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 -
The vibe I'm getting is that the red wave isn't happening. The republicans might not even get the senate. I'm watching /r/conservative and they are not happy with Trump, that sub has definitely taken a hard turn towards Desantis so that makes me optimistic that he can win the primary for 2024.
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.But isn't that a good thing, from the side of the pro-choice? It means no unwanted children are born to be neglected and abused, it means he is taking financial responsibility for paying for the abortion, and the women are free of unwanted burden of motherhood?
I can see criticising the guy for being a hypocrite if his party is anti- abortion, but I don't get the logic of people (and I don't just mean you, I see this all over) being at the same time loudly pro-choice and complaining about the threat to abortion rights, and then use "he paid for his girlfriend's abortion" as a criticism.
I see the main argument trotted out time and again that restrictions on abortion will mean forcing women to have babies they don't want, which means the unwanted children will be abused, so abortion is a good thing. Unless you can show these women didn't want to have abortions or would not have aborted the pregnancy even if it had been Joe Blow, ordinary guy and not Football Star who was the father, what is the problem here?
"He shouldn't be paying for abortions if he's running for a political party that is anti-abortion?" What are his own views on it - has he said 'abortion is wrong'? Then you can get him for hypocrisy, and for being a sinner.
But by the same token, you cannot be both pro-choice and a conservative, because that's how the battle lines have been drawn up. If you're conservative, you must be anti-abortion, and if you're pro-choice, why are you voting Republican?
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