No Salvation

Republicans are lining up to blame Donald Trump for their poor showing in the mid-term election. But, Greg Sargent writes, Trump won't take the blame:

Trump will never admit that he and MAGA failed in any way. MAGA can only be failed, as Trump demonstrated when he declared Thursday that he had played his own role perfectly throughout the midterms, while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility in the actual outcome.

More important, this effort to offload blame on Trump is partly spin. Republicans are eager to erase the central role that the demise of abortion rights played in their midterm losses, because that could have ideological consequences that are much more difficult to reckon with. Pinning the outcome on Trump is one way to evade that.

No question, the MAGA movement and the profusion of radical election-denying candidates surely help explain what happened. Such candidates helped Democrats sweep governorships and lower offices in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — a big step toward rebuilding the “blue wall.”

However, Republicans are refusing to admit how much the overturning of Roe v. Wade played in the election results:

An analysis from the New York Times, for instance, demonstrates that Democrats overperformed in places where the fate of abortion rights was at stake. In the aforementioned blue-wall states, electing a GOP governor could have dramatically limited or ended them, since Republicans controlled all three legislatures. Democrats mostly won up and down the ticket.

In Michigan, an abortion rights referendum was on the ballot — and Democrats grabbed control of both chambers in the state legislature. Something similar happened in normally red Kansas, where a Democrat was reelected governor. There are other examples of this pattern, and anti-choice referendums were defeated in red states such as Kentucky and Montana.

But you can already discern signs that Republicans don’t want the backlash in favor of abortion rights to be the story of this election. In Michigan, the state GOP released a memo suggesting their gubernatorial nominee, Tudor Dixon, lost because her position on abortion (opposing it even in cases of rape or incest) was too extreme. This is an evasion: It’s supposed to suggest that a slightly less extreme anti-choice position might have fared better.

But Democrats scorched Dixon with ads warning not just of her extreme position on exceptions but also that the fundamental underlying right, and the question of whether abortions would be criminalized, were on the ballot. It worked: In Michigan, the referendum enshrining a right to reproductive freedom in the state constitution passed by solid majority.

For decades, banning abortion was the Holy Grail for Republicans. They now know that, having achieved their objective, they will not find salvation.

Image: The Washington Post