A Very Happy Taurus Season To You
First of all, I tore through Hunter Biden’s memoir, Beautiful Things today and he’s just like me for real (for real).
I think a lot of activists would do well to understand that the median Democratic primary voter, who’s well to the left of the median American, thinks that Greg Abbott’s bill to report the parents of transgender kids to CPS is insane and reprehensible and that transgender individuals should be able to present as the gender they identify as without being discriminated against. However, this same Democratic primary voter also flat out doesn’t want trans girls competing with cis girls in high school and collegiate sports and doesn’t want trans women in the same prisons as cis women. I’m not saying this opinion is right or wrong, bigoted or fair, I’m saying that’s what people believe and just like in every other context, we have to work with the electorate we have, not the one we want.
Josh Barro is right-on-the-money here with regards to abortion. I happen to think abortion is good and there should be more of it given how many women end up keeping kids they never wanted in the first place, and how that negatively impacts the kids in question. I also think abortion is a health care procedure that I want to get about as much as I want to get an appendectomy (that is not at all).
But my view isn’t common: the majority of people are at least somewhat disturbed by abortion even if they aren’t overtly religious and would rather not think about it as much as possible. But now, with the Supreme Court set to overturn Roe v. Wade for all intents and purposes, it’d be prudent for liberals/progressives/activists to understand the opinions of this country in terms of abortion, aka with the majority of people supporting abortion staying legal in the 1st trimester and substantially less so after. Like, I don’t think there are moral and immoral abortions but most Americans do, and the ugly truth is that we need to tailor our messaging to that brand of moralizing.
This November, Democrats need to make sure that as many of our incumbents survive as possible, especially our governors and senators since it’s much easier to win back House seats than governorships and Senate seats due to the 2-year vs. 4 and 6-year terms. Incumbent Blue Wall governors Tony Evers (D-WI) and Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) as well as Josh Shapiro, who’s the Pennsylvania Democratic gubernatorial nominee, need to win this November because without their winning, electors in those states can easily overturn the 2024 election if the Democratic presidential candidate wins those states. And, given that Evers literally vetoed a bill that would *checks notes* disband Milwaukee Public Schools, you can see why having a Democratic governor is imperative with those states’ Republican legislatures! If the effects of the Supreme Court effectively overturning Roe v. Wade are felt anywhere, it’ll be in the Blue Wall which has trigger laws in place that ban abortion on the state level too.
Pair these two doomer articles with each other.
“Democrats are sleepwalking into a Senate disaster” by Simon Bazelon
“Democrats Are Facing Doom—And No One Seems To Even Have Any Suggestions” by Ben Dreyfuss
My two cents is that if the economy doesn’t get WAY better, Dems will be lucky to leave the 2024 election with 40 Senate seats (my current estimate is that we have 45), and the only way we’re going to mitigate is to triangulate center after midterms, which look very good for the Republicans. We’re not going to do any more big spending bills, and we’re going to have to go right culturally at least in messaging, and the Democratic base will hate that. I think we’re going to end up having to go full third-way on crime and immigration, which swing voters label as their #2 and #3 issues after inflation, which is going to make leftists/progressives hate Biden even more than they already do, but we don’t have a choice since the choices are either, free and fair elections with Democrats putting a moratorium on phrases like “Latinx” and “pregnant people” and talking a lot about public safety and securing our border (which is quite aside from what they do about these issues) or autocratic single-party Republican rule for decades.
I’m not wrong here like when the median Dem staffer has seen Succession and didn’t watch a single March Madness game, that’s a problem!! For the record, I still haven’t seen Succession despite all my friends trying to get me to watch it, and I watched over a dozen March Madness games.