The State of Our Democracy
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read): It held in 2022
Issue #174 Government November 10, 2022
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I pre-plan my topics in my editorial calendar for this publication 2-4 weeks in advance, so the topic I planned for today was decided quite a while before the November 8, 2022 midterm elections.
Frankly, before Wednesday, November 9, 2022, I was quite frightened about the state of our democracy.
For months leading up to the election, the Democrats warned that this election was the most important election of our lifetimes (again) and relatedly, that democracy itself was on the ballot.
With so many election deniers on ballots nationwide, and other far-right fascist MAGA followers fighting to end democracy as we know it with voter suppression, outright vote elimination, threats of violence, conspiracy theories about Democratic cheating, and denying the results unless they won, it was very possible that we could have lost our democracy.
But, we did not lose it.
As of today, November 10, two days after the polls closed, there are many races that are still not decided, and which party will control either the House or the Senate or neither or both will not be completely clear until the 1st week in December, after the runoff election for Senator in Georgia.
For the last few months, major media outlets (including the New York Times), ultra-conservative political channels and podcast hosts, and Republican politicians have been broadcasting that “The Red Wave is Coming!” They believed that the uproar about the Dobbs anti-abortion SCOTUS decision last June had subsided and that more people were worried about inflation, gas prices, crime, and the caravans of dangerous brown illegal immigrants coming over the southern border. They also depended on their years of voter suppression efforts and on the billions of dark money dollars to propel them to victory.
It didn’t happen. By the end of Election Night, the “Red Wave” turned into a “Red Trickle.” In all five of the states where the abortion question was on the ballot, the people voted for the reproductive rights of women to be left up to…women. So far, the majority of the major candidates advanced and supported by Donald Trump lost their elections. Trump blamed his wife.
What the Republicans didn’t see coming was the “Blue Wave” of Black women voters (again), millions of other non-white voters, and especially the young voters aged 18-29, also known as “Gen Z.” Gen Z voters waited in line for hours to vote; in Ann Arbor Michigan, the last people cast their votes about 2:30 am Wednesday morning.
The Republicans didn’t count on the years-long ground game that Democratic activists have been building to GOTV.
Republicans did not count on Joe Biden’s popularity rating going up more than ten points in six weeks.
The Republicans did not believe in President Obama’s effectiveness as the Closer in the last couple of weeks of the campaign season.
The Republicans refuse to see that the majority of Americans want a more diverse and educated population and do not want an authoritarian nanny state.
So although the Democrats had some very heartbreaking losses, overall, November 9, 2022, the day after the midterms, was a good day to be Blue.
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"Red trickle" - Thsnk you, God.