New Right strategists openly sought lower voter turnout to increase their leverage

Evidence

Weyrich went on to call for a constitutional convention in hopes of producing a form of government more congenial to conservatism. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said at a gathering in the fall of 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Richard Viguerie emphatically endorsed Weyrich’s radicalism, which in turn led both men to adopt a kind of experimental pragmatism in pursuing their ends. “One of the major differences in this group of new conservatives was that we weren’t afraid to try even when there was only a 20 per cent chance of success,” Viguerie wrote. “We knew that if you expected to hit a lot of home runs, you had to expect to strike out a lot.” — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 238

Categorization

• XREF: Links to voter-suppression and election-integrity debates; also to annihilating-caste reading of who benefits from restricted franchise. — connects to: Key New Right strategist wanted low voter turnout to boost conservative power — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 238; Well-organized extremist factions exploit low primary turnout to unseat even ideologically aligned incumbents — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1228; Low voter turnout may indicate absence of distrust rather than failure of support (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The frank admission that democracy-promotion rhetoric coexists with a strategic preference to shrink the electorate is a loaded, sit-with-it claim about the New Right’s relation to democracy.

Broader Connections

• Key New Right strategist wanted low voter turnout to boost conservative power #corroborates (1.00) — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 238
• Low voter turnout may indicate absence of distrust rather than failure of support #contradicts (0.80)
• Low voter turnout can signal satisfied acceptance rather than government failure. #contradicts (0.80) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 772
• Well-organized extremist factions exploit low primary turnout to unseat even ideologically aligned incumbents #qualifies (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1228
• Low primary turnout lets organized minorities defeat established incumbents #complicates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1228
• Neoliberal parties replaced mass-member pressure with marketing to atomized voters #expands (0.72) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 144
• Election-centered grassroots mobilization structurally demobilizes activists after winning #qualifies (0.70) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 617