Voters Really Do Not Want Politicians Trying To Take Away Their Rights And Freedoms

And We All Know Who The Greater Evil Will Always Be

Republicans lost so badly on Tuesday because they’re looked at as the party that takes away our rights and freedoms. What about Mississippi? Elvis’ relative ran as an anti-Choice Democrat. How did he imagine he was going to win? With all the hubbub about a Democrat being able to win in Mississippi, Presley lost two big counties— Madison and Lafayette (Oxford) that Jim Hood, another anti-Choice Democrat, won in 2019 and wound up with the same 47% of the vote that Hood did. Utter failure to read the moment and ride the wave.

Just look at what happened in Ohio— a state Trump won with 8 point margins against both Hillary and Biden. There were two ballot initiatives viewed as Republicans trying to take away rights, abortion and recreational marijuana use. The pro-Choice constitutional amendment won by just over 13 points

• Yes- 2,186,962 (56.6%)

• No- 1,675,728 (43.4%)

And the pro-pot proposition won by 14 points

• Yes- 2,183,734 (57.0%)

• No- 1,649,384 (43.0%)

Let’s forget about the 3 big blue counties, Franklin (Columbus), Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Hamilton (Cincinnati). Of course Biden won them, respectively with 64.7%, 66.4% and 57.1%. But instead, let’s look at some counties that Trump won, first a half dozen small town and suburban counties and then a half dozen rural counties.

• Stark Co. (Canton)- Trump- 58.4%, Pro-Choice- 53%, Pro-pot- 52%

• Butler Co. (Cincinnati suburbs)- Trump- 61.3%, Pro-Choice- 51%, Pro-pot- 57%

• Lorain Co. (Cleveland suburbs)- Trump- 50.4%, Pro-Choice- 62%, Pro-pot- 59%

• Delaware Co. (Columbus suburbs)- Trump- 52.5%, Pro-Choice- 59%, Pro-pot- 55%

• Lake Co. (Cleveland suburbs)- Trump- 56.0%, Pro-Choice- 60%, Pro-pot- 59%

• Mahoning Co. (Youngstown)- Trump- 50.3%, Pro-Choice- 56%, Pro-pot- 52%

• Ottawa Co.- Trump- 60.8%, Pro-Choice- 53%, Pro-pot- 54%

• Union Co.- Trump- 64.6%, Pro-Choice- 51%, Pro-pot- 52%

• Wood Co.- Trump- 52.9%, Pro-Choice- 56%, Pro-pot- 55%

• Marion Co.- Trump- 68.2%, Pro-Choice- 49%, Pro-pot- 53%

• Huron Co.- Trump- %, Pro-Choice- 44%, Pro-pot- 51%

• Madison Co.- Trump- %, Pro-Choice- 47%, Pro-pot- 50%

Taking away peoples’ rights is a bad idea and the Republicans are seen more and more as a party that does that. Even Trump had the street smarts to understand that that’s a bad idea, regardless of party ideology. He doesn’t care about policy, just power— and self enrichment— and when policy stands in the way, he abandons it with alacrity. MAGA Mike and the congressional party want to get rid of programs like Social Security and Medicare. Trump understands that’s political suicide. Abortion is a little trickier because the GOP has a pesky anti-Choice base who are on the alert to see if anyone is selling them out but, as Jonathan Last noted at The Bulwark yesterday, “Trump has already begun distancing himself from the Republican consensus on abortion. He called the abortion ban Ron DeSantis passed a ‘terrible mistake.’ He has said that all abortion laws should have exceptions for rape / incest / health of mother because ‘Other than certain parts of the country, you can’t— you’re not going to win on this issue.’ A handful of people from Pro-Life Inc. don’t like what Trump is doing. ‘Are pro-lifers going to allow themselves to be a cheap date?’ Patrick Brown, a fellow with the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Life and Family Initiative, told Politico. ‘Are they going to sit back and take it when candidates are denigrating the cause they dedicated their life to?’” Last says yes, they “sit back and take it.”

Taking away democracy, on the other hand, isn’t something Trump is willing to compromise. He knows democracy stands between him and what he wants out of politics. Just yesterday, for example, Molly Beck reported that in Wisconsin he’s “again putting pressure on Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to overhaul Wisconsin's system of elections, this time by elevating calls to impeach the nonpartisan leader of the state's elections agency whom Trump continues to cast as a villain in his false narrative about the battleground state's 2020 election… [Meagan] Wolfe has served as a target for nearly three years to those in the Republican Party base who believe widespread election misconduct delivered an election loss to Trump in 2020, despite court rulings, nonpartisan audits, and recounts paid for by Trump, showing President Joe Biden was elected fairly.

Trump retruths a crackpot Wisconsin MAGAt who hates democracy

On Wednesday, Ron Brownstein explained how lesser of two evils politics work, noting that “Democrats, just as they did last November, generated yesterday’s unexpectedly strong results primarily by amassing decisive margins in urban centers and the large inner suburbs around them. The outcomes suggested that, as in 2022, an unusually broad group of voters who believe that Democrats have not delivered for their interests voted for the party’s candidates anyway because they apparently considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights and values on abortion and other cultural issues. ‘The driving force of our politics since 2018 has been fear and opposition to MAGA,’ the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told me. ‘It was the driving force in 2022 and 2023, and it will be in 2024. The truth is, what we’re facing in our domestic politics is unprecedented. Voters understand it, they are voting against it, and they are fighting very hard to prevent our democracy from slipping away.’… [T]he Democrats’ solid showing yesterday demonstrated that the party can often overcome those negative assessments by focusing voters’ attention on their doubts about the Trump-era Republican Party. ‘Once again, we saw that what voters say in polls can be very different than what they do when faced with the stark choice between Democrats who are fighting for a better life for families and dangerous candidates who are dead set on taking away their rights and freedoms,’ Jenifer Fernandez Ancona.”

[T]he principal reason for Youngkin’s failure, analysts in both parties agree, was public resistance to his agenda on abortion. Youngkin had elevated the salience of abortion in the contest by explicitly declaring that if voters gave him unified control of both legislative chambers, the GOP would pass a 15-week ban on the procedure, with exceptions for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother.

...Youngkin and his advisers described that proposal as a “reasonable” compromise, and hoped it would become a model for Republicans beyond the red states that have already almost all imposed more severe restrictions. But the results made clear that most Virginia voters did not want to roll back access to abortion in the commonwealth, where it is now legal through 26 weeks of pregnancy. “What Virginia showed us is that the Glenn Youngkin playbook failed,” Mini Timmaraju, the CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion-rights group, told me last night. “We showed that even Republican voters in Virginia weren’t buying it, didn’t go for it, saw right through it.”

Youngkin’s inability to capture the Virginia state legislature, even with all the advantages he enjoyed, will probably make the 2024 GOP presidential contenders even more skittish about openly embracing a national ban on abortion. But Timmaraju argued that yesterday’s results showed that voters remain focused on threats to abortion rights. “Our job is to make sure that the American people don’t forget who overturned Roe v. Wade,” she told me.

…[A] clear message from the party’s performance yesterday is that, however disenchanted voters are with the country’s direction under Biden, Democrats can still win elections by running campaigns that prompt voters to consider what Republicans would do with power. “We have an opening here with the effective framing around protecting people’s freedoms,” Fernandez Ancona told me. “Now we can push forward on the economy.”

Yesterday’s results did not sweep away all the obstacles facing Biden. But the outcome, much like most of the key contests in last fall’s midterm, show that the president still has a viable pathway to a second term through the same large metro areas that keyed this unexpectedly strong showing for Democrats.

Tessa Stuart put it like this for Rolling Stone: “The primary question after Tuesday’s rout is to what extent voters’ sustained fury at Republican attempts to strip them of their rights, reproductive and otherwise, can help Biden stave off defeat next November… It certainly helps Democrats that abortion referendums like the one that passed in Ohio will appear on the ballot in at least two critical swing states: Arizona and Nevada. Similar efforts are also underway in Nebraska, Colorado, and Florida.”