You may have noticed by now that Democrats will vote for anyone and anything. They’d vote for a bit of lint or a pat of butter if it promised to boost abortion access and outlaw unpopular speech. They understand that they are the establishment and as such, they belong to a hive-mind, a Borg cube in which every drone knows what to do without being told. They’re issues voters, as evidenced by the Vegetable-in-Chief, as well as that lobotomy convalescent from Pennsylvania and the memory-care patient from California who rubber-stamp the laws we must obey. Democrats haven’t voted for a candidate since Hillary.
Republicans (or whatever we are now on the right) tend to vote for candidates, but that’s changing, too. We still vote for the candidate, yes, but s/he must 1) have the right stance on the issues and 2) demonstrate the leadership ability to execute good policy.
In other words, the 2024 general election will be first and foremost about issues. And as of now, three issues are taking center stage (as of now — obviously, things can change completely, multiple times, before November ’24 gets here).
Abortion
Hooray, we won the Dobbs case! It took fifty years and determined strategizing to reclaim the Supreme Court, but we won! … and we haven’t won an election since.
When it comes to abortion, we are the dog that finally caught that car we’ve been chasing. Ideally, at this point, the states would decide what abortion policies they wanted for themselves and, after a few years of shuffling the deck, the issue would resolve itself organically into a patchwork of policies that pleased people on a regional basis. If only it were that simple!
The 800-pound gorilla in the room is the political reality that abortion is unsettled on the national level, and that is costing us elections. Abortion aborted our long-promised red wave in 2022. Last night, it crushed Ohio conservatives’ attempt to shore up the state constitution against a new right to abortion — which will now likely be voted into existence in November.
So what is to be done? The truth is that it’s in God’s hands now. We need to accept that Team R will likely underperform in elections for the foreseeable future until the issue is settled nationally. (My dream is for Congress to pass a law guaranteeing abortion, and for SCOTUS to bat that down, too. States decide! But that would take years.) There are several ways this issue could ultimately play out. But for the foreseeable future, America is too packed with weaponized spinsters, bitter crones, and their neutered allies for the issue not to cause considerable headaches for the Right. It will be important to remember during this time that losing elections is not the same thing as being wrong.
ADVANTAGE: Democrats
The bad news is that the abortion issue will keep costing us votes for a while. The good news is that, on the other major issues, the Right is much stronger than the Left.
Immigration
I can’t laugh hard enough at the New York City newscast we watch every morning over coffee. Asylum scammers have overfilled all the public housing and overflowed into colonies on the sidewalks. Legal immigrants are angrily protesting as Mayor Adams erects Bidenvilles in their parks and on their children’s athletic fields. And as August wanes, you can hear the disbelief in the newscasters’ voices as the topic turns to adding all those non-English-speaking kids to the already failing public school system. And the buses just keep on coming!
Related: Massachusetts Declares a State of Emergency Over Immigration
The same situation is playing out across the country, most especially in “sanctuary” cities and states. Republican candidates would do well to bring this simmering issue front and center every chance they get. It’s got the potential to tamp down moderates’ — and even some Leftists’ — ardor to vote “D” for abortion.
ADVANTAGE: Republicans
Weaponized Partisan Justice
There’s a game I like to play that goes like this: When the Democrats do something unusually reprehensible (even for them), shred a new norm, etc., I lurk on my most Leftist friends’ social media accounts to see if they are so far gone that they approve. And for the most part, they never miss the opportunity to cheer on the Forces of Light and call the 45th president vile names.
But after every one of the three-and-counting indictments of a former president, something odd has happened: they haven’t posted a word. Could it be that even these far-Left loons understand that the country is going through a tragedy, not a flowering of true justice?
“If Joe Biden thought siccing his Department of Justice on Donald Trump would keep him from returning to the White House, that strategy appears to be backfiring,” writes my PJ Media colleague, Matt Margolis. Matt covers the latest 2024 presidential election poll, conducted after the third Trump indictment, and it shows that Trump is now starting to put some daylight between himself and Joe Bribin’.
To be sure, I know some delusional Dems who insist that the Capitol Riot was the worst thing they’ve ever seen. But even some of them are growing uncomfortable with the banana-republic weaponization of America’s grand old institutions.
ADVANTAGE: Republicans
The bad news is that the one issue on which we lose — abortion — is an extremely powerful motivator for the Left (and a suppressor for some squishy Republicans). It’s also intractable and will take years (and election cycles) to work through the system.
The good news is that we’re far and away the winners in the other two major issues of the 2024 general election. Will that be enough to overcome the power of feticide as a voter draw?
Sing it with me, people: two out of three ain’t bad!
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