The most important outcome of the midterm elections is that I am vindicated. I knew the prophesied “red wave” wasn’t going to happen! I knew it. I had given in for awhile to all the hype over a Republican takeover of Congress, because the out-party usually does take over, but I tried to ignore all the bad punditry from the media and Eeyore-ism from the Democrats because I was seeing some signs that my party was going to have a better night than predicted.
And after all that red wave talk, here we are. The Democrats are holding onto the Senate and may even get a 51st seat. Even if the Republicans win the House, it will be by a much smaller margin than everybody had predicted (and best of luck to Kevin McCarthy trying to wrangle that clown car full of howler monkeys). I believe just about all of the extremist election deniers lost their races for governor and secretary of state.
I believe it was abortion that prevented the Republicans from having the night they were bragging about having. I read awhile ago that record numbers of women were registering to vote for the first time. Why is that? What is new this year that so many women are so fired up to vote? It’s Dobbs overturning Roe. It turns out abortion is a bipartisan issue—neither Democratic nor Republican women were keen on having “local political leaders” control their bodies, or having women die senselessly from ectopic pregnancies, or criminalizing miscarriages, or forcing young girls to carry their rapists’ babies to term, or any of the other barbarism that’s starting to happen in America. You see this confirmed in Kansas, Kentucky, California, Michigan, Vermont, and Montana. These states are blue, red, and purple and when voters had a clear choice of whether to protect their reproductive freedom, they voted to protect it.
In the aftermath, I wonder why more pundits and pollsters didn’t see that. In the summer, they acknowledged how much the Supreme Court’s decision was going to galvanize voters, but by September and October, it’s like the news industry had decided it was in fashion to pretend that caring about reproductive rights was out of fashion. But why else would so many women be voting in such numbers, and why would so many people be voting early? The news told us it was the economy people cared about, but I don’t buy that it would fire people up quite that much. The economy is always going to be a concern for voters. We have inflation this year, but every two years there’s something in the economy that people want to fix, so the economy isn’t some novel thing that would get people to vote for the first time. (I think polls that say the economy is a top concern have some nuance that’s not really explored. The economy is always a top concern for me in the sense that it’s the job of legislators to care about it, but it doesn’t fire me up, and I wonder if that’s true for other voters.)
In the end, I think the pundits ignored women voters and ignored the message you could see them sending for months before the midterms. This is just coming from me as someone who follows politics closely. I don’t have the means to do a deep dive into any of this, and I’m not an expert. But if a rando voter like me, working from publicly available information, could see through all the hype about the red wave, and could see Dobbs wasn’t something people would forget, why couldn’t these professional pundits and reporters see that? Instead, the press listened to those who scolded the Democrats were focusing too much on abortion.
I don’t know if it was as much that the polls were wrong but that the framing journalists erected around that polling was wrong. Two weeks before the election, the New York Times interpreted a poll saying Democrats were ahead in four bellwether districts as “fresh evidence that Republicans are poised to retake Congress this fall as the party dominated among voters who care most about the economy." So for the Times, Democrats ahead equates to Republican victory. This happened a lot in the runup to the midterms and I think it was because reporters grasped at the lazy narrative—the president’s opposition party always wins significant seats in Congress in the midterms—and manipulated whatever data it had to so it could write the analysis it planned to write. And they ignored the other data that was right in front of them. I saw so much of this in the last few weeks: reporters saying a tight race meant a GOP win, while no Democratic lead, no matter how big, was safe.
How can we expect reporters do a deep dive when it’s easier to keep refreshing FiveThirtyEight for polling averages and reprint whatever Nate Silver says? The problem with that was there were shady pollsters like Trafalgar, which always lean Republican and don’t share their methodology, flooding the media in the last few weeks, and I think this skewed the results. Trafalgar ended up being hilariously wrong in many of its projections. The Wall Street Journal had a poll a week before the election saying women had shifted 27 points from D to R in three months. That doesn’t pass the smell test, and yet the media fell for it.
I got tired a few months ago of all the Eeyore-ism in a lot of people, including some in my party, about the election. (I know that’s pretty rich coming from me, as I always worry and catastrophize and see the dark cloud in every silver lining, but I’m trying to fight that tendency.) I kept reading people saying, “The party in power always loses seats in the midterms” with this “whaddya gonna do?” shrug. And I thought, “How about we try not losing power?” For my part, I wrote out a ton of postcards to voters and phone banked for the Delaware Democrats.
I had never done that before. Since I was 18, I’ve always voted faithfully in general, midterm and primary elections, but I felt I needed to do more—just something so I could say I tried to stem the tide of this mythical red wave. I’m going to keep doing that type of volunteering in the future. Don’t tell me we can’t do something when we cast off the negativity and become happy warriors for the things we care about.
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