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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   Edited 3yr ago   20479 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

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Long time reader, first time poster.

I guess I'm just reeling and a little confused - I thought that Republicans did a good job raising the salience of woke issues (eg teaching gender/crt to kids, defund the police), and were better on the economy - there's 8% inflation ffs, caused in large part by excessive government spending.

I know that Oz and Walker weren't the best candidates, but did abortion really sink the GOP? DeSantis crushed it - clearly voters don't want their kids to be indoctrinated by teachers into gender ideology - at least in Florida...

I’m also skeptical of the abortion sinking the GOP narrative, because Abbott and his band of merry men won big, and Mike Dewine and Brian Kemp won big, and the figures that actually banned abortion just in general didn’t get punished for it.

I mean, trump aligned candidates with obvious personal flaws did get punished. But generally the GOP did pretty well when they had a source of energy that wasn’t trump.

I can say from personal experience that the abortion issue did curb a lot of my enthusiasm, and I wound up not voting. I even got a ballot delivered directly to my house and I didn't bother.

Republicans don't seem to know the difference between consolidating power and spending it. I suspect that decades of cultural and religious hegemony robbed them of this knowledge. They will either learn, or perish.

Abortion is culture war issue #1 and bans are defund the police level unpopular. The GOP is going to have to move off the most extreme stance on that issue or it will continue to be a drag on them.

Or at least just let it remain a state-level issue (as fraught as that is).

People will be dissecting this for a while, but remember that the reporting went rapidly from "Dems will pick up 2-4 seats in the senate" to "Reps will pick up 2-4 seats in the senate." Very little time was spent dwelling on the result no one wanted, which was "50/50 continues."

Now, the narrative will be something like "Republicans can't even pick up seats when Democrats are in the White House for a recession and historic inflation" versus "Democrats can't even pick up seats to pursue abortion-on-demand nationwide." There is some nuance here--Ron DeSantis won big, while Trump-picked candidates appear to be outright losing, or at least struggling. Democrats didn't lose big, so anger over COVID school closures and other education issues hasn't held up as well as the Republicans hoped. But very broadly, I think it's best to interpret the status quo of hyper-partisan "blue no matter who" versus "red or we're all dead" as winning this election.

The up side for Democrats is that they may get one more SCOTUS pick (low odds, but possible), they still have bargaining power over legislation, and they can claim "victory" in the sense of continued Senate control if not in the sense of actually getting the votes they wanted. The up side for Republicans is that they can continue to plausibly point the finger of blame at Democrats for two more years, ultimately strengthening the likelihood of a White House victory combined with a legislative sweep in 2024.

And because there's something for everyone to be disappointed about--predictions of rioting etc. don't seem to have come to fruition.

Have we entered the long, depressing "I'm tired of fighting, now I'm just going to sulk until someone gives me a divorce" phase of political polarization?

Have we entered the long, depressing "I'm tired of fighting, now I'm just going to sulk until someone gives me a divorce" phase of political polarization

We've entered a phase where house cleaning is occuring. No one in the Republican side looks good now while there is large amounts of political activation in the base beyond what trump already did.

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