A year after promising viewers a “red tsunami” in the 2022 midterms, only to be left with egg on their faces after the GOP drastically underperformed, Fox News was once again wondering what went wrong after Democrats romped to victory in statewide elections on Tuesday night.
Despite recent polls showing President Joe Biden deeply underwater with voters and even losing to Donald Trump in several battleground states, the Democratic incumbent governor easily won victory over his MAGA-endorsed opponent in deep-red Kentucky. And over in Ohio, a state Trump won by eight points in 2020, voters overwhelmingly passed an amendment ensuring access to abortion care in the state’s constitution.
The continued drag that undoing Roe v. Wade has had on the GOP was especially apparent in Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin had promised to implement a 15-week abortion ban if the GOP was able to gain unified control over the state’s General Assembly. Instead, not only were Youngkin’s hopes of a Republican sweep dashed, but the Democrats now control both chambers.
Maybd an american can explain the abortion bans: Does 15 week ban mean no abortion after 15 weeks? That sounds reasonable. I thought the bans mean no abortions at all. In germany its no abortion after 12 weeks unless there is serious risk for the mother or the fetus is not viable.
Not an American, but from what I have heard, that along with the outright ban at 15 weeks, they also often include other inhumane things.
Making the woman listen to the fetus’s heartbeat. Forced waiting periods. Parental consent required for minors. Forced counseling. Etc.
Also, medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds and doctors forced to read scripted lies to scared patients. (just thought I’d fill in some of the etc.)
Also, pregnancy is declared to have begun basically four weeks before the last missed period. So a 15 week ban is really an 11 week ban. And you only get 11 weeks if you are regular and are keeping track.
Now keeping track, in some states, is becoming a legal liability. So these antiabortion measures are just going to cause more oopies. It’s just evil for the sake of being controlling.
The reason it’s not reasonable is based on how we age pregnancy. The counter starts at the last day of your last menstrual cycle. That means the gestational age of the egg might be two days but you’re already 4 weeks pregnant. On top of that a lot of diagnostic tests cannot be performed that early. My wife needed an amniocentesis due to possible congenital birth defects but by the time we had the initial screening, then the diagnostic test, we were at 16 weeks. Add onto that after a test like that the decision has to be made wether to terminate a pregnancy then the procedure has to be scheduled and performed. All in all you’re looking at 20 weeks or so.
A 15 week ban might as well be a total ban.
Part of the issue in the US is that the exceptions in these laws are made purposely vague to make it too risky for doctors to be able to help pregnant women unless they are literally about to die. Not familiar enough with the reasonableness of different week limits for abortion but the main way it’s framed here is that it’s mostly an issue between a woman and her doctor and not the business of politicians
Good video from John Oliver on this topic which just aired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eH2BItdo0M
The vast majority, ~96%, of abortions take place at 15 weeks or earlier. That said, conservatives in America have spent the last 50 years arguing that each individual state should decide how to handle the abortion issue themselves. Now that Roe has been overturned, they’ve immediately pivoted to pushing a federal ban, proving once again that there are no core principles in modern American conservatism.
mmmmMmMm so tasty
I still don’t think that the full impact of COVID is being accounted for in polling and voter outcomes. Yes the first wave hit blue areas hard and fast due to population density but with the vaccine and the ever growing amount of time it has been available I have to imagine it is almost exclusively hitting red areas now. COVID has not gone away but vaccinated people aren’t dying at nearly the rate of the unvaccinated of which that group is pretty exclusively GOP or at least Maga. When some of these elections were coming down to the thousands of voters 3 years ago what happens when thousands of dedicated GOP voters are now dead?
Um polling is on the current population. Unless there’s a long, long pause between the poll and the vote it really won’t matter much.
Polling is on the current population of people who are willing to answer polls. If the poll is done by blind calling people what are the odds you would even answer the phone?
And people are less willing to give out data to an unknown entity than ever before.
Previously you’d answer surveys because you wanted to be represented. Now you don’t answer surveys because you know it may just be used to target advertisements or messaging for your opponents.
You need to keep in mind that 2023 COVID is a different beast than 2020 COVID. The currently most common strains tend to be less hard on the body as the virus has started to adapt to human hosts.
I still wouldn’t recommend people to go unvaccinated but it’s not quite as suicidally irresponsible as it used to be. Still irresponsible, though.
Yeah, but the elderly GOP base is getting it for the 2nd or 3rd time without having been vaccinated. It’s just as hard on them if not harder.
That said I don’t think it’s moving the needle as much as MAGA politics are.
What bizarro world do you live in? It’s no longer a novel virus. Most boomers have been exposed or infected by COVID, also a great number (majority) of them got vaccinated. So by now there are miniscule number of boomers without natural or vaccine immunity. The vaccines boosters do little here in terms of death, because very few boomers are currently dying from COVID.
Hospitalization rate of over 65 was
16.4 per 100,000 during the week ending August 26 2023
Death rate is a fraction of that.
I did the math a few years ago because I couldn’t find anyone else who had published it. This is rough and IANAM (mathmagicman).
Every single day 8,000 boomers and above die, and 12,000 people turn 18 and those numbers are actually accelerating. If you use existing data to estimate conservative/liberal and likely voters within those groups it works out to a delta of 10,000 per day on a national scale. That’s 5,000 votes switching every single day. That might not seem like alot. Because it really isn’t. Out of 155 million votes cast, 10,000 is .006 percent. But here’s the thing. It’s cumulative. And it just doesn’t stop. It is relentless. it’s 300k a month, 3.6 million per year. And that pace is accelerating. Between 2020 and 2024 it’s a 15 million vote difference. By 2028 it’s 30 million. It used to be that people age into conservatism. But that is not happening with millennials. The demographics are changing, and changing quickly. The most conservative group in the country is dying. While the most liberal group is rising.
We just have to hold on to democracy for a few more years. This will all be behind us. Another 10k today.
I have a feeling you “aged in to conservatism” because that’s when you finally had money and humans are generally shit when it comes to “fuck you I got mine” but speaking as a millennial, that’s just not happening. My generation’s retirement plan is to die at our desks hopefully in a way that creates a lot of work for our bosses. Although on the less cynical side of things, I also tend to think that generally people are becoming more tolerant over time.
For the most part I have aged into liberalism. Older I get and the more shit I have seen.
Before: What do you mean institutional racism is a thing? I am not racist, no one I know is racist. Oh sure there are skinheads, but they are in jail. Since I don’t see it, it must not be there.
Now: I just saw my friend who is black get treated like he was a dangerous criminal because of the crime of walking.
Stuff like that for example. I am doing well, I got mine. I want everyone else to get there’s as well.
It used to be that people age into conservatism
It used to be that being conservative did not require you being batshit insane.
Yes batshit insane conservatives existed, but so did reasonable people supporting reasonable sounding policies by conservative politicians who behaved in a respectable manner.
While I believe it’s still possible for reasonable people to be Conservative, it’s not possible for reasonable people to support Republicans with their mouth pieces like Magorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Green being treated like someone with opinions worth listening to.
Regarding the steadfast belief that “conservatism is dying”: no it isn’t. Christian schools, home schools, Christian colleges, and even regular schools, communities and colleges are pumping out kids that have the beliefs of their parents. I live in a rural area, and work (hypocritically) for a Christian based organization. I’m surrounded by young minds that are perfectly comfortable with the ideals of the religious right, and vote.
Society has been saying it for years… We said it when I was back in college. “Bubba in the white house is going to be the best! We’ll undo all the hell Reagan and Bush did!” then Newt Gingrich (sounds like a disease…) made his “Promise to America™” and everything got fucked.
This is why they want religious schools, school vouchers, private schools, etc. It’s segregation light. This way they stay in their echo chamber.
But the data shows religiousness is going down. The ones that remain are becoming more radical.
This is also why they want Fox, to appeal to more than the religious.
I will say that the trend, year over year, for xtians has been they have been going down at roughly 1% per year, every year, for many years now. I think it is things like this that explain why the cons are getting increasingly radicalized in their positions and in their tactics. They have been denigrating the notion of democratic norms (the well-actually “this is not a democratic country” stuff that they love to pull, for instance). Their more wonky members starting laying the groundwork way, way back, according to McLean’s Democracy In Chains.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/
I mean, the fact that about 1 in 3 is unaffiliated is quite staggering. I can remember a time where even admitting this was seen as rather “edgy”, now it’s going to earn a shrug.
People have been saying that conservatism is aging out since at least the 90’s. Instead we see resurgences throughout the years.
We’ve been talking about this since COVID hit. They’re too fucking stupid to accept the truth.
I remember how the cons were cynically thinking it was going to hit the “urban” people harder and the worst among them were cheering that on. Whooooops.
I think there are also a couple more factors. In a time when early detection and treatment gets the best outcomes, the right-wingers are more likely to believe that it isn’t serious, so they’re less likely to test and less likely to try to get paxlovid (or be outside the 5-day grace period).
And even if they know they’re sick early and want to get paxlovid, people who live in rural areas have less access to healthcare in general - and some of their doctors may not believe in paxlovid. Which really sucks for those people.
All that said, the are definitely health care discrepancies for minorities, and those disproportionately affect Democrats (mostly).
Everyone I know who was vaxxed and boosted told me it felt between a cold and the flu. Which granted not fun, but considering the alternative much better.
And it’s a hell of a lot better than long Covid, especially before we knew more about what the duck long Covid was going to look like.
You rightoid fuckers HAVE NO POLICIES outside of schadenfreude and bogeyman flavor of the month fearmongering. Conservatives are incapable of governance, and a lot more people are finally catching on.
In my opinion PotatoTown Tuberville and the rest of the GOP who don’t override the filibuster want to leave these positions open so they can stuff them with Christian Nationalists if they take the Senate next year.
They don’t intend to let the next coup fail.
Deep-red? As in COMMUNIST?
