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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Notes -
Yeah it seems like a bust for the GOP. Maybe they'll eke out a win in the Senate but it's a far cry from the +3 GOP pickups that RCP has been predicting.
It's two things:
Thing number one is abortion. Very unusual for a party to win a major nationally salient policy victory while the opposing party controls the Presidency and both houses of Congress. The usual loss by a president's party in their first midterm is thermostatic backlash by voters to that president's policy wins. Here, the GOP winning abortion in SCOTUS upends that logic. Retrospectively the GOP won the biggest policy issue of the past two years, and prospectively it looks a lot more like the GOP holds the whip hand and needs to be checked by centrists. I know the usual pro-life posters on this forum take the line that it's all worth it to save the fetuses, but boy is it demoralizing for a pro-choice conservative like myself.
Thing number two is Trump. If things go as they seem to be going, this is now the second federal election in which he will have singlehandedly handed Senate control to the Dems: last time by contesting the election
and putting on his insane January 6 carnivaland publicly encouraging Pence to steal it for Trump while two runoffs were pending in Georgia, both of which the GOP should have won but both of which they lost, and this time by intervening on behalf of terrible candidates in Pennsylvania (the multimillionaire Muslim snake oil salesman who lives in a palace in New Jersey -- chosen to run against the guy that central casting delivered as the avatar of the blue collar salt of the earth) and Georgia (the barely literate guy with ten thousand illegitimate children, credible allegations of familial abuse, and a history of paying his estranged exes to get abortions -- chosen to run against the unimpeachable family man pastor). And the show isn't over: he's about to announce his run for 2024.I’m not gonna put money on it til I see some better crosstabs, but if the break from predictions is more on the basis of education than by gender (with the recognition that abortion isn’t as overtly gendered as people expect), I’m gonna point to the student loan relief thing pretty heavily. It was an incredibly obvious and high-value give, timed almost immediately to the election for optimizing turnout, and I think skipping over it is missing a major component
Which is also not great, since it’s dubious as a policy and law matter in ways that something like abortion policy isn’t, and that may have corrosive effects when the next close election finds a President looking for 20k USD giveaways.
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