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.
That’s the thing. Republican politicians have a corporate mentality. They pretend to care about the customers, but their true allegiance is to the shareholders. And that mentality has worked surprisingly well for them for decades. Pretend to care just enough about social issues, but don’t do anything too controversial, all the while enacting legislation that disproportionately assists the 1%. They had a good thing going.
But they kept wanting more. They kept going back to the social policy well to get more voters because they weren’t getting enough buy-in on their fiscal policies. Now you’ve got more elected politicians willing to push unpopular social policy when just ten to fifteen years ago they knew better for the most part. This new batch of Republicans actually intend to enact their regressive policies when previously they were content with merely stymieing progress and loudly complaining.
Now that they’ve reached a critical mass of people who don’t know better or don’t care, they have started enacting deeply unpopular policies. They don’t know our care how unpopular they are because they can’t imagine anything outside of their echo chambers. They’re listening to the loudest 10 people in the room while ignoring the quiet 200 who will only speak at the voting booth. And voters have finally had enough. They may not love what the democrats are doing, they may even think that the democrats are doing a terrible job, but they absolutely hate what the republicans are doing even more. I’m betting that a large number of apathetic voters are starting to show up.
So republicans resort to every trick in the book to silence the majority who disagrees with them. Gerrymandering, purging voter rolls right before an election, closing poling places and limiting hours, restricting absentee voting, holding special elections during times when voter turnout has historically been very low, enacting voter ID laws… Every single trick they can think of so that only their voices count. And that still isn’t enough.
They’re doing what the people who voted put them there to do. The only problem is that those people apparently don’t actually represent the majority, and republicans absolutely refuse to accept that.
Yeah, overturning Roe was the dog that caught the car. Now that they don’t have their main boogeyman drum (women everywhere aborting all the babies all of the time won’t someone think of the children!) to bang on they’ve got nothing. Savvy grifters like Turtle Interrupted never wanted to actually succeed in passing that kind of extremist legislation, but now the GOP balance has shifted too far down the scale of “pretending to be crazy in order to steal money vs being actually crazy”.