In the months since Donald Trump lost his re-election bid, conservative groups traditionally focused on lobbying against abortion and LGBTQ+ rights have moved to support new restrictions on voting, offering significant grassroots power and money to efforts to make it harder to vote.
The increased attention on elections has come from unexpected corners, such as the Susan B Anthony List, which traditionally has a singular focus on restricting abortion access.
The group announced it intends to spend millions in a joint “election transparency initiative” with the American Principles Project, which until recently concentrated on restricting trans participation in sports. The effort aims to scupper national voting rights legislation proposed by Democrats in Washington DC and mobilize lawmakers and volunteers in states.
“I am not ready to say that everything that President Trump threw out there after the election was accurate, but it did motivate people who frankly have been hard to motivate in years past,” said Ken Cuccinelli, a former top official at the Department of Homeland Security for the Trump administration who has been tapped to lead the effort. “That’s my own experience, on this issue,” he added.
Members of the organization “demanded” it engage on election issues “as a pre-condition to be able to make the pro-life case” of further restricting abortions rights, Cuccinelli said in an interview.
The pivot to voting rights comes after the same groups put up tens of millions of dollars to support Trump’s 2020 campaign, which was defined by near daily claims that there was widespread voter fraud. The Susan B Anthony List spent $52m backing the former president, making it the most expensive electoral effort in the organization’s history.
Now their full-throated support has left the groups in a bind. Some small-dollar donors, believing there was widespread fraud, are uncertain why they should donate to electoral efforts if the process is rigged.
“We hear from another batch of members that say, ‘I don’t know whether I should bother with this any more. It’s a rigged system,’” said Cuccinelli. “This is their perspective, whether it’s correct or not – ‘If this isn’t fixed, I don’t know that I really want to stay engaged.’”
There is no evidence of fraud or other wrongdoing in the 2020 election, and courts repeatedly rejected such claims from Trump and allies. Nevertheless, experts said support for restricting voting rights and the rights of LGBTQ+ people is strongly correlated with the belief the election was fraudulent.
“The big lie of a stolen election that [Trump] was pushing, and his supporters were pushing leading to the insurrection … has taken hold in religious communities,” said Andrew Whitehead, associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, and recent author of Taking Back America for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States.
“There’s a real distrust in the election, in electoral fraud, and questioning whether Biden is a legitimate president.” He added: “I don’t see how that genie gets put back in the bottle.”
Anti-abortion groups are in turn beginning to see trimming the electorate as essential to achieve their goals. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B Anthony List, said in a statement that the group’s ability to elect pro-life candidates depended on a “transparent, fair elections process”.
“The integrity of our electoral system was severely compromised in 2020 when pro-abortion Democrats – utilizing the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse – weakened state laws that ensure free and fair elections,” she said in a statement.
Conservative support for anti-voting laws comes with significant financial backing. The political arm of the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative group that has long backed voting restrictions, recently announced it would spend $10m on an effort to push voting restrictions.
FreedomWorks, the group that helped spread the Tea Party movement, has its own $10m initiative led by Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who was on a phone call between Trump and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump urged Raffensperger to overturn Georgia’s election results.
Also joining the effort is the Family Research Council, which championed the issue during a town hall recently, according to the New York Times. “There is action taking place to go back and correct what was uncovered in this last election,” Tony Perkins, the group’s leader, said. The group is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which describes it as specializing in “defaming LGBTQ people”.
All of these groups have also set to work pressuring individual US senators seen as swing votes not to support the Democratic push for expanded voting rights. They held a rally in West Virginia targeting the centrist Democratic US senator Joe Manchin, according to the New Yorker.
Many of the most fervent backers of abortion bans are also championing anti-voting rights legislation in places such as Arizona, Georgia and Texas – three states that have emerged at the front of sweeping efforts across the US to make it harder to vote.
In Arizona, the Republican legislator Walter Blackman this session introduced an abortion ban bill that would have charged women and doctors with first-degree murder. The crime carries the death penalty in Arizona. Blackman, who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has also either sponsored or co-sponsored four bills the Brennan Center for Justice says would restrict voting in Arizona. Blackman tweeted in November he wanted to prevent Arizona from becoming another “third-world country when it comes to elections”.
In Texas in 2019, the Republican state house representative Briscoe Cain authored a Texas version of the so-called “heartbeat bill”, another six-week abortion ban. Cain also authored a sweeping bill with new voting restrictions that prohibits officials from mailing absentee ballot applications to voters who qualify, and gives poll watchers more power, something that could create more opportunities for voter intimidation. The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas said the measure “would make voting potentially dangerous with a new series of extreme criminal penalties”.
Grassroots agitators once seen as too extreme for serious consideration, but who gained traction during the Trump administration, have also hewn to peddling election conspiracy theories to justify limits on voting rights.
The Ohio-based anti-abortion extremist who wrote the first six-week abortion ban, Janet Porter, has been pushing fraud conspiracy theories since before Trump lost his re-election bid.
“These are the machines that are directly connected to George Soros. This is a very, very big problem,” Porter said on an evangelical TV show in late November 2020. The show now carries a YouTube disclaimer about election misinformation.
Doubling down on the big lie, however, does not come without risks. Anti-voting rights legislation threatens to undo the gains Trump made with Black and Latino voters, who will be disproportionately hurt by anti-voting rights legislation.
“The Republican party and the Christian right has invested a tremendous amount into minority recruitment,” said Fred Clarkson, an expert on the religious right and a researcher at Political Research Associates. “This is an underappreciated part of the strategy.
“It seems to run counter in some respects to the voter suppression bills that would clearly disproportionately affect poorer people and people of color,” said Clarkson.
Whitehead, the sociologist, said he believed Trump’s anti-voting campaign would be a defining feature of the future of lobbying on the religious right: “It had a huge effect and, I think it will be an effect that continues decades from now.”