November is a referendum on equal treatment
2022 Senate Election Interactive Map; 2022 Consensus as of Oct. 5
If this country is to survive the simmering brew of anti-democratic authoritarianism, it will be women who save it. Not the sad cases wearing the “Trump can grab my ↓” tee shirts or those declaring him the MAGA messiah. The women who see clearly how much panicked conservatives mean to take from them (Washington Post):
Donald Trump’s election made evident to Robin Kupernik and Elizabeta Stacishin of suburban Denver what was at stake. Last summer’s Dobbs decision revoking Roe v. Wade made clear — crystal — just what conservative backlash meant for women’s rights.
“This is not about babies, this is about keeping women down,” the two agreed (Washington Post):
Kupernik, 57, and Stacishin, 53, were spurred to political activism by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But for much of this year, they had been sensing a lack of energy on the left — an absence of the kind of commitment on the part of voters like themselves who had propelled Democrats to victories in 2018 and 2020. Then came the June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Both women said the abortion case persuaded them to redouble their efforts for the 2022 campaign.
“I really didn’t see, you know, a very positive path forward … ,” Stacishin said over coffee in this suburb northwest of downtown Denver. “People have protested so many times and so many different things, it’s not even that meaningful anymore. But I think that everyone is feeling in their bones, especially women, the insult and indignity of what the Supreme Court has done. … And that is in no small part why I am working as hard as I’m working for the midterms right now.”
The August defeat in Kansas of an amendment banning abortion there supplied oxygen to their fire. Still, in a midterm election, especially in a president’s first term, his party tends to lose ground. In normal times. Ours are anything but normal.
2022 House Election Interactive Map; 2022 Consensus as of Oct. 7
Polling suggests that pocketbook issues are, as ever, atop voters minds. Inflation, naturally.
But in conversations, the issue of inflation doesn’t always translate immediately to the political advantage or disadvantage of one party or the other. Some women reflexively blame Biden; others see the problem as more complex, caused by global economicdisruptions from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. In contrast, the Supreme Court’s abortion decision is, for many, more visceral. Democrats believe that difference might be enough for the party to hold down expected losses in the House and maintain their Senate majority. The issue is whether Republican advertising in the final weeks and more bad economic news will override the initial energizing effects from the Dobbs decision.
Trump’s election spurred the largest single-day, nationwide protest in U.S history, the Women’s March (3-5 million nationwide). Women who had never been engaged in sustained political organizing became involved and drove the Democratic sweep election of 2018.
Republicans hope to move some White suburban women who supported Democrats in 2018 and 2020 back to their column. Democrats hope to prevent that from happening. But Democrats also need sizable participation by the women who powered them to victory in 2018, a year when turnout for a midterm election was the highest in a century.
The Post’s extended story looks at how women might influence outcomes in the 2022 midterms. It is not just women on the Democratic side energized this cycle. Women are not a monolith, as the Post’s story reflects.
The wildcard is how much Dobbs backlash and fears about the authoritarian (even pro-Vladimir Putin) tilt of the Republican Party after the Jan. 6 insurrection and threats of right-wing violence will energize countervailing voter turnout from the left in November.
RINO (Republican In Name Only) was once an epithet with which the party’s fringe right branded traditional Republicans. Today the term describes an entire party that rejects all but the decorative trappings of democracy. One wonders why they bother participating in elections they consider illigitimate unless their candidates win. Chalk it up to muscle memory for the rank and file, perhaps, and to steady paychecks for the campaign industrial complex. But it seems Republicans are only in elections now to keep up appearances. And to maintain power at any cost, even the republic itself.
Jessie Danielson, 44, is a Democrat who was elected to the Colorado state Senate in 2018 after serving in the state House. She is the mother of two young children. She has advocated for many issues and causes, but nothing seems to animate her more than what she sees as the fragile state of democracy.
Not exactly a street-level voter, Danielson nonetheless expresses what many of us sense.
“I feel this is an unprecedented embrace of that extremism by the Republican Party,” she said. “I don’t think this kind of thing has happened before, and that is what I believe voters across the country will reject — an armed mob storming the United States Capitol to overthrow the elected government. And that mob was driven by Trump.”
Still, Danielson is hopeful that things can change. “I have to believe that now that we’ve gone through this and it’s been over and over and over, that the majority of Americans will say, ‘This is not okay with me, … that is not American,’” she said.
Democrats and Republicans have different takes about what is at the top of likely voters’ minds. But those are largely a reflection of the doors their campaigns’ turnout efforts have chosen to knock. What counts more is who turns out.
What has to happen for Democrats to prevail in this election and beyond is better organization at the local level, and not simply in the blue cities. We cannot concede rural America to a party opposed to democracy and committed to minority rule.
In early 2018, a purple-state, rural county chair activated by Trump’s election wrote to me about her early travails:
I have received NO direct communication for the State Party! I have had to personally beat the bushes to even make contact with them via email and phone. To date, my District chair has been unreachable. I have received NO info from the outgoing chair or state party about what we should be doing or need to do on the local level to get Democrats elected!!!
Your email and GOTV Platform is the FIRST communication I have received that gives me any help at all.
What I suspect will happen after Dobbs is, as after 2018, a fresh wave of women will step up to reinvigorate county committees that have for years been on life support. State Democratic parties do what they can with limited budgets and bandwidth. But they’d best take a fresh look at the maps above and reorder their priorities.
“Jesus will prob return before we flip the county,” one freshly minted county chair told me in May. With “very little political party experience,” she leads one of the largest counties in her state. People like her need more than a 250+ page manual on party administration if Democrats have any hope of turning the maps above bluer.
Democrats cannot win where they do not show up to play.
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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us