"Omigosh! The inflation, the inflation, the inflation! It's the only thing that'll be on the ballot in the midterms!"
Well, not so fast, Repukes! The Kansas vote on preserving its state abortion law made headlines precisely because it showed there's a lot more than spiking chicken prices to reckon with in November. As the NY Times lead piece yesterday noted:
"In a state where Republicans far outnumber Democrats, Kansans delivered a clear message in the first major vote testing the potency of abortion politics since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade: Abortion opponents are going too far. The overwhelming defeat of a measure that would have removed abortion protections from the state constitution quickly emboldened Democrats to run more assertively on abortion rights and even to reclaim some of the language long deployed by conservatives against government overreach, using it to cast abortion bans as infringing on personal freedoms."
But this evokes pretty much a 'duh' response. Of course the Dems need to run more assertively on abortion rights! I believe they need to make it the single issue, don't even bring up the "kitchen table" stuff - which is just the wicket the Reeps want to play on. Keep pounding on the example shown in Kansas, and also emulate what the Kansas abortion rights activists did, by doing energetic door-to-door canvasing. In a WSJ lead article on the result yesterday one was blown away by this nugget redolent with overthinking:
"The Kansas results showed a wariness of changing abortion law but didn’t test whether that will motivate voters to choose Democratic candidates"
But as I responded in a comment:
"Ah, but you didn't mention the "wariness" was focused on changing the abortion law in the negative. And which party would be doing that? C'mon, this isn't a Mensa admission test question. It shouldn't take a Mensa level IQ to appreciate that if the Reeps take both houses of congress in November they will go all out to pass a nationwide abortion ban. Several GOP senators have even bragged about it, so sure are they. But Kansas - a deep red state - shows the calculus has changed. It doesn't take a genius to grasp it will be the DEM candidates who stand to protect the access to abortion, not the Reeps. So assuming voters (mainly women) are as motivated as those in Kansas, this ought not be a difficult political issue to parse. I mean, we aren't talking differential geometry here."
The point is that motivating voters to choose Dem candidates is freaking implicit, given they will be the ones to protect women's abortion rights - certainly not the power hungry, Trump idolizing GOP. Oh they yap at length about inflation and gas prices 'hurting Americans' but they don't give two craps about your pain at the pump or at the supermarket. They only want what they believe is an easy peasy way to seize power. Economically, if they get too many dummies to vote them in, no one's economic situation will improve.
Indeed, as I already pointed out Sen. Rick Scott (FL) has a proposal in the pipeline to have Social Security "reviewed" as a budgetary item every 5 years - with the option not to renew it. Dumb Americans, gullible enough to buy into the Reep crappola to put inflation woes voting over common sense and personal rights, will also find food stamps cut to support more tax cuts. All of this means the Kansas vote and Roe needs to be the primary issue, especially directed at college-educated women in the states Dems need to hold onto the House, and the Senate.
The Kansas abortion vote was a shot over the bow of Democrats not to go into sleepwalking mode as November 8th nears. They need to energize themselves and their base - especially women - to go all out to keep House and Senate in November. The cost of not doing so will be too horrific to contemplate.
See Also:
by Priti Gulati Cox | August 7, 2022 - 6:23am | permalink
Excerpt:
The "Vote Yes" side screamed at us that we wanted to kill babies. Their skillfully branded mother-and-child logo and cynical three-word slogan "Value Them Both" were everywhere here in Salina, Kansas. Always the same cozy white-on-purple image and soothing words on yard signs and banners, as if they were My Pillow or Hobby Lobby. On weekends, they would occupy street corners. Just a half-dozen or so actual humans accompanied by a much larger number of stars-and-stripes flags (almost certainly made in China) flying in the crazy Kansas winds (which are quickly going climate-change crazier).
by Mitchell Zimmerman | August 4, 2022 - 5:42am | permalink
Excerpt:
Our country may be divided on the issue of abortion. But when it comes down to it, most Americans believe that it’s a pregnant person’s right to decide for themselves whether to continue a pregnancy.
That’s not only a blue-state attitude — it’s just as true in conservative states like Kansas.
By a margin of nearly 20 percentage points in an election with record turnout, Kansas voters just overwhelmingly rejected Republican efforts to cancel the state’s constitutional right to personal bodily autonomy, even after the U.S. Supreme Court deleted that right at the federal level.
And:
by Bill Berkowitz | August 4, 2022 - 4:59am | permalink
/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/52ffdc56d1ff60efb76562f09e3af1cc/ATX%20Roe%20Overturned%20SF%20TT%2003.jpg)
Excerpt:
In the first abortion-related election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, voters in Kansas overwhelmingly defeated a constitutional amendment that could have led to the banning of abortion. Republicans scheduled the vote for August, hoping for a low turnout in a state where Donald Trump defeated Joe Biden by nearly 15 percentage points in 2020 In the midst of a heat advisory, a historically high turnout defeated the amendment. According to MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki, about a fifth of the “no” vote came from Republicans.
"This is truly a historic day for Kansas and for America. Freedom has prevailed," said Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, which helped lead the opposition to the amendment. "Thank you to everyone who took part in this movement."
And:
by Thom Hartmann | August 5, 2022 - 6:20am | permalink
And:
by Lucian K. Truscott IV | August 7, 2022 - 6:15am | permalink
And:
by Meaghan Ellis | August 4, 2022 - 7:08am | permalink
Excerpt:
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) has suggested that he believes federal programs like Medicare and Social Security should be included in annual budget discussions; an initiative that could ultimately threaten to impact the lives of millions of benefit recipients.
On Tuesday, August 2, the Republican lawmaker made his remarks during an appearance on "The Regular Joe Show." During the discussion, show host Joe Giganti asked Johnson about the PACT Act — which was passed to provide aid for veterans who suffered from exposure to toxic burn pits — as well as the debates surrounding discretionary and mandatory spending.
The Wisconsin lawmaker, who is currently campaigning for a third Senate term, admitted that he seeks to shift the full federal budget toward discretionary spending. The proposed change would include Social Security and Medicare, programs he believes need to be re-evaluated and restructured.
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