27 March 2024

A startling win for freedom in Alabama

In general I'm actively avoiding electoral-politics-related topics these days, but what happened in Alabama yesterday was too significant to ignore.

In a state House district in which both parties are usually pretty evenly matched (Trump carried it by 49% to 48% in 2020, for example), Democrat Marilyn Lands won a special election by 63% to 37%, a crushing margin.  Her campaign emphasized reproductive freedom -- preserving the right to access IVF treatment and repealing Alabama's draconian forced-birth law, which has no rape or incest exception.  The fact that this campaign produced a result so stunningly atypical for this district shows that these issues still carry massive weight at the ballot box -- even though this one result will not bring down the evil laws, since Republicans still have a huge majority in the legislature.  Almost two years after the fateful Dobbs ruling, there is no reason to believe that the political salience of reproductive rights is fading.  If anything, it may well be intensifying.

Also of interest is that polling before the vote showed a close race -- that is, it utterly failed to predict the blowout which actually happened.  This suggests that there's some aspect of the reproductive-freedom issue's impact that polls are not capturing.  It might be that the issue is bringing out voters who don't usually vote, thus rendering the pollsters' turnout models useless.  It might be that many people who normally vote Republican (especially women) are telling pollsters they intend to do so again, but then changing their minds at the last minute in the voting booth as the horror of draconian forced-birth laws really sinks in.  It might be something entirely different.  But the pattern is there.  Not only have abortion rights won big every time they've been on the ballot since Dobbs, even in red states, but they've done substantially better than polls predicted.  Now we see that the same effect can appear with candidates as well as single-issue referenda.

(No, it's not just "rigged polls" or polling in general being unreliable.  Serious analysts know which polls are politically skewed and which are honest, and serious election forecasting is based on the latter.  There's something more fundamental going on.  And to Republicans who think that any time they lose an election the voting itself must be crooked, if you believe the electoral system in Alabama is rigged to produce fake Democratic wins this huge, then you're even more delusional than I thought.)

Based on this repeated pattern, I'm beginning to think this November's election might actually be a landslide, not the close race that the polls currently suggest.  Of course a national election is affected by many major issues and is less susceptible than a local one to being upended by one single issue.  But if the Democrats are smart enough to go all-out in making this election about reproductive freedom, they'll be able to tap into a massive groundswell of public feeling which is clearly very real and very powerful.

The odds generally favor Biden's re-election (Trump's legal problems and general assholery will torpedo him with voters outside his core cult once people start paying attention in September or thereabouts), but the margin -- and mandate -- may be a lot bigger than anyone is now expecting.  It will be astonishing if the Democrats don't win the House, after all the Republicans' blundering and backstabbing through the current term, but if the impact of reproductive rights is anything like it was in Alabama yesterday, it will be a huge wipe-out.  Conventional wisdom holds that Republicans are certain to take the Senate, since Democrats have several red-state seats to defend and no Republicans now look vulnerable -- but maybe the reproductive-freedom issue will overturn that conventional wisdom even there.  And the landslide will probably be even bigger on the state level, since that's where most decisions about abortion laws are made.  Certainly if all this happens, everyone will say that in hindsight it was foreseeable, given election results since Dobbs.

Freedom matters -- and politicians and judges who try to take it away will face the wrath of the voting masses.

26 March 2024

Truths and inspirations for 26 March 2024

If something's hard to see or read, click to enlarge.

(For the link round-up, click here.)





Most of the world is now fully electrified!





































This would actually be an improvement.







I haven't looked up and verified the numbers in this specific case.  But this has been typical corporate behavior in recent years.




Nor a working-class white criminal.  Trump has class privilege.