A year after promising viewers a “red tsunami” in the 2022 midterms, only to be left with egg on their faces after the GOP drastically underperformed, Fox News was once again wondering what went wrong after Democrats romped to victory in statewide elections on Tuesday night.
Despite recent polls showing President Joe Biden deeply underwater with voters and even losing to Donald Trump in several battleground states, the Democratic incumbent governor easily won victory over his MAGA-endorsed opponent in deep-red Kentucky. And over in Ohio, a state Trump won by eight points in 2020, voters overwhelmingly passed an amendment ensuring access to abortion care in the state’s constitution.
The continued drag that undoing Roe v. Wade has had on the GOP was especially apparent in Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin had promised to implement a 15-week abortion ban if the GOP was able to gain unified control over the state’s General Assembly. Instead, not only were Youngkin’s hopes of a Republican sweep dashed, but the Democrats now control both chambers.
I still don’t think that the full impact of COVID is being accounted for in polling and voter outcomes. Yes the first wave hit blue areas hard and fast due to population density but with the vaccine and the ever growing amount of time it has been available I have to imagine it is almost exclusively hitting red areas now. COVID has not gone away but vaccinated people aren’t dying at nearly the rate of the unvaccinated of which that group is pretty exclusively GOP or at least Maga. When some of these elections were coming down to the thousands of voters 3 years ago what happens when thousands of dedicated GOP voters are now dead?
I did the math a few years ago because I couldn’t find anyone else who had published it. This is rough and IANAM (mathmagicman).
Every single day 8,000 boomers and above die, and 12,000 people turn 18 and those numbers are actually accelerating. If you use existing data to estimate conservative/liberal and likely voters within those groups it works out to a delta of 10,000 per day on a national scale. That’s 5,000 votes switching every single day. That might not seem like alot. Because it really isn’t. Out of 155 million votes cast, 10,000 is .006 percent. But here’s the thing. It’s cumulative. And it just doesn’t stop. It is relentless. it’s 300k a month, 3.6 million per year. And that pace is accelerating. Between 2020 and 2024 it’s a 15 million vote difference. By 2028 it’s 30 million. It used to be that people age into conservatism. But that is not happening with millennials. The demographics are changing, and changing quickly. The most conservative group in the country is dying. While the most liberal group is rising.
We just have to hold on to democracy for a few more years. This will all be behind us. Another 10k today.
I have a feeling you “aged in to conservatism” because that’s when you finally had money and humans are generally shit when it comes to “fuck you I got mine” but speaking as a millennial, that’s just not happening. My generation’s retirement plan is to die at our desks hopefully in a way that creates a lot of work for our bosses. Although on the less cynical side of things, I also tend to think that generally people are becoming more tolerant over time.
I completely agree. With both points. Add to it the rapidly fading religious influence.
It used to be that being conservative did not require you being batshit insane.
Yes batshit insane conservatives existed, but so did reasonable people supporting reasonable sounding policies by conservative politicians who behaved in a respectable manner.
While I believe it’s still possible for reasonable people to be Conservative, it’s not possible for reasonable people to support Republicans with their mouth pieces like Magorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Green being treated like someone with opinions worth listening to.
Regarding the steadfast belief that “conservatism is dying”: no it isn’t. Christian schools, home schools, Christian colleges, and even regular schools, communities and colleges are pumping out kids that have the beliefs of their parents. I live in a rural area, and work (hypocritically) for a Christian based organization. I’m surrounded by young minds that are perfectly comfortable with the ideals of the religious right, and vote.
Society has been saying it for years… We said it when I was back in college. “Bubba in the white house is going to be the best! We’ll undo all the hell Reagan and Bush did!” then Newt Gingrich (sounds like a disease…) made his “Promise to America™” and everything got fucked.
People have been saying that conservatism is aging out since at least the 90’s. Instead we see resurgences throughout the years.
Some people have been saying that the current resurgence is more of a death throe. I truly hope so, but I’m worried.
You need to keep in mind that 2023 COVID is a different beast than 2020 COVID. The currently most common strains tend to be less hard on the body as the virus has started to adapt to human hosts.
I still wouldn’t recommend people to go unvaccinated but it’s not quite as suicidally irresponsible as it used to be. Still irresponsible, though.
Yeah, but the elderly GOP base is getting it for the 2nd or 3rd time without having been vaccinated. It’s just as hard on them if not harder.
That said I don’t think it’s moving the needle as much as MAGA politics are.
What bizarro world do you live in? It’s no longer a novel virus. Most boomers have been exposed or infected by COVID, also a great number (majority) of them got vaccinated. So by now there are miniscule number of boomers without natural or vaccine immunity. The vaccines boosters do little here in terms of death, because very few boomers are currently dying from COVID.
Hospitalization rate of over 65 was
Death rate is a fraction of that.
Shhhh if we don’t talk about it they’ll never figure it out
We’ve been talking about this since COVID hit. They’re too fucking stupid to accept the truth.
It also was and still is most fatal for older people, who generally lean more towards the Republican side.
I think there are also a couple more factors. In a time when early detection and treatment gets the best outcomes, the right-wingers are more likely to believe that it isn’t serious, so they’re less likely to test and less likely to try to get paxlovid (or be outside the 5-day grace period).
And even if they know they’re sick early and want to get paxlovid, people who live in rural areas have less access to healthcare in general - and some of their doctors may not believe in paxlovid. Which really sucks for those people.
All that said, the are definitely health care discrepancies for minorities, and those disproportionately affect Democrats (mostly).