Latest news with #electionloss
Yahoo
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A new study disproves Democrats' most cherished delusion
Colorado Democrats were feeling triumphant. After a decade of organizing, the state party was in a strong position. The demographics were trending their way. And so, in 2013, they prepared the coup de grâce for the state's beleaguered Republican Party: a new voting law. The law dramatically expanded voting access, mandating that mail ballots be sent to every registered voter for most elections, creating new polling centers where anyone could cast a ballot and allowing voters to register on Election Day, among other things. When everyone votes, Democrats win, as members of the party often say, and now it seemed like nearly everyone in Colorado would be able to vote. On Election Day the next year, they voted. And Democrats lost. While the Democratic governor who signed the law won re-election, the boost in turnout from the voting reforms helped Republicans win races for attorney general, secretary of state, state treasurer and, most significantly, U.S. senator, as Cory Gardner defeated Sen. Mark Udall, member of a political dynasty with strong roots in Colorado, in a surprise win. It was the high-water mark for Republicans in the state, which has since definitively become a blue state. And Democrats had only themselves to blame. They had fallen for the oldest and hoariest political myth in politics, one used by Republicans to justify passing restrictive laws on voting and by Democrats to cope with unexpected losses. But time and again, research has shown that it's just not true. The latest evidence came in a study from the Pew Research Center of the 2024 election. Donald Trump won that election by 1.5 percentage points, but any Democrat who muttered that new restrictions on voting in red states skewed the result has to contend with this study, which involved surveying 9,000 voters after the election and then painstakingly verifying which ones actually voted — and which didn't. What they found: If everyone who was eligible had voted, Trump's winning margin would have been twice as large. That's not a fluke. While both Democrats and Republicans believed that the expansion of vote by mail during the pandemic in 2020 helped Joe Biden beat Trump, studies repeatedly undermined the central tenets of that belief: A study by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found that states that made it easier to vote in 2020 didn't see larger increases in turnout or any partisan advantage. A study by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia found that states that made it easier to vote may have seen higher turnout, but it didn't help either Trump or Biden. A study by the Public Policy Institute of California found that making it easier to vote may have boosted turnout, but it either had no effect or slightly boosted Trump. I could keep going. I wouldn't normally get this deep in the weeds on research, but I want to stress how definitive the research is — and this is over an election that saw one of the most dramatic expansions in voting access in recent history. That's not to say that voting laws don't matter. It's just that our understanding of how they work tends to be static and they are really much more dynamic. Pass a strict voter ID law and campaigns will spend more time helping voters get the right identification. Pass a vote-by-mail law and campaigns will do more outreach to make sure they return their ballots. Expand early voting and campaigns will spend more time locking down those votes. Nothing is fixed. Every now and then, one party will get caught flat-footed and lose a winnable race because it didn't understand the new rules. (Failing to strategize around ranked choice voting hurt Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral election, for example.) The losers learn quickly, though, and the advantage doesn't last. When Coke introduced a zero-sugar cola in 2005, Pepsi didn't just give up and go out of business; it launched its own version two years later. Political parties follow the same competitive logic. There's no question that the recent Republican efforts to restrict voting access are motivated by a belief that it will help their party. While they typically pitch these laws as being about voter integrity and confidence, every now and then someone slips, as when a Republican lawmaker in Wisconsin said that Trump would win the state in 2016 because of a new voter ID law. But that doesn't mean they are correct, just as Colorado Democrats were wrong in 2013 when they thought making it easier to vote would help them. I understand the impulse to argue against these laws by zeroing in on that premise. But in doing so, Democrats risk giving themselves an out on the hard work of figuring out why so many Americans preferred Trump in 2024 and what they can do about it in the future. On this much, we can agree: Everyone should be allowed to vote. And when everyone votes, we all win. This article was originally published on
ABC News
29-06-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Turnbull and Kovacic are the latest to weigh in over quotas for women in the Liberals
As the Liberal Party grapples with its spectacular election loss and works out how to rebuild, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley is approaching it as if there's a giant sign above her head that screams, "I'm not Peter Dutton". Her speech at the National Press Club this week was loaded with hints that fit this thesis. Even the decision to address the National Press Club itself — a forum Dutton viewed as a space of the Canberra journalistic elite and snubbed consistently — was a signal. She has also flooded the youth and women's podcast space to send the same point. And from the moment she was on her feet at the press club she acknowledged the traditional owners of the land — a sentence that had not only become absent from the Liberal leadership lexicon — it was by the end of the election campaign a full-blown culture war that put even more nails in the Liberal Party's already bolted-in coffin. If you swim in right wing algorithms — especially on X — you'll see that all of these choices by Ley are being mocked as symbols of "Labor Party-light". In the subterranean online world Ley's leadership is being painted as too "woke". Ley's job over the next year is fraught with danger. She might be given a period of brief peace but most Liberals you speak to privately concede that it will be difficult to keep that peace for the entire term. One of those big debates that's just starting to get heated is the issue of women's representation. On this issue you will hear a lot of over the top language. Ley says she will be a zealot for women's representation in the party. Shadow Defence Minister Angus Taylor says he will crusade to have more women elected. Fancy words. But after the two previous elections, leaders said similar things. The issue of gender quotas is the one philosophical and cultural mountain that the Liberal Party has never been prepared to climb. And even by the party's own reckoning, it is failing. Beyond the hard arithmetic of imposing quotas, every other strategy is little more than vibes and positive thinking. Vibes don't get women elected, and if women are not at the table in large numbers Australian voters will continue to turn their backs on the Liberal Party. If everyone agrees with such a passion that the party needs a stampede of women — what's the hold-up? Opposition Defence spokesperson Angus Taylor this week rebuked gender quotas for political parties, a move that was widely regarded as undermining Ley's openness to the idea. Timing is everything in politics and just six weeks earlier Ley and Taylor fought for the Liberal Party leadership. One pitched her credentials as the modern Liberal centrist leader — the other as the centre right cultural figure that could re-engage the existing base. The problem is the existing base is old, white and male. Ley's National Press Club speech featured her claims she would consider quotas if the party's state divisions saw them as the solution to gender equity. Days later Taylor said mentoring and recruitment was a better way to do it, adding that the Labor Party "subverted democracy" with its quota strategy. "I believe in democratic processes, and I don't believe in subverting them, but I also know from my past experiences that mentoring, recruitment support is the way to make sure you have the people you need," Taylor said. "The Labor Party will do things their own way. And they do subvert democracy, and that's a matter for them. At the end of the day, if you're going to have quotas, it means you are going to subvert democratic processes." Subverting democracy? Labor women were lining up to respond. The numbers speak for themselves. Only one-third of Liberal MPs are women. That compares to 56 per cent of Labor MPs who are women. Cabinet Minister Tanya Plibersek told Insiders the Liberals used quotas for Nationals MPs on their frontbench pointing out the contradiction in the tools they use for promotion and representation. "They've got a quota of National Party MPs that have to be on the frontbench," she said. "So they're happy to have quotas for National Party MPs. It's just quotas for women that they're not prepared to use. "Does Angus Taylor really want people to believe that the 28 most talented Liberals in the whole country are the people who've made it into the federal parliament?" Plibersek pointed out that the Liberals had ignored a non-binding 50 per cent target for female representation put in place after the 2022 election. Here is some free advice to the Liberal Party. Every time they talk about women and quotas and anyone implies that the Labor quotas have led to the promotion of women without merit the ALP has a literal party. They won this debate so long ago it provides Labor with a free kick of monumental proportions. I was a high school girl when Labor had this debate and settled it. Now, here we are 30 years later and the Liberals are still having a debate the community resolved in the 1990s. Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told this column senior Liberal men, including former prime minister Tony Abbott and Angus Taylor, left the impression that they were happy with the male dominated party as it is. "The Liberal Party has said it needs to recruit more women into its parliamentary ranks for years and for just as long resisted quotas on the basis it undermines the right of party members freely to choose their own candidates. But nothing has changed and the party room has fewer women than ever," Turnbull told me. "Those who oppose quotas need to explain what their alternative is, otherwise people will reasonably conclude they are quite happy with the male dominated status quo." Opposition frontbencher Julian Leeser has called for preselection primary contests, instead of quotas, and other Liberals including former minister Simon Birmingham and NSW senator Maria Kovacic have called for mandated quota systems. Kovacic tells this column that quotas are no longer a philosophical discussion, but have become a source of urgency. "We must address the persistent and systemic under-representation of women in our party, the temporary implementation of quotas is now both necessary and urgent," she tells me. "Quotas will serve as an effective interim measure to correct these structural imbalances." Kovacic believes the scale of the gender imbalance in the Liberal Party demands "immediate and decisive action". "Delaying the adoption of quotas in favour of softer incremental approaches alone, such as mentoring and leadership programs is no longer viable. That opportunity has passed. We must change, and change now." The NSW Liberal Women's Council will debate gender quotas at a meeting in Sydney this week. Those pushing for change won't go down without a massive fight. Patricia Karvelas is host of ABC News Afternoon Briefing at 4pm weekdays on ABC News Channel, co-host of the weekly Party Room podcast with Fran Kelly and host of politics and news podcast Politics Now.
ABC News
25-05-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Decimated and divided Liberal Party insiders at odds over what went wrong and what they stand for
The Liberal Party room is deeply divided over its future direction, with a profound schism emerging between those who want the party to move to the "sensible centre" as articulated by new leader Sussan Ley, and others who believe moderates are hijacking the devastating election loss to suit their agenda. Four Corners has spoken to senior frontbenchers and key Liberal figures who believe the campaign was botched by campaign headquarters, with one frontbencher calling for heads to roll over the stuff ups. Rising conservative star Andrew Hastie, widely seen as a future leader of the party, has warned the Liberal Party's problems are so deep that without serious change, it may cease to exist. Several frontbenchers have revealed their policies were either dumped or buried, in what all describe as a confused and incoherent campaign. Mr Hastie told Four Corners he pushed to have his defence policy announced with details of where the new money being committed would be spent. "I just assumed that we were going to announce it in the first week or two and then it blew out to the week of Anzac Day," he said. He was left frustrated that a key Coalition strength was being squandered. "It became very difficult to talk about defence during the campaign without a policy," he said. Shadow minister Sarah Henderson said her education policy was "buried" by the campaign because it was obsessed with talking about the cost of living and steered away from values-based policies. "On Thursday night [before the election], the policy was uploaded onto the website … my media release was withdrawn and a lot of incredible hard work by my team and many others right across the Coalition, unfortunately, didn't see the light of day," she said. "This is a policy which spoke to our values. It was all about aspiring to be a top 10 education nation to ensure that every young Australian reached his or her best potential, supported by evidence-based teaching, underpinned by parental choice and a strong commitment to faith-based education as well." Senator Henderson said many of her colleagues were frustrated. "Too many taxation policies were not pushed forward … [there was a] housing policy delivered on the run, a defence policy looking like an afterthought," she said. "We failed in a number of different ways, but we lost sight of our values." Tasmanian frontbencher Jonno Duniam let rip at the party for relying on "fatally flawed" polling and not heeding his warnings that the campaign wasn't working. "Something went off the rails," he said. "It's like having a compass telling you to go in one direction. In fact, you know you should be going in another. And that's what we did. We made decisions based on bad polling." Senator Duniam believes bad advice from campaign headquarters was behind Peter Dutton's backdown on his work-from-home policy. "Our numbers started to fall off a cliff the day we backed down on that policy," he said. "Not because people loved the policy, but they were feeling that they were mistaken about our leader and whether or not he was a strong man and whether he could be prime minister." Senator Duniam suggested people in the professional wing of the Liberal Party should consider their positions. "We were frankly in a very competitive position at the start of 2025, and that completely evaporated," he said. Some are blaming the organisational wing of the party for not running a better negative advertising campaign against Anthony Albanese. Four Corners has learnt that Peter Dutton was so frustrated he raised in a mid-campaign meeting that he wanted advertisements commissioned that called Mr Albanese a liar. A source said it wasn't pursued because Liberal campaign headquarters believed it wouldn't be persuasive. Another source said it was highly unusual to have a candidate try to suggest campaign advertising. Others in the party believe they went into the campaign with a false sense of confidence. The Liberal Party's own pollster said they overestimated the number of so-called Labor "defectors" to the Coalition. They wrongly assumed those who voted No in the Voice referendum were more likely to favour the Coalition at the election. Mr Hastie said while the referendum had plenty of downsides for Mr Albanese, the upside was that people also saw he was prepared to "politically die for something". "People saw that he was prepared to go hard for an idea even if he was going to fail. And I think you can't quantify that, but people certainly, I think it reflected that people thought he had some convictions," he said. "He put a referendum, he lost and moved on. But at least people, I think in the end, saw that he was willing to follow through on it." Not all Liberals agree the campaign was the ultimate problem. Former Liberal minister George Brandis said the policies announced alienated Australians. "We alienated women. We offended public servants. We offended multicultural communities. We insulted people who live in the inner cities. It was almost as if we were running out of new people to offend," he said. "I think people who say that it was just because of a bad campaign, that we got the worst result we've ever got and ignore the orientation of the party and the image of itself that it projected to the community over some years, are kidding themselves." New Liberal leader Sussan Ley has committed to change, saying the party must "reflect modern Australia" and that government is formed "in the sensible centre". Senator Henderson rejected critiques that the party moved too far to the right and focused too much on so-called culture wars. "The answer is not to move to the centre, but to move forward as one united team … continuing to bring together classical Liberals and conservatives in our great party together with the Nationals," she said. "That is the best and most important way forward for our party." NSW Liberal Senator Maria Kovacic said the party must address deeper problems if it ever wants to win elections again. "If we focused on our economic credentials, if we focused on making Australia a better and more prosperous country returning and restoring living standards in a more meaningful way, then I think we would've connected with people." Four Corners explores the Liberal Party's existential crisis of what it stands for and who it represents. Watch tonight on ABC TV and ABC iview. Internally, a debate is brewing about nuclear power and whether the Liberals should stick with its promise of net zero emissions by 2050. Mr Hastie told Four Corners he wanted the party's commitment to net zero reconsidered. "I think the question of net zero, that's a straitjacket that I'm already getting out of," he said. "The real question is should Australian families and businesses be paying more for their electricity? And should we allow this sort of hypocrisy at the heart of our economy to continue whereby we sell coal and gas to India and China, and we deny it to our own people? That's the question that I think we need to answer." While Mr Hastie wants Australia's moratorium on nuclear lifted, Senator Kovacic said it was time for the party to dump the policy. "It was going to be hard enough as it was," Senator Kovacic said. "Even if we'd started on it on Monday, if we'd won the election, [it would have been] hard to deliver. Three years into the future, it's going to be even harder. "Most young Australians believe that climate change is real and we have to deliver energy policies that ensure that we reach our net zero targets and that we deliver stable power … that is as cheap as possible." Former Liberal MP Jason Falinski, who lost his seat of Mackellar in Sydney to teal independent Sophie Scamps at the 2022 election, said the party needs to stop viewing energy policy through a culture lens. "If we are talking about coal versus nuclear versus renewable versus whether it's even happening at all, then you are in a culture war scenario and our opponents love that issue," he said. The Liberals' split, and looming reunion, with the Nationals exposed the mistrust in the Coalition. The Nationals ended the partnership when Sussan Ley would not immediately commit to key policies. Senator Duniam called the Nationals' demands "contrived", telling Four Corners it was unrealistic to have policy decisions settled within weeks of an election. "The Nationals wanted to dictate to the Liberals what their policies should be. Now imagine if the tables were turned … I can't imagine my Nationals colleagues abiding by that and going quietly," he said. Nationals Senate Leader Bridget McKenzie denied the party had pushed Ms Ley into policy commitments. "We had every right to assume that the policies we took to an election only three weeks earlier remained Coalition policy," she said. Ms Ley's leadership may face another test soon. The first female leader of the Liberal Party won the leadership ballot by just four votes earlier this month, beating Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor. But three party room members nominally aligned with the moderate leader who took part in the vote will have left by next month. It has left some observers wondering whether the muddy majority leaves the door open for Ms Ley's authority to be undermined by conservatives eyeing the leadership. Lindsay MP Melissa McIntosh said the party "can't let that happen". "I feel the sense of the party room getting behind her … but every female, I think stepping up as a first, does face unique challenges," she said. Ms McIntosh survived a pre-selection challenge during her last term, when Peter Dutton was forced to step in to protect her, then promote her to shadow cabinet. She says structural change is needed to protect women like her in the Liberal Party. "[Women] need to feel like part of something and they need to be protected. And that's gonna take time. And I think Sussan's, you know, she's our first female leader, but she understands this. So, she's a great leader to push these changes as well." New Deputy Leader Ted O'Brien said Ms Ley being the first female leader of the party was a point of pride, but it was "first and foremost because she's the right leader for the party". "I believe she'll lead with a united team," he said. Not everyone is as optimistic. Asked if the party had hit rock bottom, Jason Falinski laughed, "I think the answer is no". "There's further for us to go, but that's necessary. I think we've put off a lot of arguments for a long time and it's time to have it out." Watch Four Corners's Decimated, reported by Patricia Karvelas, tonight from 8:30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
National Post
25-05-2025
- Politics
- National Post
Poilievre set to speak to Conservative MPs before House of Commons opens
OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will welcome the new House of Commons session with a speech to his MPs on Sunday afternoon. Article content Article content The Conservatives are still reeling from an election loss to Prime Minister Mark Carney's Liberals, which was made all the more devastating because the Tories were leading by more than 20 percentage points at the beginning of the year. Article content Article content The party has yet to confirm if it will be doing an official review of the campaign to determine if lessons can be learned for the next election. Some MPs have said that they want to see changes and 'contrition' from the leader in the wake of the election loss. Article content Article content Last week, Poilievre announced that more than half of his MPs will serve in critic roles with the roster showcasing more experienced MPs than fresh faces. Article content With the House set to open for the first time in nearly six months, there have been hints of a change of tone from the Conservatives, who have offered to work with the government on issues relating to Canada-U.S. relations as the country endures a trade war with its southern neighbour. Article content The Conservative leader will soon be running in a byelection in Battle River—Crowfoot after losing his own Ottawa-area seat in the April election. Conservative MP Damien Kurek has pledged to step down as member of Parliament in the riding to allow Poilievre to run. Article content
ABC News
22-05-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Decimated
They lost the inner-city seats and now the outer suburbs. Can the Liberal Party ever recover from its historic election loss? Behind closed doors a battle is raging for the heart and soul of the party. ABC presenter Patricia Karvelas talks to Liberal insiders as they grapple with the existential crisis of what the Liberal Party stands for and who it represents. Liberal Party powerbrokers talk to Four Corners candidly and honestly about the contest which will redefine Australian politics. With the Nationals walking away from the Coalition, the Liberals face the very real prospect that they may never govern again. The party of Menzies and Howard faces a reckoning: can they rebuild and win back middle Australia or face further losses? Four Corners charts the inside story of these monumental political shifts. Decimated, reported by Patricia Karvelas, produced by Alex McDonald and Joshua Martin goes to air on Monday 26 May at 8.30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
