Plot the Vote

When Vivek Ramaswamy was supposedly running for the Republican nomination for President, he floated the idea that the voting age be raised to 25 or thereabouts (I don't care enough at this moment to go look it up), with certain exceptions for military or "first responder" service. While people on the American Left were quick to jump on this as some sort of embrace of Fascism (pointing to the fact that only current and former soldiers could vote in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers) it was much more easily explained as a partisan plan to remove a group of consistently Democratic voters from eligibility, since the exceptions that the plan allowed just happened to be groups that tended to lean more Republican.

Republican Senator and Vice-Presidential pick J. D. Vance has similarly drawn fire for comments he'd made previously where he said that parents should basically have more political rights than non-parents. But again, this is another nakedly partisan suggestion. While plenty of parents are left-leaning, allowing parents to effectively have more votes and greater access to political office would mean a political advantage for Republicans, since people old enough to vote, but younger than the age at which people tend to start having children tend to be more liberal, and those people who do marry and start having children young are more likely to have Conservative mindsets. Again, nothing new here.

I'm not sure why these sorts of proposals aren't treated as the alternatives or supplements to practices like gerrymandering that they are. Especially considering that few people on the Republican side of things are going to see these as indicative of some sort of prejudicial thought process (or think it inappropriate, even if they do). As the American electorate ossifies into partisan camps that become an increasingly central aspect of voters' identities, finding new voters becomes more and more difficult. And so looking for ways to suppress turnout on the other side becomes the new go-to tactic for people looking to prove their partisan bona fides to the party faithful and activist class.