Three times the fun
The 2022 midterm elections are nearly over, with the exception of an exceedingly important runoff taking place in Georgia on December 6. There’s a lot of despair and tension over who will ultimately win control of the U.S. House of Representatives come January, but this result was always going to be close. Not only did we manage to gain an extra seat in the Senate, we came close to netting 51 seats before Dec 6 – and we managed to flip not one or two, but three state legislatures – in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Now, for the first time in four decades, more people live in a state with a Democratic trifecta (full control of a state legislature) than in states with a Republican trifecta.
There are more states where Republicans control the government, but this is an important trend in the right direction. In a short time, Republican-dominated state assemblies did things like cutting food stamps and gutting voting rights – even in fairly moderate places like Wisconsin, while also preventing people from benefiting from federal legislation whenever the Democrats were in charge. This is why legislative races are much more important, even if they rarely, if ever, get much media attention.
In 2023, two more state legislatures will have elections – Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who is little more than a polished DeSantis, plans to restrict abortion rights. Youngkin has a slight majority in the statehouse and Democrats have a slim majority in the state senate, while in New Jersey, Republicans are eying a path to the senate. Let’s keep winning in 2023 and protect our majorities.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making