As reported by Neil Vigdor, writing for The New York Times:
Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.
In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.
But so far this year, the new Idaho law is one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters.
As Vigdor reports, similar efforts by Republicans to suppress the youth vote have met with failure. In New Hampshire, a proposal to require students to produce their in-state tuition bills in order to register failed to garner even a single vote in the legislature. In Virginia, lawmakers attempted to repeal a law permitting 16-year-olds to register to vote in any upcoming general election occurring after their 18th birthday. Vigdor notes that in Texas, one legislator actually tried—and thus far failed—to use the excuse of mass school shootings and the threat of “political violence” in an attempt to ban polling places from all college campuses, as well as primary and secondary schools. Over in Wyoming, a Republican effort to ban student IDs as identification failed to pass when it was discovered that the same law would have inadvertently banned Medicare and Medicaid cards (commonly used by older, more Republican voters) to identify themselves. Oops!
Still, the Republican Party knows that allowing young people to vote constitutes an existential crisis for them. In a private meeting with GOP donors held in Nashville on April 15, Republican lawyer and fundraiser Cleta Mitchell—possibly best known for her efforts to assist Donald Trump in overturning the 2020 election—presented a massive Power Point plan for suppressing voting by college students.
As reported by Josh Dawsey and Amy Gardner, writing for The Washington Post:
A top Republican legal strategist told a roomful of GOP donors over the weekend that conservatives must band together to limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters, according to a copy of her presentation reviewed by The Washington Post.
[…]The presentation — which had more than 50 slides and was labeled “A Level Playing Field for 2024” — offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turnout among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic.
In addition to Mitchell’s slide presentation, the Post obtained an audio recording of Mitchell complaining to that “roomful of GOP donors” about just how clever the Democratic Party’s tactics in obtaining the youth vote actually were. This three-minute clip is captioned and worth a listen.
As the Post notes:
“What are these college campus locations?” she asked, according to the audio. “What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”
In Mitchell’s view, college students are lazy, but apparently not too lazy to “roll out of bed” to vote for Democrats.
As Dawsey and Gardner report, Mitchell singled out the Virginia state Senate as potentially flipping Republican in 2023, which she hopes will set the stage for that state to curb—or eliminate altogether—the apparently insidious access to early voting in that state.
“Forty-five days!” she said in a reference to Virginia’s early voting period. “Do you know how hard it is to have observers be able to watch for that long a period?”
As reported by Bill Glauber, writing for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Mitchell seemed particularly perturbed about the results of the recent Supreme Court election in Wisconsin.
Mitchell said: “Wisconsin is a big problem because of the first day, because of the polling locations on college campuses. There are 501c3’s (nonprofits). Their goal for the Supreme Court race was to turn out 240,000 college students in that Supreme Court race. And we don’t have anything like that and we need to figure out how to do that and combat that.”
Of course Mitchell is already veteran of attempting to “combat” lawful votes. She was Trump’s go-to lawyer, and on the line in the infamous January 2021 phone call between Donald Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump demanded that the latter “find” him enough votes to declare victory in Georgia. That conversation is one of the centerpieces of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s investigation of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
What’s most notable, however, among all these Republican schemes to stop young people from voting is the complete lack of any acknowledgment or awareness that the GOP’s biggest problem is—and has always been—its policies.
Consider this April 6 rant from failed presidential candidate Scott Walker, blaming the whole world for the indoctrination” of young people—but not GOP policies.
As Jezebel’s Caitlin Cruz, whilst summing up Mitchell’s presentation, observes:
Indeed, when your policies are diametrically opposed to those cited as priorities by young voters—gun control, action on climate change, etc.—and you’re banning books and going after gay, trans, and reproductive rights at the same time, it’s going to be hard to win their vote! But instead of actually trying to win the youth vote by taking a hard look at their own legislative agenda, Republicans are just trying to cheat as a shortcut.
It also seems to be lost on the GOP that once a young person establishes allegiance to one particular party, that allegiance seldom changes. Party identification is very often a lifelong proposition, and the youth vote today will, for the most part, be the adult vote tomorrow.
So, if the Republican Party continues to believe that alienating and attempting to suppress younger voters is the only path to its survival, it can count on an ever-shrinking pool of constituents willing to even identify as Republican, let alone vote for them.
