1). “A Surprisingly Good Night for Democrats Was a Much Better One for Socialists”, Nov 13, 2023, Branko Marcetic, Jacobin, at < https://jacobin.com/2023/11/
2). “Off-year US election shows mass popular support for defending democratic rights”, Nov 8, 2023, Jacob Crosse, World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), at < https://www.wsws.org/en/
3). “Democrats Shouldn’t Let Up on Abortion Rights”, Nov 13, 2023, Molly Jong-Fast, Vanity Fair, at < https://www.vanityfair.com/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introductionby dmorista: Over the last week, the loud-mouth pundits and analysts have been filling airwaves and the pages of such ruling-class publications like the New York Times and Washington Post with their impressions of what happened, often quite different from what they had predicted before the elections. The three articles posted here take somewhat different conclusions from that taken by the “main stream Corporate Controlled Media”.
The article in Item 1)., ““A Surprisingly Good Night for Democrats ….”, looks at a number of local elections, largely ignored by the Corporate Outlets. The author Marcetic, writing for Jacobin, an important leftwing publication that largely hews to the political line taken by The Democratic Socialists of America, discusses a number of municipal and state level elections where Socialist candidates were in the running, and where socialist sponsored and/or supported ballot proposals were voted on. He notes that there was a general trend of around 70% wins by those candidates and proposals. The material in Item 2)., “Off-year US election shows mass popular support ….” looks at the results though the Trotskyist viewpoint of the WSWS. The analysis notes that the low level of support for Joe Biden is overcome for many voters by issues. It also discusses the recent New York Times poll showing that Donald Trump is ahead of Joe Biden in 5 of 6 key “swing states” (Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona) and only ahead in one, Wisconsin. The article also points out that the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians is costing the Democratic Party support for Biden: “.... among broad layers of the population, including young people, Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans. A John Zogby Strategies survey of 500 Arab-Americans conducted between October 23 and 27 found that support for Biden had plummeted from 59 percent in 2020 to 17 percent last month, a 42-percent drop.” The article also points out that even in the victory of Andy Beshear in the Kentucky Gubenatorial race against the Forced-Birth fanatic Republican State Attorney General Daniel Cameron Beshear's and Cameron's total votes actually fell over the results from the 2019 election.
In Item 3)., “Democrats Shouldn’t Let Up on Abortion Rights”, the author makes the point that Democrats should aggressively tie any Republican they oppose in an election with their personal, or at least with the Republican Party's, staunch Anti-Choice / Forced-Birth positions. The Republicans have a serious “primary” problem in as much as the most extreme right-wing elements of that party control the primaries. That constituency is all in for forcing women to suffer through even the most horrific pregnancies regardless of the likely outcome or if rape or incest were involved when woman (or girl) became pregnant in the first place.
Abortion is the most hot-button issue in many elections, but there are plenty of other issues people care about and that can drive how they vote: these include the horrific gun violence in the U.S., protection of Social Security and Medicare from being looted and privatized (already underway for Medicare), the outrageous cost of higher education for young people and the predatory student loans, the endless attacks on public schools, the housing crisis in many urban areas, the increasing level of Climate Change and disastrous weather events, and a host of other issues are also of great concern to most people. There is also the ever-looming threat of an overt fascist takeover, should Trump manage to squeak out another minority level Electoral College win, pushed through by voter suppression and Reactionary State Legislatures.
Let's be realistic. There will not be a national socialist political party arise in the next year so it will be necessary to vote for the Democratic Candidate of President in 2024. It is nothing but a "buying time" vote, but the Trumpian program is clear, it would be like 1933 in Weimar Germany.
A Surprisingly Good Night for Democrats Was a Much Better One for Socialists
The potential for progressive change is very much alive in American states and cities. Socialists had a strong showing at the state and local levels across the country last week, winning four of six ballot measures and gaining eleven seats overall.
Wednesday’s election results held no shortage of surprises, as the Democratic Party shocked itself with a successful showing that defied dismal poll numbers for President Joe Biden. But one pattern has continued to hold over the past half-decade or so of US elections and was again proven true this week: regardless of the two-party to-and-fro that structures US politics, socialist candidates continue to win elections and expand their presence in the country’s elected bodies, while broadly left-wing policies continue to find favor among voters.
Twelve of the nineteen candidates and ballot measures endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) at the national level, or 63 percent, were victorious last Wednesday, with one election still too close to call. When taking into account the total number of candidates given the thumb’s up by all DSA chapters at the state and local levels, as well as DSA members who ran and won without the organization’s endorsement, forty-six candidates won their races (two of whom were nonmembers). As of Monday, there were fourteen losses and three are yet to be decided, resulting in a success rate of 77 percent and a net gain of eleven seats.
Wins in the Twin Cities
The Twin Cities may have seen the most dramatic success, where four DSA members on the Minneapolis and St Paul city councils won reelection while adding two new members: Aurin Chowdhury in Minneapolis and Hwa Jeong Kim in St Paul. The Minneapolis City council will now have a progressive majority comprising seven of thirteen seats, beating back a vastly better funded push from allies of Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey to make gains on the council.
Chowdhury won the endorsement of former councilmember Andrew Johnson, whose empty seat she was campaigning for, as well as that of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) and the national and local DSA — but took some positions at odds with the local chapter. On rent control, Chowdhury didn’t sign onto a 3 percent cap on annual rent increases or to providing no exceptions for new construction, citing the range of views in her ward on the subject and the need for a “deliberative and transparent process” to build local support for it.
She also did not support banning tear gas and demilitarizing and disarming police. After years-old tweets during the 2020 George Floyd protests surfaced showing Chowdhury calling for police abolition created controversy, she explained that they’d been authored when she and the world had been “on fire” and that she had since “evolved,” affirming that she now viewed police as “a critical part of our public safety system.”
Soren Stevenson’s bid for the seat of city council president Andrea Jenkins fell short by the thinnest of margins: thirty-eight votes. The result gives Stevenson, who won a $2.4 million settlement from the city when he lost an eye at the hands of an officer at a George Floyd protest, the legal option to ask for a publicly funded recount.
Jenkins’s original 2017 win had been hailed for its historic nature, having become the first black, openly transgender woman elected to office in the country. But once in power, Jenkins posed herself as a “pragmatic progressive,” opposing rent control and voting mostly in line with centrist councilmembers. The new-look council isset to take up the issue of rent control next year, and it remains to be seen whether the electoral scare Stevenson delivered to Jenkins will push her to support the measure.
Referendum Highs and Lows
The Philadelphia City Council has seen similar results. The reelection of at-large councilmember Kendra Brooks and the addition of socialist Nicholas O’Rourke to another at-large seat, winning seats that are specially set aside for non-Democrats, has left the council with a single Republican member, ousting the party from seats they’d held for more than seventy years. O’Rourke and Brooks, who had become the first third-party candidate to sit on the council in decades after her 2019 win, were backed by both DSA and the Working Families Party, and their victories will help push the council leftward.
Socialists saw important victories in nearby Massachusetts, too. Two incumbents, Willie Burnley Jr and J. T. Scott, won reelection to the socialist-heavy Somerville City Council, while Zac Bears won reelection to his seat on the Medford council. These wins were tempered by a several defeats, with Joel Richards falling short of his bid for a Boston City Council seat and two DSA candidates failing to win seats on the Cambridge City Council. But Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, a volunteer for Boston DSA and the city’s Sunrise Movement chapter, won back the council seat that he’d first won four years ago after losing reelection in 2021, running on a platform of rent control, ending tenant-paid broker’s fees, accountability for police shootings, and support for first-responder alternatives to law enforcement.
In Tacoma, Washington, longtime local DSA leader Jamika Scott similarly won a seat on the council after a campaign and activist career that prioritized police accountability. A cofounder of the Tacoma Action Collective, Scott was at the forefront of protests over the March 2020 police homicide of Manuel Ellis and ran for a council seat this year while suing the city for $100,000 over what she said was a wrongful arrest two years ago.
Running on a platform of alternatives to policing, attacking crime through community investment, and expanding affordable housing and tenant protections (she stopped short of supporting rent control, which she had toyed with during her 2021 mayoral campaign), Scott nabbed some heavy-hitter endorsements, including the speaker of the state House and won comfortably with 51 percent of the vote. Her opponent himself noted that she had dominated in precincts concerned with housing issues, in a city where more than half of residents put more than 30 percent of their income toward rent.
Over in Santa Fe, cafe owner, former Chicago public school teacher, and organizer Alma Castro cruised to victory for a city council seat, winning the largest share of votes outright, before moving through two runoffs, ultimately ending up with 52 percent of the vote out of four candidates. Castro ran on “sustainable economic development” of the rapidly growing city, including an expansion of public transit and won with a publicly funded campaign, despite her closest competitor outfundraising her nearly fourfold.
In Indianapolis, socialist Jesse Brown will join the Democratic supermajority on the city council off of a campaign that talked about the “other Indianapolis” and called for taxing the rich, after earlier shocking the city’s political establishment by ousting the council’s seven-year-long vice president in the May primary. His was one of several other victories last Wednesday that resulted in a net gain seats for socialists around the country, including Nate Baker’s in Durham, Kate Sykes’s in Portland, Maine, and Maurice Brown’s in Onondaga County, New York, all of whom ran on solutions to their local housing affordability crises. Meanwhile, Rhonda Caldwell’s victory in Hamden, Connecticut, adds one more member to its legislative council’s socialist caucus, which had already passed an ordinance earlier this year making it easier for tenants to organize.
It wasn’t all victories. Socialists fell short contesting two seats on the Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, council despite some solid fundraising, only a few years after the Democratic-voting county seemed to be shifting left. The closest to a socialist was newly elected Allegheny County executive Sara Innamorato, a former DSA member who left the organization in 2019 and “strongly denounc[ed]” national and local chapters’ statements on the October 7 attack by Hamas, which she implied were antisemitic. Two-year Boulder city councilmember Nicole Speer came third in the race for mayor, while two out of three socialist campaigns for Duluth City Council fell short, making political novice Wendy Durrwachter its first and sole socialist member.
Coast to Coast
Though the battle over ballot measures saw some defeats, the Left fared well overall there too. The clear takeaway from last Wednesday’s results are that the voting public continues to favor broadly progressive policies, whether backed by socialists or not, even in some red states.
Arguably the biggest news of the day was the major pro-choice victory in now-reliably red Ohio, which saw voters codify the right to abortion in the state’s constitution with 56 percent of the vote, a campaign endorsed by the national DSA and which saw the involvement of various local chapters in the state. Ohio’s is now the seventh pro-choice ballot measure victory since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, and further suggests the Right’s radicalization on the issue is putting it more and more out of step with national sentiment — prompting former GOP senator Rick Santorum to lament out loud that “pure democracies are not the way to run a country.” The state also legalized recreational marijuana with 57 percent of the vote.
That win was tempered by Cincinnati voters’ decision to sell off their municipal-owned railway, the only one in the United States, to Norfolk Southern, the train company behind the East Palestine disaster. A grassroots effort by dissenting union members, socialists, the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter, and other activists wasn’t enough to overcome the powerful backing for the sale, which included the mayor, most of the city council, and several labor unions, ultimately passing with 52 percent of the vote. A separate Cincinnati ballot measure modestly raising the earned income tax to pay for affordable housing also failed.
In sunnier news, at the same time that Portland, Maine, voters voted in another socialist to their city council, they handily rejected by a 2-1 margin an amendment to the city’s 2020 rent control ordinance exempting “small” landlords — that is, those with an ownership stake in nine rentals or fewer. It was the third referendum on rent control in the past year, as landlords have attempted to undermine the measure. Other DSA-backed campaigns, including one to kill an effort to use excess tax revenue to build a nearly $5 million police training facility in Colorado Springs and another to make the Houston city government more democratic by giving city council members the ability to submit agenda items, were also victorious.
As Jamika Scott sailed to victory in Tacoma on the back of her housing policy, the Tenants Bill of Rights that was also on the ballot remains too close to call a week later, though it’s currently ahead by the infinitesimal margin of 1.4 points, or 470 votes. If passed, the measure would mandate landlords to offer relocation assistance when raising rent by 5 percent or more, ban evictions during cold weather as well as discriminatory evictions of certain protected groups and limit rental fees.
That leaves the DSA National Electoral Commission with a 4-2 win record on ballot measures this past Sunday, with the Tacoma referendum still to be decided. Two more — a referendum to block Atlanta’s Cop City and one repealing Arizona’s right-to-work law — are set to be voted on next year. Though not DSA-endorsed, Santa Fe voters also overwhelmingly passed a “mansion tax” on new home sales of over $1 million, a broadly progressive victory for housing affordability policy. The similarly unaffordable Seattle likewise saw 66 percent of voters pass an affordable housing measure raising property taxes by nearly $1 billion over seven years, which will fund the construction of more than three thousand affordable homes, services for subsidized housing, and rental assistance.
On the flip side, Texas delivered a major victory for the sixty-six billionaires who own more wealth in the state than 70 percent of its residents combined, with more than two-thirds voting to bar state legislators from imposing a wealth tax, even though none has ever been proposed. The successful GOP-backed campaign means that the state’s absurdly unfair tax system, where the lowest earners pay 13 percent of their family income in taxes while the top 1 percent pay low single digits, will stay locked in for the foreseeable future.
The Way Forward
Last week’s election results reinforce a number of trends we’ve seen over the past few years. Even as the broader socialist movement has been left somewhat adrift in the wake of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 loss, it’s continued to be surprisingly and quietly successful at the state and local levels, racking up electoral and legislative wins, even when operating as single members of a city council or as a minority bloc. As with last week’s results, many of those successes revolve around the housing crisis enveloping the country, propelling long-standing campaigns for affordable housing and rent control.
While the future remains unwritten, these facts may point the way forward to gather the scattered energies of the socialist project. With the Biden presidency stalled and now risking a death spiral with its support for an increasingly unpopular war, the potential for progressive change is very much alive in American states and cities.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Off-year US election shows mass popular support for defending democratic rights
On Tuesday, several US states held off-year elections for statewide offices and ballot referendums. While there is broad disgust with the presumptive presidential candidates of the two big business parties and with the corporate-controlled two-party system as a whole, voters registered their support for referendums that sought to broaden, not diminish, democratic rights, and the candidates who claimed to support them.
The most significant result was tallied in Ohio where “Issue One,” a citizen-led ballot initiative to put the right to an abortion into the state constitution, and therefore beyond the reach of the Republican-controlled legislature, garnered the support of over 2.1 million people, or 57 percent of the vote.
In Franklin County (Columbus), the most populous in Ohio, nearly three quarters of the over 414,000 votes were in favor of the ballot initiative. Some 20 out of the 23 most populous counties voted for Issue One, which secures “an individual right to one’s own reproductive medical treatment,” including decisions on abortion, contraception and fertility treatment. The ballot measure takes effect within 30 days.
Despite Ohio’s vote, “nearly one in three women ages 15 to 44 live in states were abortion is banned or mostly banned” according to the Washington Post. Abortion is effectively banned throughout the Southern states where the Christian right has inordinate influence, including Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia.
However, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, in every state where voters have been given to the option to vote to protect this basic democratic right, including in so-called “red states” like Kansas, they have overwhelmingly voted in favor.
Tuesday’s vote in Ohio on Issue One is virtually the same split that occurred on August 8 of this year, when Republicans sought to block the initiative through a referendum proposal, put on the ballot by the state legislature, that would have made it more difficult to amend the state constitution. While the 57-43 percent margin is similar, over 800,000 more people voted in Tuesday’s election compared to August.
Similar results were reported on “Issue Two” in Ohio, which aims to legalize cannabis in Ohio. Both the abortion and cannabis referendums were citizen-led drives that required organizers gathering hundreds of thousand of signatures that needed to be deemed valid by the Ohio secretary of state, Republican Frank LaRose.
The decriminalization of recreational use and sale of cannabis could take longer or be forestalled, as it was not an amendment to the constitution, just the Ohio criminal code. The Ohio legislature can also modify, or repeal the law if they choose.
The overwhelming vote in favor of Issue Two is rebuke to the bipartisan “war on drugs” and to right-wing politicians and police organizations that campaigned against legalization, including Ohio Governor Mike DeWine.
While both measures were overwhelmingly popular among Ohioans, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, a hardcore Catholic reactionary, fumed on Newsmax Tuesday night against “democracies” after the results were tabulated.
“You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote. It was a secret sauce for disaster in Ohio,” Santorum groveled on Newsmax.
“Thank goodness that most of the states in this country don’t allow you to put everything on the ballot, because pure democracies are not the way to run a country,” he added.
Santorum’s comments are an expression of the authoritarian tendencies that are flourishing in the Republican Party and ruling class as whole. His disdain for “pure democracies” underscores that Trump’s plans for dictatorship in 2025 are not an isolated phenomena, but the dominant opinion in the increasingly fascistic Republican Party.
However, the defense of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, a party of war and the CIA no less than the Republicans which is currently overseeing the genocide in Gaza.
Seeking to cynically use voters egalitarian leanings for their own political benefit, Democrats in several state races used their support for abortion to posture as defenders of democratic rights and beat back MAGA-style Republicans.
In Virginia, where all 140 legislative seats were up for grabs, voters handed Democrats majorities in both chambers, preventing Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin from carrying out his anti-abortion agenda. Youngkin campaigned heavily in the weeks leading up to the election on the issue, promising to enact a ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy if the Republicans gained majorities in the state legislature. Instead, the Republicans lost control of the lower house while Democrats retained their majority in the state senate.
Youngkin’s political action committee donated at least $2.3 million to Republican candidates and gave another $2.35 million to the state party. The New York Times reported that Youngkins’ political actions committee, Spirit of Virginia, has raised more than $18 million this year, “anchored by six-and seven-figure contributions from a few Republican billionaires, including Kenneth G. Langone, Ronald S. Lauder, Bernie Marcus, Thomas Peterffy, Stephen Ross, Stephen Wynn and Jeff Yass.”
Youngkin, “a former chief executive of the Carlyle Group,” the Times added, “also donated $500,000 of his own money last month.”
In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, 45, beat back a challenge from current Attorney General Daniel Cameron, an African-American endorsed enthusiastically by Donald Trump. Beshear, who ran on a platform of defending abortion rights, actually lost 10,000 votes compared to his 2019 victory, garnering just over 694,000 in 2023, compared to nearly 710,000 four years ago.
In contrast, Cameron only received roughly 627,000 votes in 2023, some 77,000 less than Republican Matt Bevin garnered in 2019. Beshear dominated Cameron in the major urban centers of Louisville and Lexington, while Cameron achieved double-digit percentage victories in many small rural counties.
Kentucky Republicans swept every other state race held on Tuesday including secretary of state, where Michael Adams was re-elected with 783,695 votes, the most of any candidate on the ballot. Adams has repudiated Trump’s claims of a “stolen election” and campaigned as an incumbent that wanted to expand ballot access and early voting in the state.
While Democrats outperformed in several races, Tuesday’s results follow a devastating poll released by the New York Times that shows Trump beating Biden in five of the six “battleground” states, including Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona, by an average 48-44 percent. Wisconsin was the only state polled in which Biden was beating Trump, by a margin of 2 percent.
The same poll showed that only 2 percent of voters agreed with the statement that the economy was “excellent” under Biden. This fell to less that 1 percent of respondents under 30, with zero poll respondents among younger people agreeing to that statement in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin.
In addition to skyrocketing inflation, Biden’s fulsome support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza is cratering his support among broad layers of the population, including young people, Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans. A John Zogby Strategies survey of 500 Arab-Americans conducted between October 23 and 27 found that support for Biden had plummeted from 59 percent in 2020 to 17 percent last month, a 42-percent drop.
While some commentators in the corporate media have bemoaned Biden’s falling behind Trump as an indication of the population’s disdain for “democracy,” nothing could be farther from the truth, as Tuesday’s results show.
The vast majority of American working people and youth hate both candidates and parties and defend their democratic rights. Yet this broad discontent is not allowed to express itself within the rotten political framework of two capitalist parties, both controlled from top to bottom by corporate interests.
Democrats Shouldn’t Let Up on Abortion Rights
Victories in Kentucky, Ohio, and Virginia offer a playbook for 2024—especially as the GOP refuses to accept that their antiabortion agenda is unpopular with voters
Molly Jong-Fast, November 13, 2023, Vanity Fair, at < https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/11/democrats-abortion-2024 >
(Caption: Abortion rights supporters celebrate winning the referendum on the so-called Issue 1, a measure to enshrine a right to abortion in Ohio's Constitution, in Columbus, Ohio on November 7, 2023.by MEGAN JELINGER/AFP/Getty Images.)
Despite all the fear-inducing polls heading into last week’s elections, Democrats ended up having a very good night. Republicans had hoped that electeds like Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron and Virginia governor **Glenn Youngkin—**who embody a more “moderate,” diluted form of Trumpism—could usher in red- and purple-state wins, but those victories never materialized. In Virginia, Youngkin ran on the promise that he would instate a 15-week abortion ban with a flipped legislature. Instead, Republicans failed to reclaim the state Senate and lost the House of Delegates, thus completely losing control of the legislature.
So, to spell it out more clearly, Republicans learned yet again that running on banning (or in this case, limiting) abortion is a loser for them. Or, at least they should’ve learned! Because despite the results of elections since the right-wing Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade, evident in the 2022 midterms and last week’s races, the GOP seems unable to absorb this information. Ohio senator J.D. Vance defended the GOP’s current platform in a long post on X. “Giving up on the unborn is not an option. It’s politically dumb and morally repugnant,” he argued, against all logic. “Instead, we need to understand why we lost this battle so we can win the war.” Well, earth to J.D.: You lost the battle because people don’t like you messing with their bodies. You lost the battle because doctors are fleeing red states; because women are being sent home to bleed out in their cars; and because the country’s already shameful maternal and fetal death rate is rising in red America as a result of your party’s antiabortion crusade.
Meanwhile, on Sunday’s Meet the Press, RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel claimed that Americans “want common sense limitations.” That, to her, apparently involves “more access to adoption. We want to make sure that there’s pregnancy crisis centers. These are things we can win on. But we have to talk about it, and you can’t hide in a corner and think abortion’s not going to be an issue.” It’s important to note here that many “pregnancy crisis centers” are really just antiabortion centers that present themselves similarly to abortion clinics but are actually fake clinics, where nonmedical professionals try to convince patients not to have an abortion. But more importantly, McDaniel is wrong about America: She and her party may be politically wedded to abortion bans, thanks to Donald Trump’s extremism on the issue, but the general electorate is not.
Vance and McDaniel are hardly the only Republicans who apparently want to keep losing on abortion. Consider Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly voted “yes” (57 to 43%) on Issue 1, enshrining abortion in the state constitution. In response, the state’s GOP-majority legislature is now considering “removing jurisdiction from the judiciary” to “prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts with Issue 1.” Instead, state Republicans want the “legislature alone” to “consider what, if any, modifications to make to existing laws based on public hearings and input from legal experts on both sides.” It’s a similar stunt to the one Florida Republicans pulled in 2018, after voters approved a ballot measure that promised to restore voting rights for felons: GOP lawmakers passed a kind of poll tax the year following, which undermined the ballot measure. In other words, Republicans didn’t like the results they got from an actual election, so they decided to undermine it with a punitive and undemocratic piece of legislation.
The thinking on the Republican side seems to be that voters—not their unpopular ideas—are the problem. “Thank goodness that most of the states in this country don’t allow you to put everything on the ballot, because pure democracies are not the way to run a country,” Republican Rick Santorum said Tuesday night on Newsmax, after the party’s less-than-stellar performance. The part that both he and Mercedes Schlapp found the most vexing were the ballot measures: “You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot,” Santorum continued, “and a lot of young people come out and vote.” (Of course, by “sexy,” Santorum means “popular.”)
Most Democrats probably wouldn’t hold Karl Rove up as a role model, but in the case of the 2004 elections, they may want to take a page from his playbook. He may deny it now, but Rove aggressively used ballot initiatives to get George W. Bush reelected. As Bush’s 2004 campaign manager Ken Mehlman, told The Atlantic, Rove “had been working with Republicans to make sure that antigay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.”
At the end of the day, choice is popular. People don’t like having their rights taken away. Even red-state voters respond to this—like in Kentucky, where Democratic governor Andy Beshear ran commercials featuring a victim of childhood sexual abuse. “I was raped by my stepfather,” she says to the camera. “After years of sexual abuse, I was 12.” The message was clear: A 12-year-old should not be forced to have their stepfather’s baby. And thus, Beshear widened his reelection victory, 52.5% to 47.5%, even pulling some rural voters. The results Tuesday in Kentucky follow voters last year in deep-red Kansas rejecting an antiabortion ballot measure.
“We should put the right to choose on every ballot across the country in 2024,” argued Illinois Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker. “Not just with the candidates we choose, but with referendum efforts to enshrine reproductive rights in states where right-wing politicians are stripping those rights away.” Pritzker is correct, which puts the GOP in a sticky wicket: The same base that loves Trump is staunchly anti-choice. If the Republicans pivot on abortion, they run the risk of alienating their base. But if they stick to their staunchly anti-choice program, they will alienate mainstream voters they desperately need to win the presidency. My prediction is that Republicans will try not to talk about abortion, because they cannot possibly win on it. And that’s exactly why Democrats should be talking about abortion every damn day.
No comments:
Post a Comment