So Why Aren't Democrats Shouting from the Rooftops?

 

So why aren't Democrats screaming from the rooftops about Republican attempts to lock in a permanent monopoly on power?  Why are Democrats focusing on infrastructure bills or, at most, attempt to expand voting access?  As the clip comments, "Yes, there are more hurdles, but hurdles you can jump over.  Crooked umps is harder to deal with."  Why aren't Democrats sounding the alarm that Republicans want to forgo the whole tiresome process of finding a winning program -- or candidate -- altogether and just putting people in charge of counting the vote who will always certify Republican winners regardless of actual vote total?  This seems like, as our current occupant of the White House would say, a big fucking deal.  Why isn't it getting more attention?

I can only assume that Democrats believe that control of the voting apparatus, like most procedural issues, is just too much a matter of insider baseball to interest normal people, and that most people care more about infrastructure than governmental structure.  Scandals, like procedural issues, are generally seen as insider baseball that no normie cares about.  Certainly Trump's egregious violations of the Hatch Act (the law forbidding use of the federal government for election campaigns) were dismissed as something no one outside the Beltway cares about.

To which I can only say, the Republican Noise Machine knows how to make people care about procedural issues.  And scandals.  Make no mistake, if a Democratic President had employed federal resources in a campaign, the Republican Noise Machine would have made sure people cared.  One might think that a Secretary of State sending State Department e-mails on a private server would be the sort of insider baseball issue that no normie would care about, but somehow it managed to be the number one issue in the 2016 election.  

A large part of the secret here is message discipline. If everyone talks about the same subject at every opportunity, it ends up being something that people pay attention to.  Another part is making the message something short and simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker, and something with real moral resonance.  Something like, "Hillary Clinton is under FBI investigation."  

If "Republicans don't want your vote to count" isn't enough to get people's attention and fire up Democrats, this country clearly has no hope.