the lesson of the last decade. You wrote about it in your book. I'm writing about it right now. I mean, that is almost the singular lesson of the last decade, that Republicans will go to extreme lengths to entrench their power if they believe it will help them in future elections.

• 57:43Ezra Klein?

  This, to me, is the problem Democrats really don't have an answer to. Like, maybe you can beat back some of the voter ID laws, maybe you can, you know, do something about the election administration, but this deeper bias of the system against them is pretty profound right now. I'm 538's numbers, just to put some numbers on it. Senate is a five-point Republican skew. The House has about a two-point skew. The Electoral College, about a 3.5-point skew. And given that these are close elections we have in America now, I mean, these are big. Then you add up on top of that, you can use those skews to get in a friendly Supreme Court, to pass the laws that you want, or block the voting laws like H.R. 1 or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act that you don't want.

• 58:26Ezra Klein?

  And you get something really pretty profoundly rigged. So even if Democrats beat back, like, every voter ID law, the system's deep bias towards the Republican Party remains. Do Democrats have any kind of answer for that problem?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Well, the system itself is the biggest problem for the Democratic Party. And the system itself is the biggest problem for American politics right now writ large. It's hard to say we have a functioning democracy when you can win the popular vote for the presidency by 7 million votes and the other candidate come within 45,000 votes of winning the Electoral College. It's hard to square that with democracy. It's hard to square the Senate being 50-50, but Democrats representing 41 million more Americans. It's hard to square the fact that a majority of Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators who represented a minority of Americans.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  On all of those fronts, it really doesn't seem like democracy is working. But again, that's actually how our institutions are structured. And so it would require a lot more change beyond just tinkering with voting laws here and there. I mean, it would require admitting new states to the Union to change the composition of the US Senate, like Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. And that, again, only gets you so far. It would require cracking down on partisan gerrymandering so that you couldn't have incredibly gerrymandered legislatures that then could draw districts for the US House. It would require abolishing the Electoral College or changing it in such a way like adopting the National Popular Vote Compact. And a lot of these things either require extremely heavy lifts going state by state,

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  or they require constitutional amendments to try to change, or they're just not even really changeable in terms of the nature of the US Senate. And so it's a deeper question. And I was hoping, coming out of the 2020 election, that we would begin to see some of these more deeper structural reforms. Because honestly, the federal legislation protecting voting rights, the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that's the bare minimum of the changes that we need to do. And even those aren't going to pass, let alone admitting new states, or changing the Electoral College, or changing the structure of the US Senate, or changing how gerrymandering works. I mean, almost all of those things are off the table right now. To me, that's the most distressing outcome of the 2020 election. This is really the only time to change it.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Now, the question is, how much worse does the system have to become? Is it that you win the popular vote by 10 million votes and the other candidate wins the Electoral College? I don't know what it's going to take to reach a breaking point where people are outraged about our institutions enough to try to actually change them.

• 1:01:06Ezra Klein?

  That's a good bridge to zoom out to this broader picture for American democracy. Because like you, my worry is people are not, it's not that they won't get outraged. A lot of people are outraged. It's that the barrier to changing them is so high because the system is built to make them almost impossible to change, that that outrage will have nowhere to go. And so we will lose whatever democracy we have, or a lot of whatever democracy we have, just through that inability to convert fury into action. There was a recent letter by a hundred leading scholars of democracy, and they warned that, quote, "Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months

• 1:01:50Ezra Klein?

  proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures. Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk." And so I want to ask if you find that right or too alarmist? Because it's a big thing to say our entire democracy is now at risk. But when you put these things together, the minority rule, the different bills that are now trying to make it harder to vote in Republican states, the different bills that are politicizing voter administration, and a Republican Party that is running more people and seems itself to be more biased against elections that it loses.

• 1:02:33Ezra Klein?

  Do you think that conclusion is fair, or is that a little far?

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  I think the conclusion is absolutely fair, because these are people that have been studying democracies, not just in the US, but all across the world. So they have lots of templates for what authoritarianism looks like. And they're seeing creeping authoritarianism in the United States. And they don't want to say this. I mean, these are very careful people. These are the last people that are going to say democracy is on fire, unless it absolutely is on fire. You're not going to get Francis Fukuyama to say that democracy is in trouble unless democracy is actually in trouble. And I think all of these things combined, the fact that our institutions thwart the will of the people in so many different ways, that there was an attempt to try to overturn election, following a double down of that strategy, both to change the voting laws,

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  then to change election administrations, that people that stood up for democracy are being purged from American politics. Extremely conservative people like Liz Cheney, no longer in positions of authority. I think when you add it all up... It starts to look like a system where it's only legitimate when one party wins an election and it's only legitimate when one party controls election machinery. And it's only legitimate when there's one outcome to an election. And that's not democracy. Democracy is based on free and fair elections and ultimately respecting the will of the people. And we have institutions that already blunt and work against the will of the people.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  And now we have an effort by the Republican Party to just flat out nullify the will of the people writ large. And so to me, that is a really, really disturbing development. And it's one that we should recognize the severity of, that the interplay between the institutional lack of democracy and the anti-democratic forces in the Republican Party is very, very dangerous. That if they get control of all of these levels of power, the question is, how far will they go? And we saw how far Donald Trump would go in 2020. And a lot of people thought that wasn't going to happen. A lot of people thought Trump would never go through with it. And he did. And now the question is, are the democratic norms going to hold in the future? Because a lot of our system is built on norms.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  Or are those norms going to be shredded at a time when our institutions themselves are already profoundly undemocratic? And I think that's what a lot of people who study democracy are really concerned about right now.

• 1:05:02Ezra Klein?

  My former colleague at Vox, Zach Beecham, who's been great at reporting on all this, he made this argument, there is a name for the danger here. He writes, quote, "In the United States, the threat that looms is a slide into what scholars call competitive authoritarianism, a system that still holds elections but under profoundly unfair conditions that systematically favor one side." Does that seem to you like our future?

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  That seems like a potential future. Absolutely. I thought that was a really good piece. I also thought another really good part of that piece was that authoritarianism doesn't happen overnight. And I've been writing a lot about the parallels between the Jim Crow era and today. Jim Crow didn't happen overnight either. There was a 30-year period. Between the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 and states rewriting their constitutions to disenfranchise black voters. And so it didn't happen overnight there either. It wasn't like one day, everyone in the South who was black became disenfranchised. It was a process of doing it. And I feel like we're in the same process here, where

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  you have the new voting restrictions that were passed in 2011. You have the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. You have Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the election in 2020. You have Republican-controlled states changing election laws in 2021. This is a continuum too. It's not like the Republican Party just woke up one day and became an authoritarian party. It was heading in that direction, and then things have accelerated it, just like there were probably anti-democratic aspects in Hungary, but it took a leader like Orban to channel all of those things. And that's what I think the danger is here, that we minimize one thing, or minimize another, and say, oh, well, the bias of the Senate really isn't that bad. Or, oh, the attempt to overturn the election failed. Or, oh,

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  their voting restrictions won't really have that big of an impact, without looking collectively at how all of these things fit together. And you're saying, this is just one anti-democratic action, one anti-democratic institution after another. And how many of these things start to accumulate before we question the fundamental nature of democracy itself?

• 1:07:09Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that is happening simultaneously here is that you have Republican control of most states, or at least more states than Democrats have. Some states, of course, have divided government. But you do have Democratic control of the presidency and Congress. And so let's imagine, Democrats surprise everybody, Joe Manchin has a big change of heart, Kirsten Sinema, a big change of heart, and they pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, they pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. How much of that does this fix?

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  It fixes some of it, for sure. It would expand voting access in a lot of places, so we wouldn't have a two-tiered system for federal elections. There would be the same laws in place for federal elections in a place like Texas compared to a place like Oregon. That would be a big step forward. There would be, at least if you look at Joe Manchin's proposal, a ban on partisan gerrymandering for congressional elections. So that would make it a lot harder to take back the House by virtue of gerrymandering if you can't do it anymore. So I think a number of good things would happen and some bad things would be prevented. But there's still the question of what do you do more broadly about the GOP's attempt to try to subvert the will of the voters? That's not covered right now by either of those bills.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  And then what do you do about the fundamentally undemocratic nature of our institutions? That's not really covered either. And that's why I said the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act are the bare minimum of what we need to do to fix American democracy, not the end goal. And even achieving those two things is looking like a very heavy lift right now, given the fact that Democrats and senators say they won't get rid of the filibuster to pass them.

• 1:08:46Ezra Klein?

  What would it mean to go beyond the minimum? What else should liberals prioritize that maybe are not in those bills or they're not even thinking about right now?

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Well, I would be curious what you have to say about this, but I would say doing things like making DC and Puerto Rico a state if they want to become one, just because that wouldn't fundamentally change the nature of the Senate, but it would make it more diverse and more representative, and also potentially give Democrats the votes they need to get rid of the filibuster. I would say potentially experiment with different voting systems, whether it's multi-member districts for Congress, or whether it's ranked choice voting for more elections, trying to, if you can't get rid of the Electoral College, at least adopt the National Popular Vote Compact, where states decide to abide by the winner of the popular vote. I would say that things like that would start moving us in the right direction. It wouldn't fix all of the system.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  There are still going to be these biases built into the system, but I think it would make American government more representative and more democratic than it currently is.

• 1:09:44Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a lot on my list, too. Something I've been mulling over is an argument that some of the Democratic data analysts now, like David Sherrill, make, which is that... You know, Democrats weren't always so disadvantaged by America's electoral system. And so part of the real politic here is they need to reshape their their politics in order to build a more efficient coalition. So specifically, Democrats, you know, my book is all about sorting and polarization and geographic sorting. Democrats in becoming a much more urban and much more educated party, that's just been electorally disastrous for them down ballot, because that's just pack them in and is really disadvantage them in the system. And so they, in addition to everything that we were just talking about, which are the structural changes, they need to actually remake their

• 1:10:29Ezra Klein?

  message, remake their approach, so they win more rural and non-college voters. So that's not just like a nice thing to try to win elections, but that in the system we have, like, it is a necessity to holding power and being able to wield it in any sustained way. Do you think that's actually something Democrats need to think more about?

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  I do. But I also think there's an interesting correlation between voting systems and the need to do that. So take Texas, for example. Texas is a state that has hundreds of thousands of unregistered voters, disproportionately Latino, disproportionately people of color. And Democrats haven't done a good job of getting them registered to vote and then voting. And one of the reasons is that Texas's voting laws make it very, very difficult to register voters. There's no online voter registration in Texas. If you want to register voters, you actually have to be deputized by the county in which you're registering voters are. You have to attend official training, and that that

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  authorization, that deputization, only lasts for two years. So Beto O'Rourke, in the past week, was literally going county by county to be able to register voters. And Texas has 254 counties. So imagine having to get deputized in 254 counties to do a statewide voter registration drive in a state that has hundreds of thousands of unregistered voters, who are disproportionately people that would vote Democrat if they were registered and voting. So I think partly, it's Finding the right voters and converting them or activating them. But it's also just the fact that if Democrats were able to get more people registered and voting in places like Texas, that would also change the political composition of the state itself.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  And so I don't believe that if you make it easier to vote, it's always going to benefit Democrats. And there's, it's very clear that that's not the case. Georgia has had liberal voting laws until recently and Republicans have done very well there. Utah has all male voting and Republicans control the state. I mean, it's not like you suddenly make it easier to vote and Democrats are going to win every election. But I think it is true that an economic message, or whatever David is talking about, has to go along with a democracy message. Because if you're not expanding the pool of voters that you're reaching out to, it's going to be very, very difficult to build the coalitions necessary to win in places that are changing demographically that could be blue, but are not blue yet.

• 1:12:54Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, one of the crueler suggestions I've heard like this is that the really effective thing Democrats are doing in terms of a long game right now is just terrible housing policy in California and New York, which is particularly California driving blue voters potentially out into Texas and helping move, move the state, which gets at something like facetiously, but, but that is real, which is there is a geographic clustering component to Democrats and urban Democrats in particular, that is a real problem for them in the system over time. And it's giving politics on some of it too much weight to say to people, you know, you should live somewhere different than you want to live because the politics demand it.

• 1:13:36Ezra Klein?

  But I do think of there as being, and maybe it's almost too complicated, it's another podcast, but as being something Democrats need to think about between policies that they have often been part of, that have concentrated economic activity in urban centers and then led their voters there. And the kind of backlash effect of that then, as, you know, other states, other places, not Texas specifically, feel left behind and the Democratic coalition becomes weaker, even as it in some ways becomes bigger. That, another way of putting this is that for both justice reasons and actual direct, like bare knuckle political reasons. For Democrats to get better, once again, at spreading out income and wealth and economic

• 1:14:21Ezra Klein?

  opportunity is really important because a clustering of it is both bad for progressive economics, but it's also been very, very bad for progressive power.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is true. At the same time, I just find it strange that we have a system that essentially disadvantages people from moving to the most thriving, diverse and vibrant parts of the country. Like, why are people being penalized essentially for wanting to live in a place like New York City compared to wanting to live in a place like North or South Dakota? I mean, no matter how you split this question, we're still going to have the Dakota problem in American politics. And we're still going to have the fact that the places where people want to live essentially have the least amount of power. And the places that are shrinking retain a disproportionate role in American politics. And I mean, would

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  it make the Democratic Party better if they were able to compete more effectively everywhere, including rural areas? Like, absolutely. I think that's, there's no question about that. At the same time, I just have a fundamental problem with the system where a tiny state has the same level of representation as a huge state because that overrepresentation is magnified everywhere. If it was just magnified in the US Senate, it wouldn't be as big of a problem. But when it gets magnified in state legislatures, when it gets magnified in the House, when it gets magnified in the Electoral College, and then you're saying that wider rural, more conservative voters are shrinking as a population, why do they have disproportionate power over younger, more diverse, more urban, more progressive

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  voters that are growing as a population? I think that, to me, is, the real question is, why are the institutions so at odds with our demographics? And I think it's because of what you've written in your book and what I'm writing now. It's because of how they were structured in the first place. And those kind of structures have just gotten worse over time.

• 1:16:16Ezra Klein?

  I think that is a good place to end. So let me ask, what is always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  So I have been reading Number of different books to try to diversify, as I'm sure you have. I'm reading John le Carré, which I had never read before, just because I wanted to switch it up. So I'm reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Have you ever read that?

• 1:16:38Ezra Klein?

  No, I've seen the movie. I've not read the book.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  The movie was great. So now I'm reading the book, but I completely forgot what happened in the movie. And I'm not sure I even followed it in the first place. So I'm reading that. I just read a great book by David Blight, the Yale University historian called Race and Reunion, which was a book he wrote before the Frederick Douglass book that won the Pulitzer Prize. But it's basically about the mythology of the lost cause after the Civil War and how Southerners built an entire mythology over losing the Civil War, which they then turned into a victory during Jim Crow. And I think it has a lot of parallels of what's happening today. And then I'm reading a forthcoming book by my friend, Ayal Press, called Dirty Work, which is all about essentially all of these jobs that nobody wants to think

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  about that power our economy. And I think it's extremely relevant in terms of what happened in the pandemic, where a lot of people suffered and were invisible, but bore the brunt of taking care of us in the past year. So those are three books I'm reading, all very different, but trying to mix it up and not just think about the death of American democracy every day.

• 1:17:43Ezra Klein?

  Ari Berman, thank you for all the time you do spend thinking about it and for being here today.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Great to talk to you. Thanks so much, Ezra.

• 1:18:00Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Rojai Karma, and Annie Galvin. Fact checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.