Marc Elias: ‘Republicans, Their Plan for November Is to Make It Harder to Vote and Easier to Cheat’

Wallace: “Marc Elias, your thoughts on — everything is about democracy — I want to say stupid, Carvillism, but that sounds too crass in these times when everyone is on a knife’s edge. But everything ties back to one side wanting to take away and the other side wanting to give back to — when Joe Biden is running to be the president of all Americans, Donald Trump literally, in his own words, wants to prosecute and has described as subhuman a lot of the others. Where do we go from today?”

ELIAS: “So, look, we have to keep in mind two things. The first is that Republicans, their plan for November is to make it harder to vote and easier to cheat. The harder to vote is the voter suppression tactics, the voter intimidation, the efforts to prevent every eligible citizen from being able to cast their ballot and have it count. The easier to cheat is the stuff after the election, where they want to try to rig the rules through state legislatures and the like to try to undermine the will of the people. We have to be very clear-eyed that that’s their strategy. The second thing, though, Nicolle, and this is — I’m speaking now to the business community and everyone else. The fight for democracy is a fight of our time. It isn’t necessarily the fight we would have picked. It isn’t necessarily what everyone would have hoped would be top of mind and top of agenda. But our generation is going to be judged by what we did at this moment. When we were faced with a clear choice between democracy and autocracy. When we were facing down a wannabe dictator who was telling us out loud in clear, no uncertain terms, what he was going to do if he was put back in power. And the business leaders who care more about the short-term of their bottom lines will have to answer to the long-term of history, to their children and their grandchildren, for why in this moment in time, when they had so much power, and the ability to make so much difference, instead, they hid and they cowered. So, this is the time for civic courage. You know, civic courage in our community centers, civic courage in our boardrooms, civic courage in the media, for everyone to do everything they can every single day to protect our democracy.”