Voters in Democratic-leaning and swing states loudly protested last week against the conservative Republican social agenda, which is exemplified by the movement to outlaw abortion.
However, Republican governors easily won reelection in red areas where they have successfully imposed that agenda over the past two years.
This stark contrast served to highlight the extent of the gap between red and blue America and suggests that the country will continue to be divided into opposing, antagonistic groups that adhere to fundamentally different standards for civil rights and freedoms. The results from last week may have given red state Republicans more confidence to continue pushing the fervently conservative social agenda they have promoted since 2021 on topics like voting rights and book bans, while also demonstrating that this agenda is unviable outside of those key GOP states.
According to CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, a non-partisan think tank that researches Americans’ social attitudes, Melissa Deckman, “the urge to regulate social policy is still pretty strong and probably expanding in a lot of Republican states.” But, she continued, “I think that the pro-choice movement actually benefitted Democrats in areas where the right to abortion was regarded as being endangered.”
By largely reassembling the winning coalition of voters who turned out in large numbers in 2018 and 2020 to oppose the policies of former President Donald Trump, Democrats defied the history of significant first-term midterm losses for the president’s party as well as widespread media predictions of a towering red wave. Young voters, persons of colour, college-educated individuals, and those who identify as less religious made up the core of this coalition, with women in each group tending more Democratic than men.
According to exit surveys done by Edison Research for a number of media outlets, including AWN, the Democratic performance with each of those groups deteriorated from 2018 and 2020. The exit poll revealed that this erosion wasn’t particularly unexpected considering the overwhelming majority of people in each of those groups who had negative opinions about the economy and many who awarded President Joe Biden poor scores for his work thus far.
More astonishingly, Democrats managed to maintain just enough of their support from these crucial voting blocs despite this undertow in order to produce a string of unexpected triumphs. Surprisingly, according to the results of the national exit poll, Democrats even managed to win a slim majority of independent voters, who nearly normally turn out in large numbers to oppose the party in power at such times of societal unrest. The important blue and purple state governor races, including those in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, saw Democrats defeat independents by even greater numbers, according to the exit polls.
These unexpected results demonstrated how many people saw the GOP’s agenda under Trump as a threat to their rights, their values, and democracy itself, even in the midst of widespread dissatisfaction with the economy and the president’s performance. That is the exact goal that the red states are carrying out.
According to Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, vice president and chief strategy officer of Way to Win, a liberal organisation that pushed the party to emphasise the threats to rights in its campaign messaging, “my main takeaway is there is a pro-freedom, anti-MAGA majority.” We weren’t sure if it would manifest itself as it did in 2018 and 2020, but we observed a really unequivocal response from American voters: “We don’t want these MAGA Trump Republicans to take us backward, we want to go forward.”
In blue-leaning or swing states where abortion is now legal, this sentiment—what Democratic strategist Tom Bonier has dubbed the “Roe wave”—helped propel Democratic victories in gubernatorial contests by a wide margin. Maine, Connecticut, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, and California were among the states on that list. Even Kansas, which last summer rejected a constitutional amendment meant to pave the way for the outlawing of abortion, reelected Democratic Governor Laura Kelly, who is pro-choice. Democrats also made gains in elections for state legislatures in a number of those states, particularly Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Michigan.
All of this was particularly striking because economic pessimism was pervasive even in these states, with approximately three-fourths or more of voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin describing the economy as only fair or poor.
According to Fernandez Ancona, “In places where people have grown accustomed to having these rights and freedoms, the idea that they would be taken away overrode other things they may have been concerned about.”