This theme comes from a single video: six quotes from one segment of Roland S. Martin’s program, which has 1.8 million subscribers and sits on the Far Left of the study’s spectrum. The main voice is investigative journalist Greg Palast. The study doesn’t try to verify his claims. It records that the argument was made and how little of the rest of the spectrum took it up.

Palast’s case rests on voter purges. He described checking 198,000 Georgia voters who had been removed from the rolls as having moved, and said that a sample of 800 of them turned out to be almost entirely Black voters still living at their registered addresses. He also argued that suppression tactics cost Democrats three or four House seats, enough to decide control of the chamber.

His criticism of the Democratic Party is that it was absent from the fight. He said the party was “totally missing in action on vote suppression,” and that civil rights groups such as the Georgia NAACP and Black Voters Matter were doing the organizing instead. He pointed to Harris’s promise to sign the John Lewis Voting Rights Act after taking office, saying the problem had to be fixed before the election or there would be no chance to sign it. He also said he had been asking candidates for DNC chair when they would take on the issue.

One voice

No Center, Left, Right or Far Right voice in the study made this argument. Most commentators explained the result through strategy, turnout and demographic shifts, which keep the campaign at the center of the story. Palast’s argument puts the rules of voting there instead.

The editorial 2×2 places this theme under External and Tactical. If the argument holds, the response is year-round organizing on access: purges, voter ID and mail-ballot rules, and registration.