Since the election ended, I've seen a lot of hand wringing from some, and rejoicing from others, that the abortion issue supposedly motivated people at the polls to vote against Republican candidates.
Baloney.
First of all, in most locations, abortion wasn't on the ballot. It was in some places, namely Montana, Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont and California.
Montana's was shocking in that Montana does not allow for abortions pass the point of viability, and the proposed law would have required physicians to assist any such aborted baby born alive. The ballot measure failed.
Kentucky has a trigger law that's now being litigated, but its ballot measure stated:
Are you in favor of amending the Constitution of Kentucky by creating a new Section of the Constitution to be numbered Section 26A to state as follows: To protect human life, nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion?”
Voters rejected the amendment.
Michigan put a right to an abortion, of some sort, in its state constitution.
Vermont did as well, passing an initiative that stated:
That an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.
And California also put a right to an abortion into its state constitution.
So, in terms of the 2022 midterm election, what does this really tell us?
Well, this issue wasn't on the ballot in most places. Indeed, it brings up a real irony in regard to Wyoming, which enacted an anti Obama Care amendment out of the nonsensical fear of "death panels" securing individuals right to make their own health care decisions that risks being interpreted the way that these new constitutional provisions in various states do. It'll be interesting to see if the new legislature attempts to amend the bad amendment. Having adopted the thesis that everything associated with Obama Care must be bad, they can't really simply repeal the amendment, which would make a lot more sense.
Anyhow, as this issues was only on the ballot in these states, it probably says more about these states. All of them have a strong liberal streak in them, even Montana, so if it brought people out to the polls, those states weren't going full MAGA hog wild anyhow.
Indeed, only really Wyoming went full MAGA, with the state really diving into the shallow end of the pool head first, for which we'll pay in the next couple of years, but that's another topic.
Nationwide, what this really probably tells us is this.
Yes, abortion matters to a lot of voters, but it isn't the only thing that matters to a lot of those voters. Democracy as on the ballot over the entire country, and for a lot of people that outweighed abortion as they feared that a vote for the GOP was a vote, well, for something that looked disturbingly a bit like this:
That doesn't make those people, however, liberal progressives.
Rather, its a lesson to the GOP about it looking like, well, something like this:
It's also a lesson on something else, which I've long noted.
The "two party system" is stupid.
And its beginning, finally, to erode.
In Alaska its basically been abandoned, which has led to the rise of a Native American Democratic to Congress from Alaska, and which will be the source of a runoff between two Republican contenders for the Senate, one incumbent moderate and another a MAGA Republican.
If we had that system in Wyoming, I"m not sure that the results would have been a lot different, but what you would have had is two Republicans contending for Secretary of State. The Bonapartist one that won, and a moderate that lost to him in the primary. And the Governor's race would have been between Gordon and Bien, for what that's worth. I think Gordon would still have won that, but there's no denying that race made more sense than the one against a Democratic whose name we've already forgotten.
And more than that, there's utterly no reason that all of the issues conceived as "conservative" or "right wing" or progressive or "left wing" should be linked. And I think in this race, the voters started to decouple them to the disadvantage of the Republicans who have really linked them in a hardcore fashion.
If you listen to the GOP, if you oppose abortion you also have to support the death penalty, be a climate change denier, and believe that Donald Trump took every single vote cast in 2019.
That's absurd.
Indeed, I'll be there were a lot of conservative, Catholic, women who went to the polls and voted for the Democrats even if they were registered Republicans as they were worried about democracy, the environmental health of the country their children will live in, and want something done about firearms. They probably also opposed abortion, but weighting it all out, they thought the Democrats a better bet.
The messages, and there are two, are pretty clear.
The big message is that the two party system needs to be deinstitutionalized. That would be the end of "voting the straight ticket" as there'd be no straight ticket. People would have to run on their own merits and the ability of the parties to shovel out, well this;
would be greatly reduced.
Indeed, it might mean that candidates actually had to engage their brains a bit when they endorsed platitudes and explain them, and that voters might actually have to pay attention to what was actually proposed.
Indeed, on that score, there are probably quite a few Wyomingites that will be surprised to learn what they voted for, when they perfunctorily voted for Republican legislators, this upcoming winter.
As doing that, although it seems to be slowly taking hold, will take some time, the next best thing would be for people to reassess their loyalties to either of the two primary parties. Probably a lot of Republicans in the middle, and the two or three Democrats left in the middle, and lots of independents, really belong in the American Solidarity Party. Should the GOP not sink under the waves with Donald Trump, as it increasingly looks likely to do, the MAGA folks would really be better off in something like the Constitution Party, rather than the Grand Old Party, and so on.
In the near term, however, the Republicans need to wrest the ship's wheel away from Captain Donald "iceberg? I'm not hitting any iceberg" Trump.
In doing that, the GOP is going to have to come to the realization that embracing a big lie is killing it, and that embracing some of the extreme positions those who embrace the big lie do is driving people away.
Finally, while I've seen some real anger in some quarters on how voters didn't turn out, in some places, to vote Republican and therefore pro abortion issues advanced, consider this.
The entire legal position in opposition to abortion has been limited to Roe v. Wade since 1973. I.e., that it was wrongly decided. Society wide, the anti-abortion forces have done a terrific job of attacking abortion, and it has declined in the US from post Roe highs. But that doesn't equate with a complete ending of support for it entirely, and the fact that the basic legal point was, and always has been, that voters in the states should decide ironically somewhat weakens the argument on a state level. I.e., having said for 40 years that they should decide, they're getting to decide.
There was always another position, which was that a right to life existed on an existential and natural law level. But that argument was never made as a legal one, as the fear was that it was too scary of a proposition for many jurists. So now the second part of this work begins, that being that anti-abortion forces, who have been hugely successful in changing minds, need to keep at it.
But the efforts of the hard right in the GOP, which would link every hard right program with abortion, don't help that.
So, there's no cause for despair. The failure of the anti-abortion forces, in the few places they failed, doesn't mean a society wide rejection of their views. It means that for a lot of voters, when they go to the polls, they are thinking of a lot of other things, and on this issue, they may not even have thought that much. If the last person they heard talk about it was also talking about how Donald Trump should be President for Life and the danger of Jewish Space Lasers, and just viewed it as one of the list of items on some sort of political grocery list, well. . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment