Normalizing election theft
By 
The winger outrage being directed against corporations for making mild statements in favor of voting rights should be understood alongside the conservative intelligentsia openly coming out against democracy, as part of a larger effort to legitimize a Republican effort to just openly steal the Electoral College in 2024:
A new piece by Jonathan Last of the Bulwark helps make sense of this. Last argues that the frequent claim that Republicans didn’t conduct an autopsy into their 2020 losses is off base.
In reality, Last says, Republicans are conducting such an autopsy — a crowdsourced effort, not an official party committee one — and they are reaching a conclusion about how to win back power.
The rub is that that this conclusion has passed over what such autopsies conventionally do, i.e., figure out how to appeal to more voters. Instead, Last argues, Republicans are “leapfrogging the question of how to get more votes and focusing on how to use institutional leverage to take power even while losing popular majorities.”
This includes the wave of voter-suppression efforts across the country. It includes the explicit declaration that extreme gerrymanders can enable Republicans to win the House, which experts say could happen even if Democrats win the national 2022 popular vote for the House.
It includes primary challenges to Republican election officials for attesting to the integrity of 2020 GOP losses. Some of these challenges are brazenly premised on the suggestion that Republicans must succeed in overturning despised election outcomes next time.
Above all, Last says, this includes maintaining fealty to the Big Lie that the 2020 election was illegitimate — not because such mythmaking feels good, but rather to build the “political will to use raw power” over election machinery to swing hated results, to the maximal degree possible.
As Sargent says, Republican “anti-corporate” poses are a joke — they will spend the next two years fighting to keep their taxes low and fighting against other popular proposals corporate America doesn’t like. But opposition to Republican vote suppression efforts is viewed by Republican elites as an existential threat because they’ve given up on trying to appeal to national majorities.