Woody Allen said it first.
“Eighty percent of life is just showing up.”
That’s why Republicans, who are definitely a minority, manage to win elections, particularly in years when people aren’t voting to elect a president.
Oh, those aren’t the only times they win. Even in elections with high turnout, Republicans in many states work to suppress opposition votes by making it more difficult for non-Republicans to cast their ballots. Indeed, in North Carolina in 2016, GOP officials openly bragged at how much they suppressed the African-American vote.
In my own state of Georgia, Republican officials admitted last year that if everyone voted, they would never win elections.
In Virginia, a combination of several factors lifted Glenn Youngkin, pictured above, to a victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the gubernatorial election. There was without question a major swing to Youngkin from independent voters who supported Joe Biden last year, but there was also a significantly higher turnout from right-leaning voters than left-leaners.
Pundits suggest that what happened in Virginia coupled with a Democratic governor barely avoiding defeat in New Jersey means next year’s Congressional elections probably mean Democrats will lose control of Congress in 20222.
Perhaps not so coincidentally, 2022 is the year I have been citing when I’ve written about H.L. Mencken’s prediction of the fall of our republic. Mencken wrote in 1922 that within 100 years, a combination of ignorance and greed would cause our system to fail.
I’ve written before about the growing problems with both ignorance and greed, but there’s a third problem that may be even tougher to solve. For the last 30 years or so, voters have bounced back and forth between the two parties without giving either one enough time to do very much.
In addition, they have tolerated a party that seems to spend every waking moment preventing the other party from getting anything done. Indeed, Republicans have spent the last 12 years opposing everything a Democratic president proposes, even if they were in favor of them.
Maybe the worst thing of all is the way they deny the legitimacy of elections when they lose. A solid majority of Republicans deny that Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 was fair, despite the fact that the election wasn’t even close.
But Democrats hurt themselves almost as much when they fail to turn out in off-year elections. And in the end, the folks in the middle stop believing in the system.
I don’t know if 2022 will be the end of our republic, although it’s possible to argue that it’s gone already.
Next year should teach us a lot.
If the Democrats show up.