filibuster is the be all and end all here in washington, but these anti-voter bills that are passing are 100% partisan. as near as i can tell, no democrats in any states have voted for any of these bills. it s this irony of it s purely partisan in the states and yet we can t do anything about it because of the filibuster decrees that you have to have bipartisan support. i d love to have bipartisan support. so far, the republicans have said no, we re not going to talk about these voting rights issues. we are where we are. i m hoping american people will weigh in because democracy itself is at stake. 57% of all democrats support a simple majority to pass legislation and 15 percentage points more of republicans do. i hear what you re saying about
elections for years. the fact that violent criminals broke the law does not entitle senate democrats to break the senate. it is surreal to hear sitting senators invoke january the 6 tot justify. listen to this. to justify breaking rules to grab out ones they have not earned. what mitch mcconnell fails to understand or chooses to be blindly ignorant about is what those violent criminals who broke the law on january 6th acted to do. they were undermining our democracy by sowing doubt based on lies about the legitimacy of our electoral system. unfounded lies. so, yes, the insurrection is absolutely tied to the country s voting rights issues. in fact, in the years since the insurrection, voting became harder to do in some states. nbc news reports, this year 19 states, most of them controlled by republicans, enact 3d 4 laws that made voting harder while many blue states expanded access, particularly to male voting. that s according to brennan
side of bull connor and segregationists from the past. that has pushed away a lot of these republican lawmakers who needed an excuse to go against some of these voting rights issues, even though they re already opposed, and this has given them an easy option to say biden s rhetoric is too inflammatory. he s much more like trump than the uniter he said he would be. that s facetious in a way but something they used as cover and to drill home on the fact biden is struggling to gain the support of some of the moderate voters that pushed him into office. the fact we re still dealing with falling approval ratings at the one-year mark of his presidency, makes it harder for biden to counter some of the claims coming from the right. and we should also point out, abby, the washington post and others have said mcconnell
african-americans as well as young people is the drag on his job approval. his job approval i think at nbc polling was 43%, 44%. if his approval is in the eights among young voters and eights among african american voters he s causal flee close to a r50% approval mark. when you look at young voters and african american voters, you know, front and center is voting rights act and no more is that more front and senter than in the state you are in. symone, i talked to one frustrated activist on voting rights issues and she said to me, look, there s no way i can ever support the other party. i think the other party doesn t want me to be a member of their party she goes but i didn t agree with what that other guy did but he always seemed to be doing something. what she was saying was it feels like this president is not able to each get a small thing done. now, i know that s not true, there s a lot of small things, but she s not hearing it, right?
if would you like to revise it given there are so many road blocks that they ve hit. well none of the road blocks are surprising to me. this is january 2022. we knew in january 2021 where joe manchin and kyrsten sinema were on the filibuster. and for 12 months we ve known it. there is no surprise to me on the voting rights issues. look, the point of my op-ed wasn t to be polianish, this is a extraordinarily difficult cycle for democrats. i lived through 1994 working for schumer and 2010. but there are steps that you could take and we just heard there is a story to tell, the democrats need to tell this i believe very positive and could be persuasive for voters. so let s go through the i think it is five points here that you say that could help them survive the jinx. ignore the polls.