Seems a good time to evaluate the political landscape for the next few years. My thoughts:
1.The fundamentals will probably improve for the Democrats. Covid will subside, supply-chain problems will be resolved lowering inflation. Chances are the Democrats will pass
at least one their two big bills. As a result Biden’s ratings will probably improve a little.
Wokism remains a serious liability for the Democrats whether it’s crime,immigration or education. The left pundit/activist class is in denial about this which will make it more difficult
to deal with. The Republicans will exploit it relentlessly after their success in Virginia.
Over the last 5 years Democrats have lost the white working class especially in the mid-west and gained with white suburban moderates. The former looks more permanent than the latter and
the moderates will switch back for the right kind of Republican candidate. Dems may also be losing ground with Hispanics which should scare them silly
Trump isn’t that big a liability when he isn’t running. However all bets are off if he becomes the candidate in 2024 which is still likely. Many of the suburban moderates will go back to Biden.
Abortion is a huge joker in the pack. If Roe v Wade is overturned, I think the Democrats will benefit but who really knows?
Overall a confusing landscape but my basic prediction is that the Dems will lose in 2022, probably both chambers, but that Biden will beat Trump in 2024.
“Wokism” or whatever you want to call it, is the “culture war” inflamed by almost wholly by Fox News, and even should Democrats as a whole stop talking about Black Lives Matter or Critical Race Theory or whatever, they’ll just find some other made up problem of no real consequence to pivot to in order to inflame passions over nonsense ‘threats’ (see the risible “War on Christmas”). It will persist as long as voters can be diverted by recreational outrage.
Make that more like the last twenty-five years as the Democratic Party has shifted over to being “New Democrats”, i.e. just as much corporate schilling for election funding as the GOP. The “white working class” legitimately feels abandoned and is really glomming onto the Republican platform not because it provides them anything better but almost exclusively because Donald Trump and his imitators speak to their fears and essential anger toward government, even if they are actually doing things that hurt them more, like promising to “bring back jobs” and then start a tariff war that damages actual trade.
The GOP is not going to overturn Roe v. Wade; as a boogeyman it is their perfect shit-stirring issue and without it they lose a huge pillar of their Evangelical incitement. They are perfectly happy passing state laws that incrementally chip away at reproductive rights which allow them to make the claim that they are taking effective action but that there is still so much more to do.
I’m not making any assumptions about 2024 at this point but with Democrats almost certain to lose the Senate in the 2022 midterms, we can expect a stall any legislative agenda by the Biden administration, forcing him to use executive authority to accomplish anything and then subjecting him to criticism of “executive overreach” even though claiming plenary authority over everything was the last guy’s essential bag.
The only thing that can prevent Trump from winning is cholesterol.
If he’s still healthy (and there’s no reason to think that he won’t be)–He’ll be President again in 2024
Due to the new laws on voting procedures ,turnout will be lower. Let’s guess about 3% of the people who voted this time (by mail, or with conveniently short lines at the polling station) won’t have time to stand in line all day next time…
And most of that 3% are Democrats
I hear this kind of argument a lot and it doesn’t really make much sense. Yes the GOP will always use cultural attacks on the Dems but what is important is how effective those attacks are which absolutely depends on choices Democrats make. Some politicians like Bill Clinton and Obama are highly skillful at defusing these attacks and cultivating a moderate image while other like Dukakis and Hillary Clinton are highly inept at doing the same.
I’m sorry but did you miss how Fox News convinced almost 20% of registered voters that Barack Obama was Muslim? Or that he was going to take away all privately owned firearms (essentially making him the unofficial spokesperson for the National Firearm Industry Trade Association)? Bill Clinton was, if anything, even worse in this regard; all of the screaming about what a “flaming liberal” he was even though he was firmly to the right of Eisenhower and pretty much ready to be adopted into the Bush family as far as economic and social policies go.
Propaganda doesn’t need facts or even concrete evidence; it just needs innuendo and a suitable boogeyman. Hillary Clinton certainly compromised herself in notable ways and didn’t do herself any favors with the entitled attitude and dismissal of people who disagreed with her as “deplorables” but aside from “emails” the “big” scandals like the Bengazi hearings and the Uranium One “controversy” were manufactured pap, spoon-fed to people conditioned to already expect the worst from her. These are people who are primed to be outraged about whatever they are told even if it absolutely has no basis or doesn’t even make sense. The Democratic Party could reanimate the corpse of Ronald Reagan and promote him as their leader still spouting nonsense about supply-side economics and the modern GOP would still attack him as a neo-Marxist radical too “woke” to be trusted.
I am sure Fox has a huge influence on its core audience which is around 2-3 million for its top shows and who are mostly hardline conservatives. The general election electorate is vastly larger at around 100-150 million depending on the year. There is little evidence that Fox News has some kind of magical ability to influence most of them especially the swing voters who are often largely uninterested in politics.
Dems don’t vote. The only thing that drove Dems o the polls was Trump. Yesd we are going to lose both houses in the mid terms but if Trump is on the ticket for 24, Biden wins again.
That is of course assuming the Repub controlled states don’t actually have the balls to overturn the will of the people like they are currently setting up to do. I mean, it’s one thing to talk the talk, but to actually pull the trigger? IDK, we’ll soon see.
The “magical ability to influence” large numbers of non-Fox News workers is called “social media”, e.g. Facebook, Yourtube, Twitter, Instgram, et cetera, which has a major role in proliferation or right-wing propaganda and conspiracy theories, as you might have heard over the past couple of years.
Republican culture war politics goes back far before Fox let alone social media. Its pinnacle was between 1968 and 1988.
And your theory doesn’t explain voters who switch between parties who are often crucial especially in close elections. For example the Obama-Trump voters. How does that work exactly? You think Fox went easy on Obama and ramped it up for Hillary?
I think the OP’s points are pretty well on target.
It’s certainly an interesting discussion how much wokeism really is a liability in and of itself vs just the latest culture-war nonsense driven by lies.
I tend to think that it really is a liability. Structural racism, for example, which I totally believe exists, is a really hard sell for most people, who want to believe that America is basically good, and that a lack of personal animosity towards others means that they are basically good people.
The writer Matt Yglesias is fond of pointing out that many left-wing groups will talk about facially race-neutral policies as focused on improving racial equity, and that’s not a good way to talk about them. The expanded child tax credit for example. It just goes to parents who make less than a certain amount. Due to the way that race and poverty are linked in this country, a higher percentage of black kids are poor, so this policy really does improve racial equity. But talking about it that way makes it less popular among the median voter.