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Democrats can't count on voters being mad enough about suppression to overcome it
New York Times correspondent Nate Cohn, for example, argued that voter suppression bills, such as the one passed by Georgia’s legislature this year, are unlikely to depress turnout in part because they “may backfire by angering and energizing Democratic voters.” Former Barack Obama speechwriter David Litt followed suit, writing in the Atlantic that voter ID laws may have “created an equal and opposite backlash, driving turnout among the groups intended to be suppressed” — and that Democrats should therefore embrace a compromise bill proposed by Sen. Joe Manchin III that includes a national voter ID requirement.
While telling voters about suppression can sometimes motivate them to show up at polling places, this backlash effect is far from guaranteed.
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In a randomized controlled experiment this year, I looked at how people reacted when they learned about a spate of new state bills aimed at driving down youth turnout. Using the survey firm Lucid, I recruited a census-balanced sample of nearly 4,900 individuals to take an online survey earlier this year. I randomly assigned participants to read one of three hypothetical news articles: a control article without any information on voter suppression, one about voter suppression that did not name any particular identity group as the target, or a similar voter suppression article that specified young people as the intended targets. I then measured how angry the article made people feel, as well as how likely they were to vote in the 2022 midterm elections.
The results were dismaying. While learning about youth suppression generally did make people angry, it did not make people more likely to want to vote. (Neither did learning about suppression without an explicitly named target.) Most concerning, information about youth suppression did not even boost voting intentions for young adults themselves — the individuals who stood to lose the most.
Intriguingly, one specific set of people did exhibit a backlash effect after learning about youth suppression: young adults who strongly identify with their age group. But this cohort was relatively small. Most people simply didn’t identify strongly with their age group. By contrast, people do tend to hold strong partisan and racial identities — a difference that may explain why efforts to suppress Democrats or voters of color have provoked a stronger backlash effect in the past.
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Despite the best hopes of some observers, telling voters they are being suppressed will not always be enough to counteract that suppression. In the case of bills targeting young voters, that messaging appears entirely ineffective. As debate continues over how to successfully combat these restrictions, simply counting on voter backlash may be wishful thinking.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/opinions-democrats-can-e2-80-99t-count-on-voters-being-mad-enough-about-suppression-to-overcome-it/ar-AAMHlcr?ocid=BingNewsSearch
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Mahalo Rhiannon!
Each one is awesome, but together they have to be phenomenal! 
And federal legislation
