Jake Grumbach was recently featured in The Washington Post. In his Opinion piece, “Trump’s favorite new candidate exposes the true depths of GOP radicalization,” Greg Sargent reflects upon the candidacy of Republican Jody Hice, who is running to be the new chief of elections in Georgia, challenging Georgia Secretary of Sate Brad Raffensperger who resisted attempts by Donald Trump to overturn the result of the 2020 election in Georgia and affirmed his defeat. In the article, Sargent explores the quickly changing landscape of electoral politics taking place across the country in Republican-controlled state legislatures following the 2020 Presidential election, to impose restrictive voting measures and reorganize electoral processes, of which Hice is emblematic. In his discussion, Sargent integrates findings from a recent paper from Grumbach, in which Grumbach constructs a complex measure that accounts for many different measures of democratic performance and explores the differences in “democracy score” across states. Grumbach finds that Republican-controlled states from 2000-2018 have experienced “consistently and profoundly” greater democratic backsliding than Democratic-controlled states–prompting Sargent to ask “whether this democratic backsliding will continue getting worse (which seems very likely). Second, whether that backsliding will cross over into something even more radical, such as an overturned presidential result in a particular state (which simply cannot be ruled out).” And last, given the rise of candidates like Hice and their support from prominent Republicans like Trump, “Whether the rest of us are going to allow it.”
Read the full article here.
