They started doing that immediately after Trump uttered the words "this is a fraud on the American public" and we got a good look into how effective those efforts really were in 2022. Remember that "red wave" that was supposed to happen last year? How'd that go?
And that axiom I mentioned? It was established before said efforts and survived them. That's how toxic Trump is, and it's why other GQP candidates are currently talking about raising the voting age to 21. That will never fly because it requires a consitutional amendment, and that shit ain't happening between now and next November.
But that's not even the point. The point is that all this chatter about "raise the voting age" is an acknowledgement that at the state level, they didn't do near enough to suppress D votes and that they need to do more to accomplish that. They don't know how to do that in a way that would survive court challenges.
Regarding the age issue, it can only get worse for the R's as we must consider that 1) there were a bunch of people ages 14-17 in 2020 who could not vote then and will be able to in 2024 and 2) the Gen Z demographic was as lopsided as could be against the GQP before Dobbs, and after Dobbs, they swung away from them even harder. In 2016, they accounted for 2% of the election. In 2020 it was 7.5% and next year, they look to figure in for about 13%. Combine them with the millennials, that looks to be more than one-third (37%) of the electorate. Trump does very poorly with that demo in the swing states.
The GQP certainly doesn't think that way, but their problem is that they're stupid criminals. Where as you might see them as Lex Luthor and Skeletor, what they really are amount to Harry and Marv from Home Alone. This is going to remain true as long as that "party" remains a collection of social media personalities who think clicks/views/subscriptions translate to electoral victories. The MAGA faction has been believing in that belief since 2018, and they've been knocked on their asses over and over for it.
We already got a preview of both states in the last two years. The GQP in Georgia couldn't even propel a Heisman Trophy-winning football hero into the Senate. Now you might say that the GQP voters in GA are racist, and I'm not gonna fight you on that...but still, Walker was running against a black dude that hates Trump. Their choice was "black dude that loves Trump vs. uppity negro that hates Trump," and the latter still won. And again, this was all pre-indictments.
As to Wisconsin, we got a good look at where they are with the Protasiewicz win against that MAGA loser Daniel Kelly just 4 months ago. That was nothing to sneeze at, and it was literally done on the same day Trump was indicted in NY (aka the first of the three), so it's safe to say the indictment played no role in this particular election.
If anything, Trump's legal entanglements plus the gaggle of absolutely loathsome Supreme Court decisions, due entirely to Trump's packing of the court, likely expand that margin. This apathy you speak of would be most pronounced in mid-term election years. It would also be most pronounced under the flurry of the aforementioned legislations at the state level. All that was supposed to happen at once last year, and yet here we sit with a slightly blue senate, only a nominally red house, Trump is indicted in multiple states, and his competitors in his own party are already yelling about raising the voting age with the deliberate intent to disenfranchise a very large demographic precisely because they know they'll go overwhelmingly against that stupid party the first chance they get. Seriously I don't think some of you quite appreciate how transparently pathetic that whole "raise the voting age" thing makes them look even to independents. It looks like...well, this.
In closing, what this shit really comes down to is two categories of people: independent voters and unlikely voters. It's not about making the base so mad that they press the button harder next time. That's just feelings and emotions. Trump is just playing to his base, not branching out to reconnect himself with the independent voters that he did win in 2016. I won't say much about unlikely voters because I think most of you know that those have been overwhelmingly in rejection of the President-reject. That said, if you want to get a good idea of where independent voters are heading, just check out this excerpt from a New Yorker article:
"Among self-identified independents who don’t lean toward either party, the survey yielded more ambiguous results. Fewer than half of these respondents—between thirty-seven per cent and forty-six per cent, depending on the specific cases—said they believed that Trump had committed a crime. And about half of these respondents said that the charges were politically motivated. But, although these findings seem encouraging for Trump and his supporters, the survey also found that the number of independents who believe that Trump has done something criminal is growing, especially in relation to the classified-documents case. In a Bright Line Watch survey carried out last October, thirty-four per cent of independents said that a crime had been committed in that case. In the latest poll, that number had grown to forty-six per cent."
And it's not just independent voters:
"This suggests that, as prosecutors release more details of the charges and evidence against Trump, opinion is slowly shifting against him among less partisan voters. The survey even showed evidence of movement among Republicans. Since last October, the percentage of Republicans who said they believed that Trump had committed a crime in handling classified documents rose from nine to twenty-five. “We have to keep two things in mind at the same time,” Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth who co-founded Bright Line Watch, told me on Monday. “On the one hand, the public is incredibly polarized on these cases. On the other hand, the new evidence does seem to be moving the needle.”
So in 2018, he started to lose support in electoral form and lost the House
In 2020, he lost more support in electoral form, lost the Senate, and was voted out
In 2022, he lost even more support in electoral form, the GQP barely gained the House because of gerrymandering fuckery, and the D's gained a Senate seat
In 2023 he is losing even more support due to the indictments
So he's gonna...what...gain all that support back and win the general?