Monday, October 24, 2022

History Is So Last Summer

"“If I said to you six months ago, ‘you know Kansas, right? It’s a huge pro-abortion state and this summer by a margin of 60% they’re going to keep abortion legal’ you’d think I had made a crazy statement,” he told The Guardian. “If I’d told you at the same time that in the congressional election in Alaska, a hard red state, that it’s not only not going to be won by a Democrat but a Native Alaskan Democrat, again you’d have to question if I was out of my mind.”
It’s the polls that matter, right? The polls predicted that outcome in Kansas, right? And in Alaska? Because polls accurately predict the future because they always look to the past. Like the last time Alaska elected a Native Alaskan to Congress. Or Kansas voted down an abortion statute in an election rigged to make sure the statute passed.

Turning Congress over to the party not in the White House has been true for thirty years, but not 230 years. The shift can be attributed to the collapse of parties into just structures for ballot access (the way Bernie tried to use it) through primaries. But Trump has rallied a rump segment of a once Grand Old Party and so resurrected the GOP as a cult of personality.

Every action in politics has a reaction. Trump and Dobbs may well reverse the short term trend of midterm elections by creating a party only its mother could love.

It’s as reasonable a prediction as the polls that say races are “tightening.” (If I ever live to see an election year where polls don’t “tighten,” I will know I have lived to see a brand new thing.)

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