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“The Republicans should pray for rain”—the title of a paper published by a trio of political scientists in 2007—has been an axiom of American elections for years. The logic was straightforward: each inch of election-day showers, the study found, dampened turnout by 1%. Lower turnout gave Republicans an edge, because the party’s affluent electorate had the resources to vote even when it was inconvenient. Their opponents, less so.
The findings offered an empirical reason for Republicans to make voting harder. The party had already adopted voting restrictions as an ideological plank, one previously advanced by southern Democrats courting white support in the Jim Crow era. In 2013 the Supreme Court gutted the pre-clearance system under the Voting Rights Act that had forced southern states to vet changes to their voting rules with the federal government. Alabama, Mississippi and Texas immediately enacted voter ID laws that had been previously blocked. Over the next decade 29 states passed nearly 100 bills to restrict voting, and Donald Trump’s obsession with “election integrity” became Republican doctrine.
Yet Mr Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has scrambled the voting coalitions that underpinned the pray-for-rain logic. Rich people used to vote Republican and poor people Democratic. But the correlation started to wane in the 2000s and ultimately flipped for white voters when Mr Trump ran, according to research by Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope at Brigham Young University. Poor blacks and Hispanics still voted Democratic, but in 2024 they too moved to the right. At the same time, voters without college degrees took to the Republican Party and the college-educated moved in...