Republicans Have Normalized Voter Suppression
New polling shows many Republican voters now consider trampling voting rights a legitimate tactic. It’s a worrying trend — and a threat to democracy.

Voters in Des Moines cast their ballots during the 2020 presidential election. (Phil Roeder / Flickr)
Voter suppression has been around for as long as the republic. Stories of subterfuge and ballot box-stuffing schemes are such a part of American political folklore, there’s an entire book about them. So in one sense, there is nothing particularly novel about Republican politicians’ efforts to rig the vote, or the important revelations that right-wing groups and corporate officials are coordinating state-level campaigns to make it harder to vote.
However, a new nugget of polling data illustrates that something more fundamental has happened: Voter suppression is no longer a plot engineered in the shadows and denied in public, for fear of criticism by a population that considers such measures grotesque. Instead, voter suppression is having its coming-out party — because more and more Americans now consider it to be a perfectly legitimate and even laudable campaign tactic.
The data point comes in a new CBS/YouGov survey, buried under the top-line finding that almost two-thirds of Republican voters do not consider Joe Biden the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, despite Biden’s electoral college and popular vote victories.