I recommend this roundup from Bob McElvaine of the election results as they now stand: An Election Post-Non-Mortem: The “Red Wave” Was Another Big Lie Substack 11/13/2022.
At this writing, it’s still uncertain whether the Democrats will hold on to a narrow majority in the House.
Michigan had such great results for the Democrats that it’s looking like a kind of “liberated territory” at the moment.
But I expect the Republicans to go continue their party’s process of radicalization. So here are some of the considerations at the top of my mind for the next two years in terms of protecting the democratic system.
Voting Rights: There will be a temptation among pundits, donors, and reflexive moderates to declare that voter dedication has overcome the Republicans’ Jim Crow style voter-suppression and election-subversion efforts and we don’t have to worry about it any more. It would be both foolish and irresponsible for the Democrats to proceed on that assumption. We need a voting rights act that reinstates the federal “preclearance” provisions and other protections that the rightwing Supreme Court has shot down. We need a new Electoral Count Act to require state legislatures to respect the popular vote in their states when selecting Presidential Electors. And we need a law that overrules any Supreme Court validation of the crackpot “independent state legislature theory” (ISLT), which would open the floodgates to radical gerrymandering and invalidate even state-level constitutional protections for voting rights.
Abortion Rights: Congress needs to codify abortion rights nationally as they were protected for half a century prior to this year in the “Roe v. Wade” decision. Suppressing women’s rights is a key obsession of the global right wing, from European Putinists to Brazilian fascists to Islamist theocrats to the US Christian Right whose views now dominate the current Republican Party. It very much worth remembering that when he was campaigning for President, Obama said signing a proposed law that would codify Roe would be "the first thing I'd do as president." Once he was elected President, he basically brushed the entire issue aside.
Protecting Judicial Independence: Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been working to prioritize the issue of “dark money” in lobbying for judges and supporting candidates in judicial elections in the states. Establishing a require code of ethics for the Supreme Court is a real necessity. There needs to be a serious Congressional investigation of Clarence Thomas’ relationship to the January 6 insurrectionists with whom his wife was involved. (The House January 6 Committee has examined this in part.) The Democrats really need to make the role of the staunchly rightwing Federalist Society in Republican judicial selections much more of an issue.
I’m highlighting those three issues because they are areas where the Republicans having been radically changing the status quo as it existed in 2010 or 2018. They are all three really issues related to defending the liberal-democratic system and the basic rule of law. The threat in all those areas is far from over and with the Supreme Court in Dred-Scott-decision mode, the Democrats need to make measures like expanding SCOTUS (“court-packing”) and restricting the courts’ jurisdiction on some key issues like voting rights that are clearly within the power of Congress in the Constitution much more prominent in the political conservation.
The Democrats are notorious for passing up obvious chances for doing things like the voting rights act and abortion rights, even though doing them would be clearly politically beneficial for them. That tendency would be a particularly dangerous one to indulge in the next two years.
In particular, the striking preference for voters under 35 for the Democratic Party is something the party needs to take really seriously and pass substantive measures that address their priorities, like student loan cancellation, for instance. Partisan affiliations change, of course. But over decades, early party affiliation has tended to be a strong indication of how younger voters will vote in later years.
And, apart from specific issues, the Democrats really need to build up their state party organizations. Especially in states like Florida where the state party really seems to be weak at the moment.
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