Democrats To Wage Expensive Battle vs Voting Curbs In GOP States

With voting bills dead, courtesy of Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to scrub the filibuster, the Democratic Party will have to battle voting restrictions inflicted by states controlled by Republicans in various ways, Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti reported for the New York Times.

Photo Insert: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, along with fellow moderate Democrat Joe Manchin, has been a consistent hindrance to the Biden administration's key agendas.

With the door slammed shut this week on federal legislation to create new protections for access to voting, Democrats face an electoral landscape in which they will need to spend heavily to register and mobilize voters if they are to overcome the hodgepodge of new voting restrictions enacted by Republicans across the country.

Democrats rode on a record turnout to win the presidency and control of the Senate in 2020 after embracing policies that made it easier to vote with absentee ballots during the pandemic.

But Republican-controlled state legislatures have since enacted a range of measures that undo those policies, erect new barriers to voting, and remove some of the guardrails that halted former president Donald J. Trump’s drive to overturn the election.

Republicans have traditionally been opposed to relaxing voting rules seen as restricting minorities from exercising their right to suffrage. The party, now sundered by pro-Trump and anti-Trump factions, has fewer members and has been reduced to redrawing many areas to buttress their control of congressional districts.

However, Democrats now say they are resigned to spending and organizing their way around the new voting restrictions passed in Republican-controlled states. Florida Democrats say they will spend tens of millions of dollars registering voters, money that could have been spent on campaigns if federal voting rights bills had passed.

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