This is really just the culmination of what
we’ve seen over the last several years,
and really several decades, coming from the Republican Party, which is an effort to win
and then to hold onto power by any means necessary. And I really think — you know, I’ve often
asked myself, you know, how far would they go to do this. And I don’t think I would
have come up with the answer “letting people die in order to hang onto power,” but that’s
literally what we’re seeing happen right
now in Wisconsin.
This is just an astounding story,
as Juan just was asking you about Milwaukee,
when you have this massively disproportionate death toll around the country of African Americans,
in one of the blackest and brownest areas
of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, five of 180 polling
places alone, so you’ve got these incredibly long lines. There’s one picture of a person
holding a sign in one of these lines, you
know, in mask, in gloves, which says,
“This is ridiculous.” And yet you have the speaker of the house, Assembly, in full hospital gear,
right? You’ve got that blue long robe. He’s
got plastic gloves. He’s got the mask. And
he’s telling voters, “It’s perfectly
safe to vote here.” Now, tell us what is
the inspiration, Jesse. What was the motivation, the state Supreme Court justice who was running
for reelection, why they wanted this race
to go forward?
Well, you know, the reason that that state
Supreme Court seat is so important is, you
know, the state Supreme Court has acted as a backstop for a lot of the Republican policies
that Wisconsin has instituted in the last
decade. It now has a conservative majority,
a 5-to-2 conservative majority, so it looks
like they’re safe. But, in fact, if this
justice were to lose — and he very possibly could lose if you held a fair and free election
— it would be a 4-to-3 split, and then,
within the next couple of years, that could
flip, and Democratic-aligned justices could take control of the court. Republican lawmakers
clearly don’t want that to happen at any
cost.
And one of the most immediate reasons for that is this upcoming case on a voter purge,
which was ordered by a Wisconsin judge last December. They purged more than 200,000 Wisconsinites
from the rolls. And that is now being challenged in court. But, you know, Wisconsin is one
of the battleground states. It may be the
decisive state in this year’s presidential
election. So, exactly who comes out to vote is extremely important there, right? President
Trump won the state by roughly 20,000 votes in 2016. Two hundred thousand people being
struck from the rolls could very easily alter the outcome in Wisconsin and possibly in the
nation. So, Republicans there are well aware of how important this is, and Donald Trump
is, too, which is why he weighed in on this
race. I just think it’s — I agree it’s
ridiculous, as the voter said, is very much
understating it.
And the lower the vote count, the more chance he would win?
I think there’s no question about that.
We already see that in the results coming
in, where the absentee ballots are coming
— were both requested by and coming in from
parts of the state that are wealthier, whiter, more conservative. That’s standard. I mean,
that’s just common practice, right? People
with more money and more time are going to
be more likely to vote, have the opportunities to vote, and vote absentee if they need to.
Many of the last-minute requests that came in for absentee ballots were coming from the
less well-off areas of the state, like Milwaukee. I’ll just say — sorry — just one point
here. The legal fight that’s going through
the Wisconsin courts right now is about this
purge, this purge off the rolls, a sort of
formal election purge of 200,000 voters. We’re
watching right now a purge of Wisconsin voters. They got their purge yesterday by keeping
so many voters home, by forcing other voters to show up who now may end up getting sick
and dying, literally. And, you know, they
knew exactly that’s what was going to happen.
They’re happy for that to happen. They won’t say it out loud, but they come very close.
