Last Monday I made three predictions with a high degree of certainty. I was (happily) only partly right on all three:
I said we wouldn’t know the final results of Election 2022 on Tuesday night, and that the counting would be full of lawsuits and chaos. True that ballots are still being counted in races that will determine the balance of power in the House, and that we just Saturday got the final counts in Arizona and the breaking news that the Democrats held onto 50 seats in the Senate (phew!) with the balance of power again coming down to a Dec. 6th runoff in Georgia. But the outcomes so far have been so definitive, the big picture trends so clear, and, importantly, Trump so distracted by his own personal humiliation in Florida, that the counting has largely been smooth and free of shenanigans. My unscientific observation is that the media was also quite a bit better about how they covered the count in ways less likely to fuel the Big Lie. Hallelujah!
I said the GOP would claim victory immediately, regardless of the actual outcome. Partly right; would-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s very late-night speech in front of a mostly empty party room retained some of the “red wave” bluster, but even the GOP talking heads on Fox News were on the blame train and not the victory bus by the wee hours.
I said there would be violence. More specifically, I said there would be attempted violence at polling places, against election workers, and against elected officials, Democrats in particular, and I said some of those attempts would be successful. Again, partly right but mostly (gratefully) wrong: there were serious and significant threats of violence all over the country, but in most places the threats stayed just that - threats. Not great, but not as catastrophic for American democracy as if the Trumpster fire turned out in force as threatened.
And I made two more predictions with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯:
I said the GOP would pick up 15 seats to take the House and that the wackadoo caucus of the GOP would gain power, making the House even less governable. It looks very likely that the GOP will pick up more like 6 seats to very narrowly flip the House, that the crazy caucus will in fact be quite a bit larger, and that the House will be a nonstop chaos machine, unmanageable by any GOP Speaker. Fun!
I said the GOP would take the Senate with 51 seats. In my map I had NV going GOP. Thank you Nevada voters for making me wrong! Now let’s all pour our relieved energy and resources into Senator Warnock to help him make me even wronger.
So, now what?
Some reflections on the wild ride we’re (still) on.
Hot take: Trying to force a 10-year-old to stay pregnant after she was raped while building a whole political party around the ego of a criminal with an affinity for the very worst of us was motivating to a slightly smaller portion of the GOP base and a much larger portion of the Dem base than folks assumed.
With a tad less snark: without Trump actually on the ballot and benefitting from a media anxious to give him an always-on megaphone, the wackadoo GOP plurality wasn’t as energized or mobilized as the scared and exhausted from-the-chaos base(s) of the Democratic party. The end of Roe and the absolutely insane, empathy-free reaction to it on the part of Republicans (i.e. standing firmly against 10-year-old victims of rape, women nearly dying from ectopic pregnancies, and doctors afraid to prescribe standard medications because they might also be abortifacients) was a motivating wake-up call.
A majority of Republicans still say they support Trump or Trump’s slightly more polished political twin-cum-rival DeSantis at the top of their ticket in 2024. Most Republicans don’t believe Biden was legitimately elected. As much as a third of the GOP House caucus is on the wackadoo end of the conservative spectrum. And the Republican leadership, such as it is, has not yet taken any steps toward ejecting the dangerous extremists from the Party’s core.
We should absolutely cheer Tuesday’s outcomes: hardly a red trickle at the federal level, major wins in several states, universal wins for abortion rights where they were on the ballot, and just one of the election-denier Secretary of State candidates won, meaning we’ll likely get another shot at free and fair elections in 2024.
We should consider 2022 a reprieve and not a victory. Stay buckled up for the wild ride to continue: One of our nation’s two major political parties remains in thrall to anti-democratic, proto-fascist, pro-political-violence forces, and have unprecedented billions behind them. They likely have control of the House for the next two years, they have control of the Supreme Court, and they will not likely go quietly into the dustbin of history.
Money talks: in the olden days of this newsletter (i.e. until early this year when I got busy picking fights with Charter Spectrum and fell off the newsletter wagon) I was trying to convince you to come along with me on a “follow the money” journey to unpack the campaigns the billionaires were running to enrich themselves by shifting some of the fundamental ways our society works/worked. (See Gigify for my manifesto-ish statement on that.)
In the coming weeks I’m coming back to that journey, because I think there are hints in the turnout and voting patterns of this election that maybe there’s an emerging coalition.
Call it the coalition of the exhausted, maybe? People wary of/tired of the wackadoo and angry about the ways concentrating wealth and power in the hands of ever fewer people are impacting their quality of life and the propects for their children.
I think there might be some interesting things emerging around corporatism and how it’s overridden the (nonpartisan/apolitical) public good to such an extent it’s impossible not to notice. I think there are dangerous ways that could intersect with systemic racism and cynical nationalism, but there are promising ways it could help move us forward, too.
Distractions
It’s still pretty weird out here, friends. Here’s how I’m distracting myself:
Watch: Bad Sisters, Season 2 of The Vow
Listen: Alabama Shakes radio on Pandora (comfortingly throw back!)