Republicans Support Not Just Sedition But Also Secession From the U.S.

Back in January, shortly after the MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection in Washington, D.C., a Neo-Confederate “Lost Cause” Texas Republican state legislator Kyle Biedermann filed a ‘Texit’ bill for election on whether state should secede from the United States:

As promised, District 73 state Rep. Kyle Biedermann submitted legislation calling for a statewide election on whether Texas should secede from the United States.

Biedermann, R-Fredericksburg, filed House Bill 1359, officially titled the Texas Independence Referendum Act, on Tuesday.

If approved by the 87th Legislature and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, voters could decide to assign a joint legislative committee to draft plans for Texas independence.

In February, Texas Republicans endorsed legislation to allow vote on secession from US:

The Texas Republican party has endorsed legislation that would allow state residents to vote whether to secede from the United States.

In a talkshow interview, the then-party chair, Allen West, argued that: “Texans have a right to voice their opinions on [this] critical issue.

“I don’t understand why anyone would feel that they need to prevent people from having a voice in something that is part of the Texas constitution”, the former Florida congressman said of the Texas Referendum Independence Act. “You cannot prevent the people from having a voice.”

Note: Allen West is now challenging Texas Governor Greg Abbott from the even farther-right fringe in the GQP primary for governor. Allen West announces he is running against Gov. Greg Abbott in Republican primary, no doubt running on the Texas Nationalist Movement platform.

Fact Check: Current Supreme Court precedent, in Texas v. White (1869), held that the states cannot secede from the union by an act of the state. The Court held that individual states could not unilaterally secede from the Union and that the acts of the insurgent Texas legislature–even if ratified by a majority of Texans–were “absolutely null.”

See also Texas can’t legally secede from the U.S., despite popular myth:

[T]he Republic of Texas did not join the United States until 1845, when Congress approved the Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States.

This resolution, which stipulated that Texas could, in the future, choose to divide itself into “New States of convenient size not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas” is often a cause of confusion about the state’s ability to secede. But the language of the resolution is clear: Texas can split itself into five new states. It says nothing of splitting apart from the United States.

A conservative icon, the late Justice Antonin Scalia explained: “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.”

In May, House Bill 1359, the Texas Independence Referendum Act, died in committee. Texas bill calling for referendum on secession is dead. For now. (subscriber content).

Yet the Sedition Party is all in on this seceding from the United States and resurrecting the dead Confederacy. The “lost cause” of Confederate revisionist history is now the “lost cause” revisionist history of Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen. How Trumpism Is Becoming America’s New “Lost Cause”; Donald Trump and the new Lost Cause.

A new Bright Line Watch poll finds 66% of southern Republicans say they want the South to secede from the United States and form a smaller, regional country (that would be the Confederate States of America) (excerpt):

A key finding: Distressingly high proportions of respondents say they would be willing to secede from the United States to join a new union of states in their region. Support is higher among Republicans in Republican-dominated regions and among Democrats in Democrat-dominated regions, but the idea’s popularity has risen in some partisan groups and regions of the country since Biden’s inauguration.

Secession

President Biden made it a signature goal to reunite a country scarred by partisan and regional divides. Our surveys seek to assess whether the animus that characterized the Trump era persists. We therefore repeated a question from our January/February 2021 survey asking respondents in our public sample about their support for breaking up the United States. As in last winter’s survey, we asked respondents the following:

“Would you support or oppose [your state] seceding from the United States to join a new union with [list of states in new union]?”

We constructed five prospective new unions and inserted the relevant states for respondents into the question wording above. For example, a participant from California in our survey would be asked about joining a new union along with Washington, Oregon, Hawaii and Alaska. These sets are provided below:

• • • Pacific: California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and Alaska
    • Mountain: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico
    • South: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee
    • Heartland: Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska
    • Northeast: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia

As in our previous report, we caution that this survey item reflects initial reactions by respondents about an issue that they are very unlikely to have considered carefully. Secession is a genuinely radical proposition and expressions of support in a survey may map only loosely onto willingness to act toward that end. We include the question because it taps into respondents’ commitments to the American political system at the highest level and with reference to a concrete alternative (regional unions).

Support for secession under the specific hypothetical unions format is illustrated in the map below. As in the previous survey, levels of expressed support for secession are arrestingly high, with 37% of respondents overall indicating willingness to secede. Within each region, the dominant partisan group is most supportive of secession. Republicans are most secessionist in the South and Mountain regions whereas it is Democrats on the West Coast and in the Northeast. In the narrowly divided Heartland region, it is partisan independents who find the idea most attractive.

These patterns are consistent from our January/February survey, but the changes since then are troubling. Our previous survey was fielded just weeks after the January 6 uprising. By this summer, we anticipated, political tempers may have cooled — not necessarily as a result of any great reconciliation but perhaps from sheer exhaustion after the relentless drama of Trump. For instance, the historian Heather Cox Richardson posited that sustained consideration of the Big Lie narrative would diminish political ardor among Trump supporters, which she related to waning popular support for secession in the Confederacy during the spring of 1861.

Yet rather than support for secession diminishing over the past six months, as we expected, it rose in every region and among nearly every partisan group. The jump is most dramatic where support was already highest (and has the greatest historical precedent) — among Republicans in the South, where secession support leapt from 50% in January/February to 66% in June. Support among Republicans in the Mountain region increased as well, by 7 points, from 36% to 43%. Among Democrats in the West, a near-majority of 47% (up 6 points) supports a schism, as do 39% (up 5 points) in Northeast. Support jumped 9 points among independents in the Heartland as well, reaching 43%. Even subordinate partisan groups appear to find secession more appealing now than they did last winter, though only increases for Democrats in the South, Heartland, and Mountain regions are statistically discernible at the 0.05 significance level. The broad and increasing willingness of respondents to embrace these alternatives is a cause for concern.

Some other findings in the new Bright Line Watch poll:

Maricopa audit experiment

The June 2021 survey included an experiment to test the effects of efforts to undermine acceptance of the result of the 2020 election. Numerous GOP officials at the state and federal level are questioning whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected and using these charges to justify changes to state laws that curtail the independence of local electoral officials, potentially bringing electoral administration under partisan control.

Our experiment focuses on the ongoing Republican Party “audit” of votes in Maricopa County, Arizona. We sought to test how news of a partisan process questioning electoral outcomes would affect confidence in electoral integrity. Maricopa is the largest county in a state that swung from Republican in 2016 to Democratic in 2020. The county conducted multiple audits after the 2020 election, some procedurally uncontroversial, others politicized and contested. The initial audits were automatic, given the closeness of the vote count, and conducted first by the Secretary of State. Subsequently, the county’s Board of Supervisors conducted tests of Maricopa’s vote-counting machines. None of these investigations showed any evidence of problems, but, in March 2021, the Republican caucus in the Arizona State Senate commissioned an additional audit of the Maricopa ballots, hiring a firm with dubious expertise, and whose CEO endorsed conspiracy theories about the election, to conduct the process. At the time that our survey was in the field, the Maricopa “audit” remained incomplete and unresolved.

To estimate the effect of a procedurally legitimate audit and a partisan pseudo-audit on confidence in that result, we randomly assigned our survey respondents to one of three conditions. A third were presented with the following information:

Maricopa County is a large county in Arizona in which Phoenix is located. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden received 49.81% of the vote in Maricopa County and Donald Trump received 47.65% of the vote.

Another third of our participants were provided the basic information above and then asked to read the following news story recounting the uneventful, confirmatory audits:

Maricopa County has already conducted multiple audits of the 2020 election

Before and after every election, it’s standard procedure in Maricopa County to conduct a “logic and accuracy” test on election equipment. In 2020, those tests turned up no issues. State law also mandates a hand-count audit of a statistically significant sample of ballots after each election to be compared to the machine count. That, too, came up with 100% accuracy, according to county election officials.

In January, after waves of protests, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved two additional audits of election equipment. The board hired two independent firms, Pro V&V and SLI Compliance, which are certified by the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission. The firms conducted their separate audits in February and found no issues.

The audits included tests for malicious software and hardware, source codes, network and internet connectivity, and accuracy to detect vote switching. Observers from both parties were invited to attend, and the audits were live streamed.

Finally, one third of survey respondents were presented with the basic information about Maricopa, then asked to read this news story describing the partisan “audit”:

The Arizona GOP’s Maricopa County audit

Although every state has certified its results, the Republican-controlled state Senate in Arizona has undertaken a full hand recount and audit of the ballots and voting machines in Maricopa, the state’s largest county, a move that has been frequently praised by former president Trump.

By subpoena, the state Senate took possession of 2.1 million ballots and nearly 400 election machines and turned them over to be audited by companies that include one whose CEO promoted debunked election fraud theories after the election. The majority-Republican county board of supervisors vehemently objected to the action and pointed to the multiple audits of ballots and machines that Arizona had already completed that had found no issues.

In response to a subpoena from the state Senate, the county board argued the legislature had no right under state law to access private ballots and election machines. The GOP-led Senate tried to hold the board in contempt, but fell a vote short.

After reading the materials, participants were asked how confident they were that the official count of votes for president in Maricopa County was correct. The figure below illustrates the percentages of respondents who were “very confident” or “somewhat confident” in the count in each condition (as opposed to “not too confident” or “not at all confident”).

Democratic confidence in the count is high and not measurably affected by information about audits.  The treatments have no statistically significant effects among independents either. Among Republicans, however, exposure to information about the official audit more than doubled confidence in the vote count, which increased from 22% to 48%. These results suggest that information about standard processes intended to verify the results of elections can be reassuring to Republicans who might otherwise be sympathetic to the claims of electoral fraud and irregularities that President Trump and his allies so frequently make.

Exposure to the news story about the fracas over the partisan “audit” also increased confidence in the count relative to the baseline condition, but only to 31%, 17 percentage points less than the official audit. The role of Republicans in the process may have been initially reassuring to co-partisans. However, the news article does not discuss the ultimate outcome of the pseudo-audit, which is unknown at this time but widely expected to question the final vote tally. Such an outcome seems more likely to reduce voter confidence among co-partisans than to increase it.

There is much more in this Bright Line Watch poll which is concerning for the state of our democracy. This country may be as divided and polarized now as it was in 1860 just before the Civil War.