Republican "Experts" Were Dead Wrong About Election Integrity and Turnout
Discussions of election integrity do not suppress Republican turnout. They increase it.
The political consultant class told us that Ali Alexander and others, who sounded the alarm about massive voter fraud in the 2020 election, would end up suppressing Republican turnout. But this week in Virginia, Republican turnout was higher than ever.
The only thing that was suppressed by election integrity activists was the brazen voter fraud itself.
How is it possible that Republican turnout in an off-year gubernatorial election was higher, in many counties by double digit percentages, than it was in a Presidential election that saw the highest turnout for an election in all of human history? Was it the weather? No. In fact the weather in Virginia was less conducive to voting this year than it was on election day a year earlier.
In 2020, there were dozens of videos purporting to show Democrat party operatives throwing out Republican ballots. This year, all eyes were on the lookout for this sort of activity and somehow Republican turnout ended up materially higher in Virginia than in 2020.
The only factor that can reasonably explain the higher turnout is a relative lack of voter fraud schemes this time around. Presumably because of increased scrutiny brought on by a the widely held belief that massive levels of fraud that took place in 2020.
Conservative commentators on Twitter, from Ann Coulter to Mike Cernovich, shunned efforts by Donald Trump and others to call attention to alleged voter fraud, claiming it would dishearten the electorate and suppress Republican turnout in elections. They pointed to Georgia’s special election as proof for this theory. The data now show that the real factor to blame for suppressing turnout in Georgia was weak Republican candidates who seemed even weaker by refusing to address voters’ concerns about the integrity of elections.
The pollster-class will tell you that Glenn Younkin saw higher support than Trump in Virginia because he refused to talk about election integrity, but this just isn’t true. Youngkin spoke about the issue very frequently and provided a great deal of substance on how to remedy it. Of course, Youngkin spoke about election integrity less in terms of a total percentage of all the issues that he discussed than Donald Trump. That makes sense, given that Trump was the guy sitting at Mar A Lago who believes he was cheated out of the Presidency and Younkin was the active candidate for governor who, by definition, had a duty to tell Virginians how he would address the myriad other issues that they face.
Donald Trump, as a former President who feels he was cheated out of the Oval Office, doesn’t have a duty, nor is it his place, to articulate solutions to local concerns faced by the Commonwealth of Virginia. Glenn Youngkin did face that obligation—but that doesn’t mean that he never spoke about election integrity, despite the oft-repeated claim by the media.
Comparisons of the sum total of instances that Donald Trump has spoken out about election integrity versus Glenn Younkin are foolish.
Using such comparisons to prove a point would be like listening to the quarterly earnings conference calls of Coca Cola and American Airlines back-to-back and then drawing a comparison showing that Coca Cola’s CEO talked a lot less about fuel prices than American Airlines’ CEO did. Yes, both are Fortune 500 CEO’s, but who cares? Fuel prices will always be a greater percentage of one company’s talking points because they’re an airline. Just as election integrity will always make up a bigger percentage of Donald Trump’s talking points than [fill in the blank] gubernatorial candidate.
These dimwitted comparisons don’t prove that Coca Cola’s relative success in a fiscal quarter is driven by the fact that they spent less time talking about fuel prices, nor do they prove that Glenn Youngkin’s success on Tuesday is ascribable to him spending somewhat less time talking about election integrity.
When activists and former presidents spend a great deal of time talking about election integrity, it doesn’t dishearten Republican voters and keep them home on election day. On the contrary, this activism leads to a much greater level of awareness about what can and must be done to keep America’s elections secure and creates confidence among Republican voters, resulting in more of them showing up at the polls.