Economic Anxieties Reigned Supreme in Western States

I had hoped to write about how in yesterday’s election several House seats in California, Nevada and Arizona went to the Democrats and how this contributed to the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives. I also planned to write about some interesting ballot initiatives—the abortion rights initiatives in Nevada and Arizona, the minimum wage initiative, and Proposition 36 in California.

But then came, well, the results of the presidential election, which made everything else pretty much infinitesimal.

So I’ll briefly mention the state of affairs around the races and the House initiatives, and then move on to Groundhog Day circa 2016 or 1933.

In Arizona, Democrats had high hopes of winning districts one and six, and early vote counts last night showed them on a winning trajectory. As of this writing, with nearly 60 percent of the vote counted, Democratic candidate Kirsten Engel there is holding a narrow leash over GOP incumbent Juan Siscomani, but in the district, one Amish Shah’s lead disappeared overnight, and it seems likely that Republicans will retain the seat. However, there are still many votes left to be counted, and it is likely that the results will not be known for several days, possibly weeks. elsewhere residence in Reno which Democrats hoped to flip remained solidly red.

Meanwhile, Ruben Gallego looks set to win the Arizona Senate seat, but the incumbent Jackie Rosen trails Republican Sam Brown by 1,000 votes in Nevada, with more than 80 percent of the vote counted. That result will likely change by the time all the votes are tallied, but it’s clear that if she wins, Rosen will win by a narrow margin in a race that most polls had her winning comfortably.

Even in solid-blue California, Democrats are struggling to flip winnable seats in the Central Valley and greater Los Angeles. In District 40, where the GOP incumbent was seen as vulnerable, the GOP looks set to win by a landslide. Likewise, in District 13, in the Central Valley, it looks like the Democrat is just short of victory at this point (though with only half the vote tabulated, that could change). In other words, across ballots ranging from House and Senate races to the presidential race, Democrats fell far behind Tuesday — both due to Biden’s unpopularity, which Harris apparently inherited, and Trump’s unfathomable mass appeal.

It’s not that voters were uniformly reactionary. In fact, the electorate is in both Nevada and Arizona passed constitutional amendments protecting the right to abortion. And a ballot measure is pending in Arizona expand access to abortion care once in force. However, on some issues, around security and around the economy, especially inflation, voters turned sharply to the right.

In California, it looks like voters will reject the raise minimum wagefearing a surge in inflation. Perhaps more significantly, with an overwhelming advantage, the electorate passed Proposition 36which increases criminal liability for minor property and drug crimes, and in doing so strips voters of funding created by Prop 47 in 2014 for rehabilitation services funded by savings from incarcerating fewer people.

I think the abortion and criminal justice proposals provide a wider window into the mood of yesterday’s electorate in the country.

Many voters I met with in Arizona and Nevada over the past few weeks indicated that they supported abortion rights — echoing decades of polling data that has confirmed the same among most Americans — but at the same time were going to vote for Donald Trump. , because they were excited about the supposedly terrible economy. (Fact check: By almost any measure, the economy isn’t that terrible right now.) They were also outraged by the way Biden had managed the border; was enraged by the increasingly extreme message of Trump and his allies about the confluence of immigration and crime; and, in addition, constantly fed horror stories about out-of-control theft gangs and violent criminals, despite the fact that crime in most parts of the country has actually fallen in the last couple of years.

And so they decided to protect the rights they cared about at the state level (such as abortion rights) while handing over enormous powers to the federal government obvious fascist. They gave the presidency to someone who promised to restore order by unleashing the police to give “a very hard time” to criminal suspects; use the military and its arsenal of weapons against civilian protesters; hunt down undocumented immigrants, place them in vast detention (read “concentration”) camps, and then quickly deport them; forbid everything asylum seekers and refugees; pandering to dictators with a transactive foreign policy that can only destroy the democratic world; and threaten huge tariffs on uncooperative trading partners, even if those tariffs boomerang on consumers.

How did this horrible, fundamentally undemocratic policy, which runs counter to centuries of American politics and culture, gain any legitimacy? Because in the post-truth era, the image created on social media is really important. And when the richest man in the world, who owns one of the world’s most widespread social media systems, turns all that power into a 24/7 propaganda machine, really bad things happen behind it.

Elon Musk has done everything he can to wrap the electorate in a pretty bow and hand it over to his pal Trump in exchange for the promise of massive powers to dismantle the regulatory state that has sometimes held him back from acquiring even greater oligarchic power.

Several scoundrels are responsible for the shameful results of yesterday’s elections. But Musk stands out for the sheer scale of his influence and support for Trump’s re-election campaign.

Meanwhile, it’s clear that much more work needs to be done to try to limit the unfathomable damage that Trump and his thuggish government are now free to inflict on people in the United States and around the world.

Tears today, rolled up sleeves tomorrow.