What Does Trump’s GOP Offer Us Voters?

By Donald A. Collins | 5 November 2022
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

Well, let us begin with the record. Trump put three anti-choice Justices on the now discredited Supreme Court after its June 24th Dobbs decision which ignored the 5-decade precedence of Roe, slammed the oft followed example of keeping church separate from state, and threw women in states where abortion was illegal under state law into dangerous risk or at best expensive inconvenience of having to travel to states where abortion is safe and legal.

One of my MD friends who provided choice to women his entire career wrote how Roe reduced deaths from 200 plus a year to almost zero, but also stopped the use of dangerous methods such as trying to abort using coat hangers which desperate women used and survived with follow up medical help.

Read his informative article here.

The Court also allowed an open gun carry law to stand in a NY case and this term started to hear about Harvard using affirmative action in granting admissions for minority students. Laws against contraceptives and LGBTQ citizens might well be ahead.

Claims that a new GOP controlled Congress might cut Social Security or Medicare are probably untrue but with people such as Marjorie Taylor Greene in power helping our less affluent citizens are hopefully not likely. However expect more tax breaks for the wealthy and the reducing IRS of funding to cut audits of the wealthy could easily happen.

If in 2023 inflation goes down both parties will claim credit, which is a bit like claiming they control the law of gravity.

The GOP’s more rabid right wingers have promised investigations into Democratic leaders which with a big enough GOP House majority could open the way to impeaching Biden or Pelosi, instead of governing, for which they have no announced plan except continued hate mongering.

So, our suspense will be over next week, and we will see how dangerously our democracy has been compromised.

As David Brooks wondered in his 11/4/22 New York Times column “Why Aren’t the Democrats trouncing the Republicans?”.

Here are some of his troubling points about our culture war and our political divisions.

What accounts for this? It’s the underlying structure of society. Americans are sorting themselves out by education into two roughly equal camps. As people without a college degree have flocked to the G.O.P., people with one have flocked to the Democrats.

“Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon,” Eric Levitz writes in New York magazine, “it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every Western democracy.”

Republicans seem to be surging heading into November, with Democrats struggling to break through, as voters turn their focus from abortion to crime and inflation. Even if the polls are as off, as pollsters fear, all signs seem to be pointing toward a strong showing for the G.O.P.

Over the past few years, the Democrats have made heroic efforts to win back working-class voters and white as well as Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted rightward. Joe Biden’s domestic agenda is largely about this: infrastructure jobs, expanded child tax credit, raising taxes on corporations. This year the Democrats nominated candidates designed to appeal to working-class voters, like the sweatshirt-wearing Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Tim Ryan in Ohio.

It doesn’t seem to be working. As Ruy Teixeira, Karlyn Bowman and Nate Moore noted in a survey of polling data for the American Enterprise Institute last month, “The gap between non-college and college whites continues to grow.” Democrats have reason to worry about losing working-class Hispanic voters in places like Nevada. “If Democrats can’t win in Nevada,” one Democratic pollster told Politico, “we can complain about the white working class all you want, but we’re really confronting a much broader working-class problem.” Even Black voters without a college degree seem to be shifting away from the Democrats, to some degree.

Forests have been sacrificed so that Democratic strategists can write reports on why they are losing the working class. Some believe racial resentment is driving the white working class away. Some believe Democrats spend too much time on progressive cultural issues and need to focus more on bread-and-butter economics.

I’d say these analyses don’t begin to address the scale of the problem. America has riven itself into two different cultures. It’s very hard for the party based in one culture to reach out and win voters in the other culture — or even to understand what people in the other culture are thinking.

Read his wise words in full here.

Hope you voted!

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?” and “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”.

Polls show Republicans poised to win in midterms

Abortion Is on the Ballot. Will It Help the Dems?

Brooks and Capehart on factors that could determine outcome of the midterms

Be sure to ‘like’ us on Facebook

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here