Plus— DeSantis Overreach & High Insurance Rates Are Killing Support For The Anti-Woke Agenda
When I was a teenager and in my twenties, I never considered that I would live past 30. Many of my contemporaries had the same mindset, a mindset influenced by the threat of nuclear war, the prevalence of political violence, the high casualty rates in the Vietnam war, the general social upheaval of that time and an aggressive youth counterculture that rejected the mainstream and encouraged rebellion and nonconformity. And because of that— or at least in that milieu— I took crazy risks: lots of LSD, experimentation with heroin and other very dangerous drugs, hanging out with mujahideen in Afghanistan, driving into dangerous parts of the world unarmed, drug dealing, smuggling… you know, stuff kids do (or did).
Last month I turned 76. I’m a respectable citizen now with a house and a retirement account. By my 30s, I realized there was a life ahead of me. I started a business. Later I took a corporate job. I gravitated back towards the Democratic Party I had eschewed for its support of the genocidal war against Vietnam. At 76 I’m part of the biggest and most consistent voting bloc in the country. Old people vote. We consistently have higher voter turnout rates than anyone else.
In recent elections, voter turnout among people 65 and older has been consistently higher than among younger age groups. According to the Census Bureau, our turnout rates have ranged from around 70% to over 80% in presidential elections over the past few decades. Many of us have a strong interest in political issues that directly affect us, like healthcare, safety, Social Security and Medicare. In the 2022 midterms, people over 65— as always— voted in much higher numbers than anyone else. And that’s true in every single state, from lows in politically backward states where allegiance to democracy has crumbled and many people feel hopeless— 51% in West Virginia, 54% in Arkansas and 56% in Tennessee— to highs in more politically vibrant states like Oregon (80%), Kansas (80%), Maine (79%), Utah (79%), Washington (78%), Vermont (78%)...
The media has been largely positive about Biden’s State of the Union speech, but I haven’t seen anyone talking about how inspirational it was for people my age. He celebrated us; he defended us from Trump’s ugly ageist attacks on our worth as citizens and as human beings. This morning, Dan Pfeiffer edged in the direction of that point: How Trump Fumbled his Attack on Biden's Age, recalling how Trump and his media allies had put Biden on the defensive about his age, with a constant barrage questioning his mental and physical abilities. It’s been an attack on all of us who have entered our golden years. Trump has been trying to make us feel like garbage.
“Thursday night,” wrote Pfeiffer, “demonstrated the folly of Trump’s ‘Sleepy Joe’ strategy… Biden did a great job delivering the speech by any measure. It was energetic and feisty and showed viewers how hard he would fight for them and their freedoms. But even if he hadn’t performed well, he still would have dramatically exceeded expectations. Trump and the Republicans (with help from the political media) set a low bar for Biden. Generally, you want to raise expectations for your opponent to the point that they are impossible to meet. Trump did the exact opposite. Just watch the Trump ad. It takes out-of-context clips to make Biden seem totally out of it. It literally claims Biden is on death’s doorstep. That portrayal is consistent with how Trump, Fox News and other Republicans talk about Biden— they say he is senile, demented, and is in such cognitive decline that others are secretly running the country. If the Trump ad, some Fox News stories, or the unflattering clips circulating on TikTok were your only exposure to Joe Biden, you would be blown away by the President onstage Thursday night. Biden was very good, but his success was irrelevant because the Trump campaign fell ass backwards into their own trap.”
Fox News, Trump, and others propel the myth that Biden is senile and question his mental fitness because it serves their political purposes and makes their Right Wing audience of Biden haters happy. Somewhere along the way, they lost plot and began to believe the caricature.
For a long time, Republican politicians and political operatives understood that Fox News and the rest of the Right Wing media were propaganda operations designed to excite the base and damage the opposition. They were in on the joke. But in the Trump era, most of them followed the former President down the rabbit hole. They stopped getting their news from legitimate sources and live entirely inside the MAGA media bubble. They turn on Fox and think it’s a window instead of a mirror. They believe voters— the vast majority of whom could not find Fox on their cable package— see the world the same way they do.
They are shocked when the real Joe Biden appears. Sure, he looks a little older than he used to, but he is still sharp and full of fight. Marjorie Taylor Greene seemed legitimately shocked when Biden didn’t collapse on stage while she tried to engage him on border issues.
…Republicans rarely learn their lesson, so I hope they keep running against the caricature of Joe Biden because that will make it easier for the real Joe Biden to win in November.
The Biden campaign released this inspiring ad this morning. They know what they’re doing.
Maine, Vermont and Florida have the highest proportion of residents over 65. Voter turnout is huge in Maine (75.5%) and Vermont (73.5%) and— while not as strong as in those states— pretty good in Florida as well (71.2%), especially compared to hopeless red hellholes like Oklahoma (54.8%), Arkansas (55.9%) and West Virginia (57.0%), where democracy has withered on the vine as Fox became the biggest source of “news” in those states. It’s not a coincidence that in the 2020 election those were among the 5 states that gave Trump the biggest share of its votes:
West Virginia- 68.6%
Oklahoma- 65.4%
Arkansas- 62.4%
And, in way of comparison:
America- 46.8%
Florida- 47.9%
Maine- 44.0%
Vermont- 30.7%
UPDATE:
According to Nielsen, 32.2 million people watched the SOTU, of which
5% of viewers were aged 18-34.
19% of viewers were aged 35-54.
74% of viewers were aged 55 and older That’s 23,708,000 million people over 55 who watched Biden giving us back our dignity and humanity that this slob below tried robbing us of:
This morning, Lori Rozsa, reporting about Florida, noted that voters there have gotten sick of the GOP’s and Fox’s “woke” bullshit. Even conservatives in the state legislature have gotten queasy about the latest anti-woke proposals from DeSantis and from the MAGAts. “Florida,” she wrote, “has firmly cemented itself in recent years as ground zero for the nation’s culture wars. The Sunshine State is the birthplace of conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty, the original law restricting LGBTQ+ discussion in classrooms, one of the strictest abortion laws in the country and legislation that has led to the banning of more books than in any other state in America. But the pushback is growing. Parents and others have organized and protested schoolbook bans. Abortion rights advocates gathered enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot in Florida in November. A bill that would have established ‘fetal personhood’ stalled before it could reach a full vote.”
GOP voter registration numbers continued to surpass Democrats, but the party lost two local races they were expected to win: the mayor’s office in Jacksonville, and a closely contested special election to replace a Republican state representative near Orlando.
The legislative seat flipped blue in January when Democrat Tom Keen defeated his Republican rival, a conservative school board member who raised more than twice as much money and promised to fight “the woke agenda.” Keen campaigned on lowering property insurance rates and protecting access to abortion.
DeSantis, who was largely absent from the state while he campaigned for the GOP presidential nomination, has urged lawmakers to “stay the course.” But his doomed presidential bid changed political calculations in and out of the state.
Many lawmakers credit Republican Senate President Kathleen Passidomo for some of the shift. Passidomo stopped several culture war bills from progressing in the Senate, including one that would have punished local officials who oversaw the removal of Confederate monuments.
DeSantis strongly supported the bill, arguing that it is problematic to apply a “hyper-woke 21st-century test” to historical figures.
“It’s totally appropriate for the legislature to say, ‘You know what? We’re going to stop this madness,’” DeSantis said at a news conference in Jacksonville in February, two months after the city pulled down a controversial Jim Crow-era monument called “Women of the Southland.”
Among the public speakers who supported the monuments bill at a Senate hearing was a man who said he wanted to protect Confederate statues to “push White culture, white supremacy.”
…Political analyst Susan MacManus said voters in Florida are paying more attention to pocketbook issues than culture war laws, and state lawmakers— most of whom are up for reelection this year— need to pay attention. Republicans who may have been following DeSantis’s lead on laws that target the LGBTQ+ community and Black history are hearing different concerns when they return to their districts.
“There’s a concern I’m hearing more and more from people, and in the media, that Florida is becoming too expensive,” said MacManus, professor emeritus at the University of South Florida. “We’re seeing stories on the nightly news about people moving out of the state because the cost of living is too high here.”
With homeowners and auto insurance costs that are more than triple that of other states, MacManus said Republican and Democratic voters have more pressing concerns than culture wars.
“These legislators are coming back and, and their families and friends are saying they should be doing something that is going help us,” MacManus said. “The woke things may be interesting to some Republicans, but there are bigger issues.”
Mike Fasano, a lifelong Republican who served in the House and Senate for 18 years and is now the Pasco County tax collector, said most culture war issues are not on the minds of families struggling to pay rising property and auto insurance costs.
“I don’t think families, whether they’re Republican or Democratic or independent, are sitting at the breakfast table talking about which books should be banned,” Fasano said. “They’re talking about how they’re going to pay their rent or mortgage and the electric bill and the premium on their homeowners insurance.”