White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre frequently gets critiqued for a less than coherent performance at the podium, but she recently managed to perfectly encapsulate the Democrats’ argument for the existence of voter suppression.
“What I am saying, is, you know, generally speaking, again more broadly speaking, of course higher voter turnout and voter suppression can take place at the same time,” she said during a White House press briefing. “One doesn’t have to happen on its own. They can be happening at the same time.”
This was every bit as coherent an argument of the dangers of voter suppression as any other Democrat or programs advocacy group has offered.
As dissected in “The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections,” every dire prediction the left has made about voter ID laws, list maintenance, and restrictions on ballot harvesting for almost two decades have never become reality.
To the contrary, as we recently saw with all those supposed “Jim Crow 2.0” laws that President Joe Biden, Georgia’s chief election denier Stacey Abrams, and practically every other Democrat warned would gut voting rights and subvert elections.
We were told Georgia was the eye of the storm for voter suppression. Yet turnout for early voting this year is on par with 2020, unusual since presidential years always have the highest participation. Moreover, early voting in the Peach State for 2022 is about twice as high as early voting in 2018. The primary season saw a 168% increase from the comparable 2018 primary.
Pressed on the early voting numbers from Georgia, the Jean-Pierre said: “Look, we have seen ourselves, I just laid out we've seen ourselves, from what legislation, state legislation we have seen across the country that is suppressing the right to vote, and look, we believe that people should have the fundamental access to voting.”
The Biden administration’s Justice Department has sued Georgia claiming the state was violating voting rights. It’s also suing the states of Texas and Arizona for adopting similar laws to Georgia in 2021, such as expanding voter ID to absentee ballots. But both states have seen similar patterns to Georgia.
The Texas primary turnout had about 500,000 more voters in 2022 compared to 2018. The 2022 Arizona primary had a record primary turnout of 35.12 percent, or 1.4 million ballots cast.
Voter suppression is not a reality but a talking point used when Democrats lose elections or when Democrats want to prevent election integrity laws from passing. But if the final tally for votes cast in 2022 ends up as high as it appears likely, Democrats won’t blame Republican voter suppression, will they?
Of course, they will.
Jean-Pierre tells America that voter suppression and high turnout are a perfectly reasonable combination. But why shouldn’t she? Evidence has never been much of a concern when arguing what amounts to a near religion on the left.
What the left has failed to do in years of litigation by Democrat super lawyer Marc Elias, the Democratic National Committee, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Abrams’s nonprofit Fair Fight Action is point to a single case of an eligible voter who was prevented from either voting or registering to vote. Lawsuits have been based on various disparate impact theories or whether a new state law complies with federal law or court precedent.
We are reminded of former President Donald Trump when he contested the 2020 outcome, claiming: “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” seemingly discounting even the possibility he lost.
Yet Democrats seem to have set a template in place that is near identical to what Trump said, only their version is essentially: If we win, the election was perfectly secure. If we lose, it was voter suppression.
If a press secretary’s job is to stay on message, Jean-Pierre did an excellent job.
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