Editorial rights purchased from iStock. Photo by Lan Zhang.
For the last six months, every conversation I’ve had about the future of America has been more like a chat on a suicide-prevention hotline than a conversation about whom to vote for in the midterms.
Whenever the inevitable “big red wave” came up, I felt like I had to talk someone off a ledge. It was both exhausting and frustrating.
It’s not like we didn’t know better. Up to and including November 8th, 2022, there were plenty of signs that Republicans would not do well in this election. Yet every pundit on just about every media outlet seemed to think Republicans would win big. Unfortunately, none of them were paying attention to the following facts:
Most Americans want to live in a democracy.
Most Americans are sane.
Most Americans want women, not the government, to control their bodies.
Most Americans will depend on Social Security and Medicare when they retire.
Most Americans want us to support Ukraine and understand that it is not just a minor territorial dispute; it is a fight for global democracy.
Most Americans don’t want to be hit in the head with a hammer when their political opponent puts a target on their backs.
Most Americans know Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden are not part of a cabal that trafficks children and eats babies.
Most Americans don’t want people who believe that Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden are part of a cabal that trafficks children and eats babies to run our country.
So why did so many pundits believe the American people would willingly put the party of Trump and QAnon in charge of Congress — especially knowing that Republicans still don’t have a platform and have not suggested a single solution to our current problems?
Where did this Red Wave idea come from?
Some of it came from Republicans whose ability to replace reality with wishful thinking has reached new heights. But the pundits seem to have made predictions about this year’s midterms based almost entirely on what’s happened in prior midterms. Given the number of firsts our country has experienced in the last seven years, it’s hard to understand how none of these firsts was a factor in their calculations.
Let’s take the insurrection, for example. Our government barely survived a coup attempt led by our former president — who is still considered the de facto leader of the Republican Party. Did the pundits not think this would be a factor in how we voted in 2022?
The pundits also seemed to be ignoring other salient facts when predicting this red wave, or as the pumped-up pundits on FOX like to say, this “red tsunami”:
Roe v Wade was overturned, and half our population lost the right to bodily autonomy overnight.
SCOTUS Justice Thomas announced his intention to revisit decisions on other critical human rights — and we know what that means.
McCarthy and other Republicans have announced their desire to defund Medicare and Social Security.
Republicans are already talking about pulling out of Ukraine.
Local Republican election officials running in various states have made threats to overturn the results of elections they disagree with.
Speaker Pelosi’s husband was attacked in his home by a fanatic who believed in QAnon conspiracy theories.
Trump openly promotes QAnon conspiracy theories.
And let’s not forget COVID
Over 400,000 people died during Trump’s presidency, and there is no way to know how many of those deaths could have been prevented if Trump and his party of deniers had been capable of grappling with reality and had put their efforts toward dealing with the problem rather than gaslighting the American people.
The timing could not have been worse. A global pandemic arrived at our shores just after we invited an ignorant norm-busting sociopath into the elite Republican political machine and artificially lifted him to the pinnacle of that machine, where he used his power not to protect democracy and safeguard our people but to dismantle as much of the machinery of democracy as possible.
And still, when asked what they thought would happen in the midterms, political analysts ignored all of the unprecedented aspects mentioned here. Instead, they deduced that this midterm election cycle would be like every other midterm election: The party in power would lose a lot of seats.
One pundit (whose name I have mentally blocked) said he didn’t think abortion would be a significant issue in the midterms because “that issue has already peaked.”
I didn’t know human rights had a “peak.”
It’s a good thing the American people are smarter than the pundits. Perhaps this is a sign that we should all trust our instincts a little more and the people on TV a little less.