Research by Jake Grumbach was recently featured in an Opinion piece written by Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times, titled “The G.O.P. Has Some Voters It Likes and Some It Doesn’t.” Exploring the influx of restrictive voting measures being introduced in state legislatures across the country following the 2020 Presidential election, Bouie integrates a recent paper by Grumbach that examines state party politics and democratic decline. Using a new measure of state-level democratic performance, Grumbach found that from 2000 to 2018, Republican control of state government “consistently and profoundly reduces state democratic performance during this time period.” Further, he finds that the reduction of state democratic performance is not specific to any state or regional context, but rather Republican controlled-governments across all states utilize strategies that impact democratic institutions similarly once they gain power. Reflecting on this grim finding and evidence that the Republican Party are engineering anti-democratic voting measures across the country in response to the defeat of Donald Trump, Bouie offers this conclusion: “If Republicans are building the infrastructure to subvert an election — to make it possible to overturn results or keep Democrats from claiming electoral votes — then we have to expect that given a chance, they’ll use it.”
Read the entire New York Times article here.
