Unpolled

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, an influential conservative activist, said in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Sam Levine "Trump says Republicans would ‘never’ be elected again if it was easier to vote”

This 40+ year-old quote has become the basis of an understanding that Republican efforts to change early-voting and vote-by-mail laws, along with a host of other items, was born out a realization that the Republican party is, at it's core, a minority party. And so the only way it can win elections (and thus hold on to power that isn't due them) is by attempting to narrow the voting public enough that its motivated voters are enough to carry the day, even though, in the grand scheme of things, they're outnumbered. Hence the current conventional wisdom that:

And these new laws point to an even more troubling problem that threatens to undermine our democracy: the GOP’s eroding commitment to democratic values, like free and fair elections.
Geoffrey Skelley “How The Republican Push To Restrict Voting Could Affect Our Elections” FiveThirtyEight

It's worth noting that journalists are citizens, and thus voters, too, and the general negative partisanship and lack of social trust that the United States is currently grappling with can influence them as much as it influences anyone else. And to the degree that people who aren't themselves Republicans tend to see Republican's negatively, journalists who aren't Republicans can do the same.

But there's also another thing in play: a "democratic value" of listening to one's constituents and acting on their concerns. Sure, a lot of people might say that those concerns should be subjected to tests of accuracy and ethics before being brought to the floor of a legislature, but isn't saying "people can only have what they want if it passes some test independent of them" also capable of undermining democracy? I don't think that everyone believes that a commitment to democratic values means that the will of the people, however that's defined, should always prevail, no matter where it goes. While conservatives are more likely to be vocal, especially recently, in their rejection that the outcomes of elections should determine what society treats as right and wrong, liberals have their own version of this.

That said, the current monster that the Republican party has to contend with, namely a voter base that sees itself as forgotten at best and actively persecuted at worst, is one of their own making. As a candidate for President, Donald Trump tapped into sentiments that, for all that the Republican Establishment ignored them, were quite real and animating for people. And perhaps more to the point, were widespread. But one of the things at work here is the idea that they're even more widespread than they're given credit for. The rank-and-file Republicans who turn out with their Stop the Steal signs, or suddenly found themselves adrift after the Biden inauguration don't have anything against free and fair elections. What they have is a conviction that in free and fair elections, untainted by partisan dirty tricks or foreign interference, they would usually, if not always, win. They're convinced that, if elections are a game, they don't need to play to find out what happens; they know what the outcome should be.

And its that sense of rightness, whether natural or motivated, that's boxed the Republican party into the position that they're in now. Paul Weyrich's quote has become a proof that the leadership of the Republican party is desirous of power at the expense of democracy, but it's an open question of the degree to which the formal leadership of the party is actually in charge.

If one assumes that President Trump is an enthusiastic and deliberate liar, it may also be worthwhile to assume that he understands the first rule of lying: start with things that people want to believe. And for all that "take Trump seriously, rather than literally" was panned up one side and down the other. most of the whoppers that he told while in office, starting with the size of the crowd as his inauguration, were about telling the people who supported him that they were on the right side of things. And it worked. It took the President's obvious mishandling of a global pandemic to mute his support enough for him to lose the election, and even that required record turnout from Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. (Turnout that, it seems, fed into Republican paranoia that cheating was afoot.)

While it's easy to see the actions of Republican lawmakers, especially at the state level as anti-democratic, it's likely more accurate to say that they're anti-Democratic. In a Pew survey from 2019, 53% of Republicans surveyed said that the Democratic party had few to no good ideas. Only 15% of Republicans viewed Democrats as governing at least somewhat ethically. And back in 2016, 45% of Republicans felt that Democratic policies “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.”

And this isn't a one-sided phenomenon. I suspect that a lot of Democrats would say that Republican backed legislation to limit voting isn't a good idea, isn't even somewhat ethical and is so misguided that it threatens the nation's well-being. No-one believes that the evil are innocent. To say that the Republican party has abandoned free and fair elections is to attribute to them the knowledge that elections were, and if they did nothing would remain, free and fair.

And sure, it's become popular to describe the idea that the election was stolen as "baseless." But for billions of people worldwide, the claim that one Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, sent by the god of Abraham to be humanity's messiah, is also baseless. I suspect that few people have stopped going to church because that was pointed out to them. This is, in the end, a matter of faith. A large segment of the Republican base takes it on faith that they are in a high-stakes battle for their survival, and the survival of the nation, and they're bringing Republican lawmakers, believers and cynics alike, along with them. Because whether they want other people's votes to count, theirs still do.