I believe the Republicans LH describes are the ones who don’t hear from.
I was in Kenosha over the summer and they were specifically saying that they were voting for Barnes.
I have some other family in Wisconsin that I suspect are more likely to stay home than vote for Barnes. Wisconsin also has their Governor’s race on the ballot in November though, and I don’t know much about either candidate to intelligently comment on how that will affect turnout in my own family let alone in general.
most conservatives I know think that while the election was not stolen, the rules of voting were changed in a way that benefitted the other side.
there is a subtle distinction between understanding why we lost vs saying it was stolen.
and most of the moderates were not really upset that we lost POTUS. We were OK getting trump out. It was the loss of the senate that allowed the liberals to have a party.
some truth to that. Most of the changes were also desirable on the merits, not just for the result. (E.g., even though not really a rule of voting, reducing gerrymandering is a good things.)
I’d say in general rules have been changed more to benefit the GOP in recent decades. However, there was a big change that did help the dems in 2020: absentee voting. This was driven by COVID, which in my opinion was an appropriate response at the time to not force people to gather in masse to vote. Not really surprising that people with limited transportation options had better turn out when it was easier to vote absentee.
While you can still vote absentee here, it won’t be quite as convenient for many as it was in 2020. That’s fine by me.
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Much like in Georgia, i do not think disdain for Johnskn will result in people staying home, as there is also a contested Gubernatorial election.
The Gubernatorial election is all about covid protocols, so all the “liberty loving Republicans” that were “oppressed” by Evers will be going to the polls. And i fear most will still vote party line.
Yet still nearly always vote for Republicans.
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I think its fairly obvious at this point that dems leveraged the availability of mail in/absentee voting to upend some close races. you can harp on the just reasons for changing the rules, but this was the result.
thats not stealing the election, they just played the game better and won.
this is the reason that I rarely admit to being conservative. Many people prefer to lump anything non-dem as radical R.
to me the game is - Make voting as accessible to as many people as possible.
I see no reason that any reasonable person can argue against this -
except using potential fraud, which has never been shown for any method currently used
and seems no worse, absentee then in person
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at the high level yes, more access to voting is better.
but what actually happened: we implemented new rules too quickly, one side jumped on it and massively increased access to voting for their party. and they specifically targeted areas that would impact the election the most.
The other side (foolishly) did not. so conservatives were not equally reached out to vote in this manner.
you can argue that everyone had access to absentee equally- but if dems funnel money into areas to increase absentee turnout and Rs dont… I wouldnt really say that was equal access.
Not disagreeing, but characterizing this as a ‘game’ is part of the problem imo. Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy. If it’s a game where one option for trying to win is to restrict the opportunity to vote for specific groups of people then we have moved farther from the ideal, which should be for all citizens to cast a ballot.
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It wasn’t just a matter of the GOP not making as big an effort. Trump was actively encouraging people to vote in person rather than by mail for months leading up to the election.
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oh ya, 100%. Trump was telling people mail votes were unsafe and wouldnt be counted. Foolishness.
I recall being told that liberal mail carriers would just dump R district ballots in the trash.
You’re not going to catch fraud with mail in or online voting.
How on earth can I possibly know whether your wife voted all on her own for the candidates and ballot measures that she prefers, or if you voted for her or literally held a gun to her head as she voted?
I can’t possibly know which of those outcomes occurred. So while it may seem to you like fraud is no more likely, there are a lot of safeguards that are missing with online or mail-in voting.
while extreme, this is a good point.
One thing I suspected during the election- lots of college kids had ballets mailed to parents, who prob just filled them out and sent them in for kids.
While that’s illegal and presumably doesn’t happen very much, it could also happen very easily. And did happen to me once as I have detailed on here and on AO on several occasions.
I assumed that this happened some amount >0, that it was mostly immaterial. And that the risk of losing a few 1000 votes to the trash was a poor reason to give up a few million votes that could be counted.
I had no data or evidence to guess the magnitude of this. i just assumed it was crazy R wing gossip.
Are you saying that a few thousand votes are immaterial? Because Al Gore would like a word.
poor phrasing by me. I was saying that the Rs discouraged absentee voting and thus gave up maybe 1M votes they could have gained. And they said this was OK since they might lose 1000 votes.
Just an example of R shooting themselves in the foot.