It was a wave election. The wave was women defending abortion rights - Monica Hesse

[question everything]

In middle school there were all these cheeky euphemisms for menstrual cycles. You might say that Aunt Flo was visiting, or that the crimson tide was coming in, or that you were riding the crimson wave. God forbid you called your period what it was, or said anything that could make boys aware that you had a body to tend. I was thinking of this, these euphemisms and this body apologia, late into the night of the midterm elections Tuesday. TV pundits remarked with apparent shock that the anticipated “red wave” — the Republican influx expected to overturn control of the House and the Senate — didn’t seem to be happening.

Yes, Democrats looked poised to lose the House, but the margins weren’t nearly as dire as prognosticators had warned. They appeared poised to hang on to the governorships in Michigan and Wisconsin and Kansas and Pennsylvania, and they’d picked up a crucial Senate seat in Pennsylvania. Why was this so? Weren’t voters angry about inflation? The economy? Where was the red wave? We’re going to be dissecting the midterm results for the next several days, breaking down polling into demographic bites. But this is one way to read what happened: The midterms were about abortion, and about women tired of having to fight for their own bodies. They were about this resolutely and emphatically, gas prices be damned.

(snip)

Conservative women were shaken by the realization that many of their elected officials seemed happy to deny access not only to “frivolous” abortions but also to “necessary” ones, i.e. the ones in cases of rape or to preserve the health of the mother — the ones these women might choose for themselves. For liberal women the rage was twofold. There was the rage of the initial Dobbs decision, and then the rage of listening to pundits admonish that Democrats shouldn’t make the midterms all about abortion access.

Democrats, this thinking went, needed to focus on kitchen-table issues, the ones that would affect voters’ daily lives. Do you know what is also a kitchen-table issue? Abortion, and not wanting to die on someone’s kitchen table because of an illegally performed procedure. Do you know what else pundits and politicians actually need to do? Fully embrace that reproductive issues are meat-and-potato issues, not desserts that you’ll tack onto a plate if there’s room at the end of the meal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/09/abortion-midterms-wave/

[catbyte]

1. This was also a referendum on J6. Peter Meijer (MI-03) who was primaried by MAGAt

John Gibbs (who lost to Democrat Helen Scholten) said:

“By midnight on January 6, it was obvious that if we continued to sleepwalk down the path of crazy we’d face a rude awakening,” he said. “Instead of facing those facts, the GOP spent the last two years heading in the same direction and actively avoiding any internal reckoning. After Tuesday, we have no choice but to heed voters when they say that ‘the grass is green, the sky is blue, and by the way, you just got your ass handed to you.’ But waking up to that reality is going to be rough.”

[mercuryblues]

2. What the GOP and the media fail to understand

Women have no economic security if they can't control when and how many kids they can have.

[question everything]

3. Indeed. This is why it is an economic issue that even the men partners can understand

[mercuryblues]

4. Men don't want to be paying child support

for 18 years because of a one-night stand.

They need to wake up in larger numbers. This election should never have been this close.

[Hekate]

5. For 51% of the population, it was about our civil rights, about our health, about our life & death...

…about our right to live in a democracy.

The issue of reproductive rights is not “just” about abortion — it is about everything.

[no_hypocrisy]

6. Dobbs was much more than abortion.

There was an assumption that women would collapse, bow to the inevitable, and accept their new second-class status. You start with abortion and then expand it to other liberties, such as discrimination based on gender. (Yeah, sure they call it fertility, but it's gender no matter what your ability to breed is.)

[scarletlib]

7. Correct. Put the little ladies back in the kitchen. Let men run the world.

Because we can all look and see what are great job the men have done these past 4000 years or so.

[Timeflyer]

8. Encouraged by national response, but women in red states

are still going to have a fight on their hands to maintain bodily autonomy.

[republianmushroom]

9. YES, we can thank the woman for these victories. IMO