The winning is just getting started
It was an off-off year set of elections and yet, throughout the country, Democrats still managed to turn out in record numbers and win a myriad of important victories, however small the races. Apart from winning a state supreme court seat in Pennsylvania and flipping the legislature in Virginia, it’s notable to say that the culture wars that Republicans ignited two years ago are flaming out, with a number of right-wing school board members losing re-election. Generally, the party of the incumbent president tends to struggle in elections, but the Democratic overperformance that we’ve seen all year in special elections was showing itself last night in full force.
We won the referendum in Ohio, the seventh consecutive one on reproductive healthcare that we’ve won by wide margins, and the size of our victories has made a lot of people feel good about our chances going into 2024. There’s now a reason to feel better but also to work harder as we go into the next election cycle: ballot initiatives to help codify abortion rights in states across the country, such as Florida, where Republicans have a trifecta.
It hasn’t been easy in the past and these are sure to meet with a number of challenges – but it’s clear that with the pro-choice side being a winning issue, this could lead to how we build our parties from the ground up, while turning out pro-choice voters to the polls who clearly trust us on this issue. This isn’t to say we’ve got a lot of work ahead of next year – quite the opposite, but it shows we can message effectively (oh, and these initiatives have been in the works even before we got the good news from Tuesday night) and win big once we put the work in, and if we’ve done it two years in a row, there’s no reason we can’t do it again. Let’s vote Republicans out wherever we can in 2024.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making