Portend
It’s a good day in America today. Any day when Americans come to their senses and vote for what they want and believe will make their country a place better suited to the life they want, is a good day. Yesterday was an off-off year election which had no federal elections, but which had many telltale state and local elections that serve to test the temperature of the populace open critical issues and political leanings. This came at an important moment in our political life because just last week a New York Times / Sienna College poll came out showing some important information. It most notably showed that in a head-to-head match-up of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, despite his 91 criminal indictments, Donald Trump still had an electoral edge in five of six key swing states (Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan, but not Wisconsin). If that were to come true, it would give Trump enough electoral college votes to resume the presidency. Naturally, I think that would be a catastrophic event for the nation that would roil not just our country but our world overall. The one ray of hope in that poll is that the respondents were also asked how a conviction of Donald Trump in any one of the criminal cases against him would affect their vote, and while many MAGA Republicans would not find that possibility at all impactful of their support of Trump, enough moderate or independent voters would be deterred from voting for him that all six of those key swing states would revert to supporting Joe Biden and the results would be reversed.
There is also ample evidence that polls out this far in advance of the election, now a year away, are historically very bad predictors of the outcome of these important elections. As has been amply noted, Obama and Clinton both came into their second term elections approximately as far behind in the polls at this stage as Biden falls and yet they rallied during their last year to overcome those predictions and win a second term in office. I suspect that that is less of a polling error than a reality of political thinking and how respondents answer hypothetical election questions a year before they are due and how they answer real world political choices when the rubber meets the road during election year. Some of that is the passage of time and some of that is hopefully people’s realizations that they have faired well during Democratic administrations, better perhaps than they had realized. That should certainly be the case for Biden since so many of his implemented policies and legislative achievements have, indeed, meaningfully improved the lives of everyday Americans.
The biggest thematic indicators that Biden’s way of thinking about what is best for Americans include his stances on critical political issues like abortion and unions. It is now crystal clear that average Americans are prepared to vote directly or more so along the lines of how they respond to polling on the issue of their support for abortion rights and that Republican led efforts among state legislatures and even the Supreme Court have been insufficient to change their fundamental belief that the state has no business dictating the very personal issue of how a woman chooses to run her body with regards to reproduction. Yesterday’s voting reaffirmed that directly in two specific cases. First there was the direct referendum in Ohio, a strongly Republican state at this point, wherein the voters strongly voted “yes” on the issue of whether to add abortion rights to the state’s constitution. That was a hard-fought issue on both sides with Republicans using every trick in the book to try to defeat the motion, including attempts to obfuscate the issue enough to confuse voters into voting with them through confusing language and electoral positioning of what yes and no meant on the ballot. The pro-abortion fought back diligently to clarify and advocate the true positioning of the bill to insure that voters understood the ballot and voted their conscious in favor of the pro-abortion amendment.
The other state where abortion figured prominently was Virginia. In that case, the on-fire Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, had positioned abortion into a slightly more moderate position by raising the time limit from 6 to 15 weeks (still well short of the timing the biology requires to determine most critical abnormalities that might lead to a need to abort) and further mitigating those restrictions for certain conditions like rape and incest. In some ways, this mild compromise position on abortion was a more critical test of the national sentiment on both abortion and right-wing ideology and authoritarianism because it was a more disguised and watered-down version that might well have caused more moderate voters to favor it. In addition, Glenn Youngkin has been touted by Republicans as perhaps their secret weapon for 2024 should Donald Trump stumble, like by getting convicted on one his criminal counts. Youngkin has stayed out of the Republican electoral fray for president up until now, but it was felt that if he could successfully position the abortion issue in Virginia’s election and successfully flip the state Senate so that he would then control both houses of the state legislature, that would be a strong positive signal both for the abortion path and for his potential national candidacy. However, the Virginia voters were not buying it. They voted not only to maintain the Democrat control of the state Senate, but also flipped the state House of Representatives from Republican control to Democrat control. That will make way for Virginia to get its first-ever black person as speaker of its state legislature. What it also tells the country is that Americans feel so strongly about the pro-abortion issue that they are simply not having it when it comes to restrictions on their right to choose what is best for their reproductive rights.
I wish more Americans would recognize that attempts to mandate and control reproductive rights is exactly the issue which has pushed China’s autocracy into a tailspin that has politics messing around with culture and thereby screwing up the country economically. The now-infamous and hugely impactful one-child policy of China has forever changed the course of Chinese history. It has altered the composition of Chinese society, skewing the demographics and favoring men over women while also forcing China to relinquish its claim to the most populous nation title (India is now bigger in population). That impact has forever reversed China’s economy as well since it has and will continue to curtail economic growth that cannot easily get moderated through immigration policies as the autocratic atmosphere is simply not conducive to attracting immigrants. This is so negative for China that the government has done a complete 180 on th issue and is now trying to promote public policies to induce and even mandate procreation. What a messed up way to run a railroad.
What I hope is that Americans can link their personal views on abortion policy preference, their time-honored belief in personal freedom and abhorrence to autocracy and the example of China as a cautionary tale to keep driving their voting in favor of the Democratic agenda that so much better suits their needs and wants. They can see this in the trends favoring unionization and pro-union sentiment. And that should lead them to understand that the Biden pro-union stance better represents their collective view than the antiquated and out-of-step views of Donald Trump and Republicans in general with their self-serving anti-union thinking. Let’s furthermore hope that yesterday’s interim elections around the country are a good portend for 2024.