Republicans are bending over backward to try to blow the midterms
To give you an idea of how the midterm elections are going for the Republicans so far, consider this: even as the special election results are still being tabulated, there’s about a 50-50 chance the Republicans have lost the only U.S. House seat in Alaska. Alaska.
Because Alaska uses a ranked choice voting system that can be difficult to translate into traditional election terms, it would be tempting to write off the Alaska special election as potentially a mere fluke of the format – if not for what else has happened this past week. The Democrats significantly outperformed the polls on their way to winning the NY-19 special election, and the Democrats significantly outperformed their 2020 numbers in a NY-23 special election that ended up being closer than anyone expected. Throw in the Kansas abortion referendum, and this is, indeed, starting to look like a trend.
The question continues to be a simple one: why? After one party elects a new President, the other party traditionally always has a significant built-in advantage in the following midterms. 2022 should be a cakewalk for the Republicans. Yet while they’re still very much in the game, the math keeps getting worse for the Republicans every day, as the Democrats keep gaining gaining ground and seizing momentum. So again, why?
As is often the case when the ground begins shifting this significantly, there are multiple answers, all of them true. Abortion rights is obviously a huge motivating factor in voter registration and turnout. But that’s just the beginning of the answer.
The Republicans and right wingers in charge used to be savvy enough to understand that their key to getting elected was to promise to overturn Roe v. Wade without ever actually doing it. That way they motivated the anti-abortion minority into voting in outsized numbers as single-issue voters, while preventing the pro-choice majority from ever being motivated to do the same. But now they’ve actually overturned Roe, and now we’re finally seeing pro-choice majority become highly motivated single-issue voters.
Similarly, while the Republicans have been trying to hack away at Medicare and Social Security for years, they used to be savvy enough to understand that they needed to do it quietly, while falsely accusing the Democrats of being the ones who were trying to do it. If you’re going to try to steal from little old ladies and give the money to the wealthy, you have to make sure as few people as possible are aware that you’re doing it.
Yet today’s Republicans, from NRSC Chair Rick Scott to Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, are now just openly talking about how they’re coming for your Medicare and Social Security. Mitch McConnell, a more pragmatic villain, has told them to knock it off, but they don’t listen to him anymore.
The Republican Party has gone from quietly screwing over mainstream Americans, while trying to distract them from realizing it was happening, to now being as brazenly open as possible about their villainy. It’s as if the Republicans looked at Donald Trump’s 2016 win, which had nothing to do with the failed manner in which Trump approached politics, and instead had everything to do with external factors, and the Republicans mistakenly concluded that their best shot at winning was to act more like Trump. Perhaps they missed the part where Trump was so toxically unpopular, he lost by seven million votes in 2020, even after he abused the power of the presidency to try to sabotage mail-in voting.
And yet, even on the heels of Trump’s humiliating 2020 failure, the Republicans have turned around and nominated other fraudulently idiotic public figures like Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker, who are predictably in danger of losing races that the Republicans were expecting to win. And instead of getting behind the kind of boring candidate who could have probably won a House special election easily in a red state like Alaska, the Republicans instead went with the most brazenly bad candidate they could find in Sarah Palin.
As much good work as the Democrats are doing to try to win the midterms, the Republicans keep meeting them halfway by putting in work to try to lose the midterms. Given how thoroughly 2022 was stacked in the Republicans’ favor before either party even left the barn, the overwhelming shift in the Democrats’ direction still means that the midterms are up for grabs for either party. In such case the party whose activists put in the most work on the ground – donating, volunteering, phone banking, sending postcards, and registering people to vote – is the party that’s likely to prevail. Democratic activists – that means you – have a historic opportunity to win these midterms just by working harder than the other side.
