The Red Wave That Wasn't

Lots of people were expecting a Red Wave. Michelle Goldberg writes:

I mistook my own sense of dread for insight and assumed the people predicting a Democratic wipeout must know something. What I should have done was listen to those monitoring the furious political energy unleashed by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision stripping women of their right to bodily autonomy. “As it turns out, there was a lot of data, and almost all of it was pointing towards this notion that Dobbs changed everything,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic analyst who’d tracked a surge of new voter registrations and early voting by women. 

It looks like the Republicans will still take the House -- but narrowly:

The House seems likely to fall into Republican hands, but only by a handful of seats. Democrats won governorships in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and are ahead in Arizona, Oregon and Kansas. They’re poised to take control of the Michigan Legislature for the first time in almost 40 years. And they staved off a Republican supermajority in North Carolina that would have allowed Republicans to pass an abortion ban by overriding the Democratic governor’s veto.

There is still much more to come and it will take a while to understand what went wrong for Republicans. But Goldberg suspects that Trump's party didn't -- or couldn't -- read the electorate:

When it comes to reproductive choice, Republicans are simply out of touch with the values of a significant part of the electorate. “I do think there is a broader narrative of Republican extremism that Dobbs really connected the dots on,” [Tom] Bonier said.

There were five referendums dealing with abortion rights on Tuesday, in Michigan, Kentucky, Vermont, California and Montana. The abortion-rights side won the first four and, as of Wednesday afternoon, is leading in Montana. In North Carolina’s 13th District, the Trump-endorsed Republican Bo Hines, who said that victims of rape and incest who become pregnant should be subject to “a community-level review process” before being granted an abortion, lost a seat considered a tossup.

Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, a high-profile, anti-abortion Christian nationalist who was widely seen as a shoo-in for re-election, is currently down by several thousand votes. Her challenger, the Democrat Adam Frisch, is the son of an OB-GYN who performed abortions; Frisch told me he remembers his dad receiving bomb threats. “That whole issue has been a very personal conversation, and it certainly got as much applause as anything when I was going around on my tour,” he said on Wednesday morning.

That extremism is the most important political story in the country. Since 2020, when Democrats won the presidency and control of both houses of Congress by smaller margins than many expected, there’s been endless hand-wringing about whether Democrats turned off salt-of-the-earth, diner-going Americans by not loudly condemning calls to defund the police. In the wake of Republicans’ weak showing on Tuesday, the political press should lavish similar attention on the ways the fringe right has alienated normal people. MAGA acolytes, it turns out, are the ones trapped in a bubble, convinced by Fox News, right-wing radio, social media and their own sense of entitlement that they’re the only authentic tribunes of the American volk. “People just want the circus to stop,” Frisch said. Even if Boebert somehow ekes out a win, last night suggests he’s right.

It turns out that, if you believe God is on your side, the people may vehemently disagree with you.

Image: JollyNotes.com

The Forest Or The Trees

Today is election day in the United States. Paul Krugman writes that, if Republicans take control of congress, things could get very ugly:

I, at least, always feel at least a bit guilty when writing about inflation or the fate of Medicare. Yes, these are my specialties. Focusing on them, however, feels a bit like denial, or at least evasion, when the fundamental stakes right now are so existential.

Ten or 20 years ago, those of us who warned that the Republican Party was becoming increasingly extremist and anti-democracy were often dismissed as alarmists. But the alarmists have been vindicated every step of the way, from the selling of the Iraq war on false pretenses to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Indeed, these days it’s almost conventional wisdom that the G.O.P. will, if it can, turn America into something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary: a democracy on paper, but an ethnonationalist, authoritarian one-party state in practice. After all, U.S. conservatives have made no secret about viewing Hungary as a role model; they have feted Orban and featured him at their conferences.

At this point, however, I believe that even this conventional wisdom is wrong. If America descends into one-party rule, it will be much worse, much uglier, than what we see in today’s Hungary.

It's a case of millions of Americans not being able to see the forest for the trees:

While I understand the instinct of voters to choose a different driver if they don’t like where the economy is going, they should understand that this time, voting Republican doesn’t just mean giving someone else a chance at the wheel; it may be a big step toward handing the G.O.P. permanent control, with no chance for voters to revisit that decision if they don’t like the results.

What strikes me, reading about Orban’s rule, is that while his regime is deeply repressive, the repression is relatively subtle. It is, as one perceptive article put it, “soft fascism,” which makes dissidents powerless via its control of the economy and the news media without beating them up or putting them in jail.

Do you think a MAGA regime, with or without Donald Trump, would be equally subtle? Listen to the speeches at any Trump rally. They’re full of vindictiveness, of promises to imprison and punish anyone — including technocrats like Anthony Fauci — the movement dislikes.

And much of the American right is sympathetic to, or at least unwilling to condemn, violence against its opponents. The Republican reaction to the attack on Paul Pelosi by a MAGA-spouting intruder was telling: Many in the party didn’t even pretend to be horrified. Instead, they peddled ugly conspiracy theories. And the rest of the party didn’t ostracize or penalize the purveyors of vile falsehoods.

In short, if MAGA wins, we’ll probably find ourselves wishing its rule was as tolerant, relatively benign and relatively nonviolent as Orban’s.

So the question is: Do Americans see the forest or the trees?

Image: The New York Times