It's Pisces Season
My current prediction for the 2022 Midterms is that Democrats lose between 15 and 30 House seats based on how bad Joe Biden’s approval rating is in November, and I’d give Dems about a 50% chance of keeping the Senate. However, a lot can change until November and I’m hoping things get better but it’s unlikely. Biden's approval ratings are tanking right now, and they're only going to get worse since the economic blowback from the war and sanctions on Russia will be showing up in the US economy a few months from now, right before midterms in November, and voters will undoubtedly blame Democrats.
I read this post by Ruy Teixeira in The Liberal Patriot and I completely agree with it, and that combined with this piece about how Democrats are losing their long-standing dominance with non-white voters makes for a foreboding combo. And relatedly, it doesn’t make me a “vote suppressor” for pointing out that Democrats are not likely to do well this fall.
That being said, one of the more optimistic political opinions I have is that a lot of American voters in the middle, who decide federal elections, don't like Republicans at all, they just hate Democrats more. We can win over people that hate us by ostensibly not being us without even changing a single policy we hold (see: Jon Tester), we can't win over people that genuinely love the other guy.
I’m kind of at my wits’ end with so many pundits and politicos and their demands that Joe Biden “DO SOMETHING.” Biden isn’t the god emperor of America and if he was, none of us would like it!!! Even if Biden tried to for instance cancel student debt by executive order, the courts can and would strike it down!!! That’s why Congress has to write a bill and make it pass the House and the Senate which of course it won’t because it won’t clear even the 50-vote threshold let alone the 60-vote threshold with the filibuster in place. That’s why letting Trump become president in 2016 was not smart of the United States and we’re going to be facing the consequences of that for decades to come.
This piece, How Immigration Politics Drives Some Hispanic Voters to the G.O.P. in Texas gave me pause because it makes sense, especially this part: “‘I want to bring God back into politics,’ Mr. Cabrera said. ‘And so that’s what I’m doing.’”
While I obviously support expanding voting rights and making it as easy as possible for everybody to vote, I think that the push for voting rights and its subsequent failure is going to be used by Dems as an excuse as to why we’ll lose elections in large swathes of the country this fall and beyond. Like, when Democrats lose blue state swing districts that Biden won in places like Virginia and New Jersey (VA is still a blue state on the federal level), it’s not going to be because voting rights weren’t expanded, it’ll be because voters preferred Republicans and we as Democrats need to diagnose the problem so we can fix it instead of blaming voters for not voting the way we want them to.
Electioneering is like a business, where voters are like customers, and our goal is to increase profits while keeping the customer happy and that means we have to listen to the customer. If American voters’ biggest issues are inflation (gas prices high), immigration (i.e. too many brown people), and crime, Democrats can’t publicly be seen focusing on like, Medicare For All or banning fracking because that’s not what the electorate wants, and the electorate decides who gets and stays in office. Governing for Democrats is a balancing act between doing what’s good for marginalized groups and winning enough votes, including from those who don’t benefit from Democratic policies, to retain power.
My least politically correct idea is that we need a Democratic Fox News esque propaganda machine staffed by the hottest (yet accessible) Democratic women we can find. It goes against many of my feminist sensibilities but I care more about keeping the right to abortion than being righteous. Like, all we have to do is hire hot (but more diverse than Fox News) women who can hold a conversation without accidentally on purpose committing treason. A GOP consultant called me "news anchor attractive" so I clearly know what I'm talking about here.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with this poem by Ilya Kaminsky, who was born in Odesa, Ukraine.
