The Midterms: Altered by Alito

The results surprised, surprising pundits most of all but -but undeterred they are off and running pell mell toward 2024.

The polls? There are too many, too many with clear built in partisan bias, e.g. Trafalgar and Rasmussen. Very few except perhaps the Des Moines Register/Selzer survey can be believed any longer. The latter got Iowa exactly right. It always does. But it surveys only Iowa, no longer contested ground or a national predictor.

The man most responsible for the election outcome? Smug Samuel Alito. Who else but the author of the Dobbs decision, abetted by his far right brethern and sister on the U.S. Supreme Court.

You can think of them as a Doo Wop group, “Sammy and the No-No’s.”

The Dobbs decision clearly, definitely, most assuredly put a strong wind into the sails of the Democatic Party and behind its candidates.

In his opinion Alito said in so many words that if women didn’t like it they could vote otherwise.

Women took him at his word. They voted.

Following on Kansas in its primary in July, in every one of the five states where a general election ballot question tested abortion the winner was choice, even in Mitch McConnell’s ruby red Kentucky.

The person whose appeals voters listened to and heeded at campaign’s end? President Obama. His sound sense oratorical talent resounede from critical state to critical state in the last 10 days of the campaign, resonating on cable news channels, on local TV news and on social media with one big message- VOTE.

All that happened while Donald Trump took to the hustings at the same time to remind people, other than his diehards, that they flat out despise him. If he was a factor, it was in the bad candidate choices made by him and his party and the fact that well over 50% of Americans just wish, really just wish he would SHUT UP and go away. But he is not going to, is he?

No, instead Trump is about to run for president again and likely to announce in the middle of the run-off campaign for the United State Senate in Georgia. He can’t help but hurt his candidate there and the man is, literally, his candidate.

Reading the runes and ruins of the election, what is the long-term drift ? It is that old white people, Republican voters, are dying. Its inexorable, it happens. Their votes are going to the grave with them.

Young voters of all races, all genders (there are more than two anymore) and all backgrounds defied the doubt about what they would do. They voted. For every aged Republican voter, for every Boomer GOP voter there is a young man or woman voting for Democrats and they will be for long years to come.

The Gens X and Y have moved decisively – decisively – into the Democratic camp, where they find their liberal beliefs affirmed especially on the defining issue of their lives, climate change.

Republicans simply refuse or are perhaps just too dense to understand the depth and breadth of young people’s concern about what climate change is doing and will do to their lives. It is literally the issue of their lives and lifetimes.

As it stands now it is more likely than not that when all is counted that Democrats will have a 50-t0-49 Senate pending a last decision in the Georgia runoff Dec. 6. In other words, control with or without Georgia and 51 seats if Sen. Raphael Warnock holds his seat there.

That is tempered by the fact that Republicans will very narrowly control the House of Representatives. Most ironically as it turns out that owes in the end to gerrymandering excess by New York Democrats. Their congressional map was rejected by a state court in upstate New York for excessive partisanship.

Instad the court appointed a guy from Pittsburgh as a special master to redraw lines. He knew next to nothing about the Empire State as he went ahead and redraw 25 congressional districts. Republicans gained five of them even as Gov. Kathy Hochul won a clear Democratic victory.

The New York Democrats political overreach shot them and their national party in both feet on a path into the minority. As it stands, Republicans are likely to have a 5-to-7 seat House majority, far from the 20 to even 40 seats that pundits told one other they foresaw.

But again, if there is one person, one man Democrats can thank for the midterm election, it is Samuel Alito for his Dobbs decisio0n.

Had it never happened, Republicans would have won decisively. But it did and instead they trumped and tromped their way to an election disaster that defied the common politcal wisdom that the out party dominates in mid-terms.

Alito absolutely galvanized women to come out and vote for themselves and doing that meant voing for Democrats.

Perhaps then the biggest question coming out of this election and its result is not who will run for president, or anything about 2024, as important as all that is.

Rather it is will the six arch reactionaries on the U.S. Supreme Court take stock, pay heed and appreciate that their hard right ideology of the Federalist Society is not that of the American people, that it is at complete odds with how a clear majority of Americans see the world and want their country to be?

A good guess is that they will not. In their cloistered, closeted, arrogant existence, with virtually no participation in the life of the nation or any understanding of the daily trials and travails of Americans, the six just won’t get it because they don’t get it, and they never have.

So we will have another election to further inform them.