STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Hey, folks. You showed up. The turnout rate in this year's presidential election looks to be the third-highest in 100 years.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Yeah, and Republicans did really well. They won control of the House, Senate and the presidency. That directly contradicts conventional political wisdom that high turnout inherently favors Democrats.
INSKEEP: NPR's voting correspondent, Miles Parks, has been looking into this, and he's in our studios. Good morning, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Steve.
INSKEEP: Thanks for coming by Studio 31. How do you think now about this general idea for many years that turnout - high turnout - favors Democrats?
PARKS: So this idea was never a hard-and-fast rule. It centers on people who only vote usually in big presidential races or every once in a while - people known as low-propensity voters.
INSKEEP: Right.
PARKS: Research has found that these sorts of people are generally less educated, are poorer people generally, and those sorts of people have tended to vote for Democratic candidates. Therefore, higher turnout brings out more of these sorts of people, helps Democrats. But Trump seems to have really changed the game here. Exit polls found that he did really well among people without a college degree and also won people who said it was the first time they'd ever cast a ballot. So the question now is whether this is going to change how Republicans feel about voter turnout and also, critically, policies that make voting easier, since those policies have been shown to help low-propensity voters the most.
INSKEEP: Oh. And up to now, Republicans, as a party, have fought efforts to make voting easier. In fact, that was the heart of their complaints about the 2020 election - was voting was too easy.
PARKS: Right. And generally, those complaints have been centered on election security, but politics have always played a role as well. I talked with John Merrill, who is the former top voting official in Alabama. He's a Republican. And he told me how he used to argue with fellow Republicans about whether registering new voters was a good idea.
JOHN MERRILL: I had people, when I would speak to some Republican groups - they'd tell me, I don't like that. I don't think that's a good thing. And I'm like, why would you say that? And they're like, because you're going to get more Blacks, and you're going to get more Democrats.
PARKS: It is not usually said out loud that explicitly, but Trump himself, in 2020, said he thought higher voting levels would mean that Republicans would have a harder time getting elected. I'm really interested to see if his views on that change now that he seems to have benefited from a high-turnout election.
INSKEEP: Yeah. And there is this long-standing kind of conservative line of argument that maybe not everybody should vote 'cause a lot of people aren't paying attention, and maybe you really don't want their participation. But that was the old way of thinking, so is this shift to a new way for Republicans to think really happening?
PARKS: I think it's helpful to think about the Republican Party in different kind of groups or factions, right? Some conservatives have argued for years that making it harder for people to vote was actually bad for the party. And this year, we saw a real shift in strategy compared to 2020, specifically with many Republican campaigns embracing the idea of early voting and mail voting - telling voters to vote that way. But what I heard from experts as I reported this story was that the Trump right - the most kind of MAGA right - may still struggle with the idea of access a little bit. Here's how Charles Stewart, who's a voting expert at MIT, put it to me.
CHARLES STEWART: If you're a Republican strategist, it does require you to kind of rethink some of these things. If you're part of the Republican Party that really is motivated by nativism and nationalism, I think it's going to be harder to make that leap.
INSKEEP: Hmm.
PARKS: There is just a clear opposition among some in the Republican Party to widening the tent of American politics. We see this in survey data. And over the last couple years, I've listened to a bunch of grassroots election integrity sort of meetings, and you can hear skepticism about bringing new people into the electorate.
INSKEEP: NPR's Miles Parks turned out in our studios this morning. Thanks for coming by.
PARKS: Thanks, Steve. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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