The GOP's relentless election strategy seems doomed to fail this year

There’s an old, humorous and semi-serious piece of strategy advice often dispensed to new lawyers which holds, “When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. When the law is on your side, pound on the law. And when neither is on your side, pound on the table.”

North Carolinians are witnessing a kind of political world version of this adage play out right now in the behavior and actions of the state’s Republicans in preparation for the 2026 fall elections.

Weighed down in the polls by the nation’s increasingly evident fatigue with President Trump and his feckless congressional allies, soaring prices and economic inequality, an unknown and weak U.S. Senate candidate, and their own embarrassing inability to enact a timely state budget, Republican officials have once again resorted to the political equivalent of courtroom table pounding: a new round of voter suppression.

Faced with what looks increasingly like a pitchfork-bearing electorate, GOP pols and their appointees have turned again to their tried-and-true tactic of keeping as many citizens as possible – especially young people, poor people and people of color – from voting. As NC Newsline’s Lynn Bonner reported, a sweeping new election law bill unveiled and moving quickly in the state House this week would alter who can vote in North Carolina, how they can vote, and how votes are counted.

The bill comes just days after the Republican-controlled Wake County Board of Elections voted along partisan lines to reject the N.C. State University student center in Raleigh as an early voting site for the general election.

The decision to relocate the voting site to a building a mile away from the student center was couched by a GOP board member as being about parking, but it was, in fact, just the latest in a long line of almost laughably transparent Republican efforts to depress turnout by college students and other Democratic-leaning voters.

Similar closures and/or refusals to open early voting sites have occurred at Western Carolina University, NC A&T, and UNC-Greensboro for the March primary – all of them places where thousands of voters (many of whom lack private transportation) live nearby.

And, of course, ever since Republicans captured control of the state legislature at the outset of the last decade, they’ve advanced a steady stream of proposals and new laws designed to make voting harder and more complicated and make the day-to-day oversight and regulation of elections more partisan.

Together with an utterly shameless commitment to partisan gerrymandering, the flaying of campaign finance regulations, and Trump’s cynical fairytales about “stolen elections,” these efforts have helped maintain Republican control of government by breeding a sense of powerlessness, helplessness and apathy amongst voters – see the 2024 election results in North Carolina – who might oppose their policies.

Unfortunately for the GOP, it’s beginning to look very much as if the 2026 election could turn out to be a political comeuppance in which voter suppression schemes go for naught.

And that’s because while it’s true that things like an inconvenient polling place or a reduction in early voting days can make a difference in a tight election in which voters opposed to the status quo are confused, divided or discouraged, 2026 looks very different. Indeed, 2026 is starting to shape up as the kind of election in which these kinds of voter suppression tactics could even end up serving as powerful get-out-the-vote tools for Democratic organizers.

Not only is Trump himself not on the ballot and in less of a position to push back against his cratering poll numbers, but as a growing cadre of pollsters and politicos have noted, voters – especially independents – are clearly angry and ready for change.

As veteran conservative GOP election expert Carter Wrenn noted in a recent column on the Ohio U.S. Senate race, a radical shift in the attitudes of independents has generated a huge surge toward Democratic nominee Sherrod Brown. Two years ago, Trump won the state by 11 points. Today, Brown leads by eight points – what Wrenn calls a “groundshaking 19 point shift” – thanks to a 53-35% lead among unaffiliated voters.

Veteran Democratic consultant Thomas Mills sees a similar trend at work in North Carolina where Roy Cooper’s dominance of the U.S. Senate race continues to play out:

With the start of voting still four months away, nothing of course is certain. Trump may seldom have law or facts on his side, but he remains the nation’s loudest table pounder and someone perfectly willing to do or inspire whatever it takes – lawful or otherwise – to hold on to power. Assuming, however, that American democracy remains largely intact for at least a while longer, the signs are increasingly strong that even aggressive voter suppression efforts will be insufficient to hold back the tide of citizens demanding change.

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