Trump's deployment of federal agents could suppress voter turnout, argues Jason Stanley, an expert on fascism at Yale University
- Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale University, argues that Trump's deployment of federal agents in cities such as Portland could serve to reduce voter turnout.
- Research suggests that voting declines in communities that have the most exposure to law enforcement.
- "One thing we need to worry about is CBP and ICE being used to intimidate people at the polls," Stanley said. "I'm not predicting it will happen. I'm not saying it will happen. I'm saying that we have to worry about it."
The deployment of federal agents in cities such as Portland, Chicago, and Albuquerque serves one purpose, from the perspective of President Donald Trump's reelection campaign, one expert believes: it shows the president of the United States taking the "law-and-order" fight to the left and people protesting police brutality, in cities led by Democrats.
"It's not obvious that it's working," Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor and expert on fascism at Yale University, said in an interview with Business Insider. Trump is less popular now than he was before civil unrest rocked major cities. That, however, presents another concern.
"If it doesn't work," Stanley said, "we also have to worry about the security of the election."
Author of the 2018 best-seller, "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them," Stanley already sees an anti-democratic side benefit to "flooding these cities with federal agents": "When people encounter law enforcement, they're much less likely to vote — to participate civically," he said citing Amy Lerman, a political scientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
That's supported by data. As Next City reported, Lerman and Yale political scientist Vesla Weaver analyzed survey data and found that "the probability of voting declined by 8% for respondents who had been stopped and questioned by the police."
A 2018 paper from Northwestern University political scientist Traci Burch likewise found that people in communities with the highest rate of police contact "were 50% less likely to vote than in neighborhoods with no residents enmeshed in the criminal justice system."
The mere presence of law enforcement in a community is enough to depress voter turnout. Republicans in New Jersey, for example, "recruited off-duty police officers wearing 'National Ballot Security Task Force' armbands to monitor polling places in Black and Latino neighborhoods," The New York Times noted earlier this year.
Stanley believes we should be on the lookout for such efforts to be carried out with the imprimatur of the state. The president, already "performing fascism," in Stanley's view, has repeatedly claimed to be the victim of phantom voter fraud while seeking to preemptively discredit a vote in 2020 that the polls currently project him losing.
"That's one nice thing about Trump: he's transparent," Stanley said. "When he talks about mail-in votes, it's clear that he doesn't want to leave a paper trail. There doesn't seem to be any sanction in place, if foreign governments interfere in our elections."
Having deployed DHS agents to arrest US citizens in Portland, Stanley thinks we should worry that Trump could be tempted to do so more broadly come November.
"One thing we need to worry about is CBP and ICE being used to intimidate people at the polls," Stanley said. "I'm not predicting it will happen. I'm not saying it will happen. I'm saying that we have to worry about it."
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