As President Biden gives another speech attempting to blur the line between his regular political opposition and extreme hate groups, perhaps it is worth looking back to a bit more than a year ago when Biden called a sweeping elections bill signed into law in Georgia “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” and “an atrocity.” Biden also said, “I am convinced that we’ll be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing. This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle. I mean, this is gigantic what they’re trying to do, and it cannot be sustained.”
But a funny thing happened in the first primary with this new elections law in place. Early voting turnout in the primaries is going to hit a new record. Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, Gabriel Sterling, reports, “with the final Monday of voting we’ve seen a total of 461,816 voters. Early voters are 245,996 GOP, 176,902 Democratic & 2,667 Nonpartisan. Absentee 17,204 GOP, 18,517 Democratic & 530 Nonpartisan.” As of Sunday, the state was seeing a 217 percent increase from the same time point in the early voting period in the 2018 primary election and a 155 percent increase in the 2020 primary election.
If this was a voter suppression law as President Biden contended, it is doing a terrible job.
If Americans are lackadaisical or nonchalant about racism — a debatable contention – perhaps one of the reasons they are is because ordinary election reform legislation, that was not designed to suppress voter turnout and that was never likely to suppress voter turnout, gets labeled “Jim Crow in the 21st Century,” an explicit comparison to legal racial segregation and that used every trick in the book to prevent African-Americans from voting.
In fact, Biden’s awkward “Jim Eagle” metaphor suggested that this new law would somehow be even worse than Jim Crow. Anyone with functioning neurons could see that was a wildly hyperbolic label for the law.
Much like the story of the boy who cried wolf, if everything is labeled racist, then eventually many people will tune out the accusation of racism.