Progressives Can't Be Satisfied with "Better than Expected"

U.S. voters seem to have defied expectations of handing a midterm defeat to Democrats, who lost less seats in the House and Senate than expected. Voters also rejected election deniers in governor’s races in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan. And, in probably the biggest win for reproductive justice, voters in Kentucky appear to have rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have eliminated abortion rights, and 56 percent of Michiganders voted for Proposal 3, enshrining abortion care into their state constitution.

However, our political situation remains rather muddled. The Republicans are likely to win the House and could still win the Senate. At best, we are still looking at a divided Congress, and it is hard to imagine such an institution solving the problems affecting peoples’ daily lives, such as inflation, rising living costs and the climate crisis. A divided Congress won’t stem the continued trend of fascist politics.

Even if the absence of a red wave offers some relief, we still must remain vigilant against reactionary politics. The GOP will continue its post-2020 efforts to defeat movements for racial, economic, reproductive and climate justice. Since the 2020 uprisings for Black lives, the GOP has launched campaigns against anti-racist protests under the guise of combating anything it deems to be “critical race theory.” In a chilling (yet rather unsurprising) development, this right-wing effort has led to the banning of books covering topics related to race and LGBTQIA+ issues.

This midterm season saw a concerted push from the GOP to discredit the Movement for Black Lives, and to restore law enforcement legitimacy. Republican candidates have run political ads that make conservative media consultant Larry McCarthy — the mind behind George H. W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad — look timid. Living in the Pennsylvania television market, I watched my fair share of ads running footage of groups of individuals committing acts of violence and falsely portraying Pennsylvanian Democratic candidates John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro as advocates of defunding the police, and thus “soft on crime.” (This claim seemed especially spurious considering Shapiro served as Pennsylvania’s attorney general, and he brags about arresting “more than 6,500 drug dealers” on his campaign website. Moreover, Fetterman said he “never believed” in defunding the police, calling the idea “absurd.”)