Liberal: Dems’ Voter-Suppression Oops

“Democrats have been consumed by panic about voter suppression,” but, as election results and academic research show, voter-ID laws “have no significant impact on turnout” — though measures like early voting don’t “inherently tip the scales to Democrats” either, explains Bill Scher at RealClearPolitics. In the 2020 election, the share of mail ballots jumped to 44%, from 24% in 2016, yet Republicans picked up 13 seats. Meanwhile, Dems, despite their 2020 victories, “convinced themselves” they couldn’t win without “expansive” voting-rights legislation that they failed to pass, and Georgia’s voter-ID law drove them to “hysteria.” Yet 2022 “turnout nationwide is estimated to be the second highest for a midterm since 1968,” and Georgia’s record for early votes was “shattered.” Upshot: Voter-suppression tools today are “weak”; “turnout machines,” strong.

Libertarian: Private Sector to the Moon

“Following 11 years in which the space agency has had no launch capability of its own,” cheers Eric Berger at Reason, “NASA will soon attempt to fly its huge Space Launch System (SLS) booster for the first time.” No astronauts aboard this time, but the Artemis program aims at “a return to human moon missions.” And it comes “as the agency starts to embrace the commercial space industry.” NASA is shifting “from telling industry what to build” to “telling industry what it wants” and “then getting out of the way and letting businesses innovate.” Commercial vehicles such as SpaceX’s Starship will take the lead “role in launching and flying human beings to the moon.” Thanks to NASA’s partnership with “private visionaries committed to the human future in space, we are going back to the moon.”

From the right: GOP Must Adapt on Voting

“For the past two years, every Republican should have been either attempting to beat back the flood of ‘no excuse’ mail-in ballots saturating swing states, or building up a party network that could adapt to it,” fumes Eddie Scarry at The Federalist. Early and mail-in voting means “elections are happening for weeks before the designated day for official in-person voting,” leaving “a lot of time for dedicated activists to call or visit the homes of their voters, no matter how unmotivated they are, and tell them that they don’t have to wait at all.” If Republican leaders aren’t going to roll back early and mail-in voting, “then they’ll have to adapt and develop their own way of pushing their voters to cast ballots for weeks leading up to Election Day. That’s what Democrats are doing and it’s working.”

Foreign desk: Biden’s Huge China Task

“Although President Biden says there isn’t a need for another cold war,” argues Bradley A. Thayer at The Hill, “his first face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping” must “be cast into the framework of history.” Xi will now enter a “period of great activity akin to Truman’s ‘100 Days’ in 1947” to forward his goals: “that China can lead the world” and “that the party’s principal enemy, the United States, will be defeated and Taiwan conquered.” Thus, “the world is entering an even more dangerous time,” and “it falls to the Biden presidency” to “check China’s ambitious agenda.” It “must work with Congress to define and explain the struggle with the Chinese Communist Party, to deter Xi’s aggressive stance, and to move forward to defeat his goals.”

Tech watch: ‘Real’ Economy as Crazy as Crypto

“It’s been a great year for those of us who didn’t have the nerve to invest in crypto,” quips Ben Sixsmith at Spectator World: With “crypto giant FTX” bankrupt, non-investors can cry “At last!” They rightly “never trusted the utopian claims people made about crypto-currencies.” “Now, it’s easy to gloat. . . . As the modern classic Onion headline goes, ‘Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him.’ ” “Still, we shouldn’t gloat too much.” “Biden, Blair and the WEF — and the people around them — thought” FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was “the kind of chap they wanted to associate themselves with.” So let’s “not pretend that [crypto] is a deranged alternative to a stable and secure status quo.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board