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Today I will post of the ballot measures. Similar to 2024, there were a lot. What is notable to me is that many states that ended up electing Democrat politicians also ended up voting for many initiatives that I'd consider Republican priorities, including lower taxes and voter ID. This includes four states that limited transgender athletes, transgender bathroom access, and more, those four states being Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, and Washington.
One of my friends in Arizona quickly said that this might be the death of transgenderism as a politically relevant issue. He thought it was likely that the issue would be dropped as an election loser, as something that the people obviously did not want since they voted against it by majority in even what you might consider quite "Blue" states. I said what could be summarized as "I doubt it", maybe along with "you'd be surprised". I think I have been vindicated in saying this, as the Colorado governor is outright saying that he's going to fight these measures that have been passed to the best of his ability, and there are already schemes to nullify those ballot measures. Anecdotally, I see transgender rights commenters saying that the Arizona propositions are illegal even if the people did vote for them.
Most of these culture war issues are not things that can be resolved by simple votes. They can only be resolved through decades-long grueling lawfare. Blues don't take 'no' for an answer, as their responses to Heller and Bruen and now this ballot measure show.
The leftists in my life have mostly interpreted the election results as "sure, trans issues might be unpopular with the unwashed masses, but they're not enough to sink a candidate, so full steam ahead". Six states elected their first trans/nonbinary lawmakers. Those lawmakers, at least, are true believers: part of the reason they want power is so that they can advance trans issues.
However, in the US the executive branch is the the one that controls how many trans people there are. Biden creatively interprets the Civil Rights Act and leans on social media companies to promote woke content, and the rate of trans youth goes up. Trump re-interprets the Civil Rights Act and leans on social media companies to promote anti-woke content, and the rate of trans youth plummets. The president can't undo transitions that have already happened, but he can marginalize those people to the point where they're not an immediately visible top-of-mind concern to the median voter.
So I predict that we will see no movement on trans issues in the US for the next two years. To the extent that Congress and state governments try to take action, they won't succeed, and voters won't really care. Then in 2029 a president who campaigned on an unrelated platform will turn the dial back up and it will become a big salient issue again.
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Not gonna leave any room for persuasion or the "changes come one tombstone at a time"?
Persuasion won to the point these policies passed even in Washington and Colorado. But, nevermind, the Colorado governor and I'll presume the activist Washington state Supreme Court will fail to implement or find a contrived excuse to block them. Preserving "our democracy" in plain opposition to a majority of voters.
I mean, at least some of the logic of constitutional republics as opposed to direct democracy is that some things are literally off limits to vote on. In theory, even if 90% of Californians were in favor of dispossessing every legal gun owner in the state, the Supreme Court would strike such a law down, and rightly so as a matter of law.
While trans rights are not enshrined in the Federal constitution, state courts can have different precedence around state constitutional provisions that might validly allow them to strike down a law like this under their state constitution. I don't think they should if they want to win going forward, because the same blue wave that gave the Democrats Texas also rejected trans rights even in already purple or blue states, and I think the Democrats have better odds in the next few years if they field "normal" candidates, who don't take the "wrong" side of an 80/20 issue. If they boil the frog like they did with gay rights, I think they'll have better odds on trans rights.
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See any persuasion happening lately?
I don't. Only cold, hard, pragmatism is what determines which issues get talked about and which get dropped, and only blood-boiling elections that are the barest step above outright war determine which ones are pushed through. The loser can cry about it until the next election, and he can abuse lawfare to the best of his abilities and resources, but he certainly can't use logic and appeals to human decency to convince the winner to not trample him.
True to an extent, but there are plenty of new voting-age kiddos coming in ready to fight about Current Issue. They get it from the media they consume, a never-ending fire. There would have to be a lot of tombstones to change that, any time soon. Which really isn't outside the realm of possibilities.
I saw a lot of persuasion in the last two years. Plenty of people were persuaded to try Trump one more time in 2024, and plenty of people were persuaded to keep him in check in 2026. Think of Obama-Trump voters, they must have been persuaded. Even persuading them to stay home and not vote is itself a kind of persuasion. Trump, in a way, persuaded people not to vote for him. Also, to chalk off entire groups of people as propagandized and kool-aid drinkers of the "never-ending fire" media is just being condescending towards the American people. Young men 18-29 didn't swing 39-points from +14 Republican in 2024 to +25 Democrat in 26 so that you can call them "new voting-age kiddos". And if the Dems fuck it up, I wouldn't be surprised if the population swung again.
I also think there is a tendency to overestimate the intensity of partisan conflicts. "blood-boiling elections" are still double-digit steps in the ladder of conflict before reaching "outright war". And I really don't see many people being trampled by the others. Maybe it's because I'm an immigrant, but America and Americans are quite peaceful and prosperous, and sufficiently high on the Maslow hierarchy of needs that Sayre's Law is being performed at societal scale.
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You are right, and your friend is wrong. Progressives are perfectly capable of shoving a political issue down the people's throat regardless of public opinion. California voted against gay "marriage" in 2008. It didn't matter; Prop 8 was found to be unconstitutional by the judiciary, then the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.
Gay rights are not the best example because public opinion on gay rights really did change that fast. "Same-sex marriages should be valid" went from 40% approved to 60% approved between 2008 and 2015 if I look at the chart in https://news.gallup.com/poll/710810/support-lgbtq-issues-remains-down-peak.aspx
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Some Biden staffer tried to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment via tweet.
I vaguely recall this, any reading that documents it fully?
The ABA had the year before declared they believed it had passed all requirements to become part of the Constitution.
I don't think there's any logical or sustainable legal argument in support of that stance, but again since when have the progressives let that stop them from doing the policies they'd wanted to all along?
Its crazy that I "don't pay that much attention" to politics (compared to some people on twitter) and yet these little details stick in my memory.
When people say Trump is doing something 'unprecedented' I feel like 9/10 times it something that either Biden or Obama did or tried to do first.
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https://x.com/POTUS46Archive/status/1880271367569895830 and its community note and responses would be a starting point. Didn't find any good articles from a search.
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Yeah I was pretty shocked that it won in WA, since I thought transgender was more popular than it is among the liberal voter base.
Yet WA has a looong history of getting initiatives thrown out over technicalities that the progressive leadership don't like, while initiatives they do like sail through the courts no matter how many irregularities they have. Since transgender is a progressive sacred cow, I expect the initiative to get nuked almost immediately.
Nobody took any electoral consequences for this at all though.
Anecdotally that's because those on the left don't express their real opinion in public. My lefty friends will admit to me in private they don't like the trans women in women's sports and then quickly "but I don't get why Republicans make such a big deal about it".
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This is why I'm finding it impossible to panic in the wake of the election.
"Voters demonstrated they have a strong preference for X policy" followed very shortly by "Dem politicians declare they will try to do the opposite of X policy."
Congenital inability to learn the lesson or take the actual temperature of the electorate. I was calling this out back before Trump won election the FIRST time. "If you ignore the shouted complaints of the voters to zero in on issues that impact 1-2% of the population, it doesn't matter how popular you THINK you are."
The Dems don't have the outright power to shove everything down people's throats now (except in Cali)... and for the near future SCOTUS is unfavorable to them so going the lawfare route is risky. I do expect them to try to re-open the immigration floodgates.
I don't see how they stay 'mask on' for the next two years.
Somehow I don’t imagine the cost of milk will get cheaper this time around and the cost of living will continue to go up. The political class in D.C. is so unbelievably out of touch with ordinary people it’s hard to imagine. Why don’t you focus on housing affordability, the energy crunch and climate initiatives, general cost of living, taking out a mortgage to go to college, the healthcare system bankrupting people, new cars costing between $40-$70k, giving preferential treatment to illegal immigrants; among other things; rather than fucking with some other country on the other side of the planet to further the foreign policy objectives of some secular, messianic morons who don’t even believe the way we do?
I won't call it a 'prediction' yet... but I expect:
Lots of focus on revenge, punishment, and settling political scores. I don't think these folks have gotten over what happened on January 6, 2021, much less what has happened since then.
Attempts to HYPERCHARGE the social changes they had been trying to implement. Trump has undone almost 16 years of 'progress' thus far, they will try to gain all that back at once, to get back 'on track.'
Desperation to re-establish funding for their various NGOs and pet projects.
Some attempts to shore up their actual control of the states they've picked up.
I don't think they're competent or efficient enough to do all this and chew gum at the same time, so unless a lot of things line up in their favor they're going to be tripping over their own feet for most of those two years.
Honestly dude, I live in a metropolis and grew up in suburbia and I can tell you straight up, the average citizen I know doesn’t care one damn bit about any of the things you just listed. They literally don’t know what an NGO is and couldn’t tell you what January 6th was about. They go to work or school, come home, watch Instagram reels and get on social media, go out clubbing, hang out with friends, etc. The ordinary citizen is pretty politically apathetic and indifferent. You have to make politics felt by people. It’s why a lot of people took note and attention when Trump proposed no taxes on overtime pay. Tariffs on Canada? (Don’t give a fuck.)
All the things you note are taking place among elite actors in a political arena that’s more than half empty.
If democracy was about solving the needs of the people then Baltimore and Detroit and Chicago wouldn't keep electing corrupt political machines.
The politicians do what they do because they are of, for, and by the activist class.
And the activist class would burn the world down to hurt Trump and his proxies. No cost is too high to bear. The enemies must pay.
The problem I have with democracies is some jobs it doesn’t possess the tools or political resources to solve. If you keep electing such people then one of two things is true: either the electorate is stupid, or, you can’t democratically vote your way out of the problem (hence, where democracies expose their flaws). The cardinal rule of politics is that politicians do whatever gets them elected.
Yes, and putting mainstream Republicans in gulags is an issue that polls extremely well with mainstream Democrats. Don't underestimate how much hate that even otherwise good people can hold in their heart.
You're assuming that Democrats will "tackle affordability" or do other impossible things to win an election.
I'm assuming that they will win elections by making a giant straw man and then burning that straw man to death.
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That's my point. The Dems will go all-in on political goals that are orthogonal to those things the electorate wants and cares about. They will thus not be able to make the median voters feel represented effectively.
I don't think there will be much substantive policy made, and as you indicate many things will get worse from an affordability point of view (modulo AI doing some cool stuff). And thus in two years, there will be an even more frustrated electorate that may be heavily regretting their last decision.
The one thing they might actually get around to doing is blatant handouts of one form or another as a means of 'easing' economic struggles.
Handouts are the kind of solutions that buy votes in the short-term but does nothing to solve problems. It’s part of the American art of playing political football. It’s why you see things like officials turning about once they’re out of office and supporting all the things the people are really interested in, now that they’re out of power and don’t have to worry about it. Same reason you find people in the energy markets doing PR stunts to put on a good face to public by “supporting carbon taxes” (because they knew they’d never happen). We don’t fix problems, we paper over them.
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It doesn't matter if the cost of milk doesn't get cheaper two years from now. Blues will use their political power to cement policy wins that Reds will not be able to reverse even if they win subsequent elections. Whatever negative consequences result from Blue political dominance will not be accounted to Blues; it will be blamed on insufficient blueness, or else it will not be recognized to exist.
I’m not disagreeing with you here but from the people I know, politics is revealed at the grocery bill and goes no further than that. Not one single one of them truly give a shit what happens internationally if they can’t pay their mortgage and don’t have enough gas to get to work. All they see is, “Hm. Blue team is in charge. My property tax has gone up, and my phone bill and Internet have increased by 63%. I will vote for the other team next time around.”
People need to tangibly feel the change in their daily lives for them to care. Even one of my acquaintances who is very much a democratic supporter (I think he’s naive but I oblige him; not that Republicans don’t play the same game; they too, can also eat my ass) said, “Shit, I’ll vote for that idiot…” (referring to Trump) “… if he puts a stimulus check in my bank account.”
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You can get a brand new toyota or honda SUV for under that, to say nothing of a sedan.
I’m looking more at the Slate cars to be honest.
Never heard of those, but I can definitely appreciate the concept.
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