Election night 2023 was a GOP disaster, and Fox News is pissed—killing off Youngkin’s candidacy before it existed and telling Republicans to set aside their abortion fixation.
A year after promising viewers a “red tsunami” in the 2022 midterms, only to be left with egg on their faces after the GOP drastically underperformed, Fox News was once again wondering what went wrong after Democrats romped to victory in statewide elections on Tuesday night.
Despite recent polls showing President Joe Biden deeply underwater with voters and even losing to Donald Trump in several battleground states, the Democratic incumbent governor easily won victory over his MAGA-endorsed opponent in deep-red Kentucky. And over in Ohio, a state Trump won by eight points in 2020, voters overwhelmingly passed an amendment ensuring access to abortion care in the state’s constitution.
The continued drag that undoing Roe v. Wade has had on the GOP was especially apparent in Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin had promised to implement a 15-week abortion ban if the GOP was able to gain unified control over the state’s General Assembly. Instead, not only were Youngkin’s hopes of a Republican sweep dashed, but the Democrats now control both chambers.
Hannity also groused that Republicans’ push to ban abortion in states across the country, as well as the reversal of the federal right to abortion, meant that “Democrats are trying to scare women into thinking Republicans don’t want abortion legal under any circumstances.”
When Republicans keep saying things like “total abortion ban”, yeah, we get that impression.
edit: fucking Texas is trying to make it illegal to drive to get around their abortion ban
Not a violent person but I genuinely want to break things whenever I’m reminded of that. Just unbelievable from every direction, from people who preach about caring for children.
Fucking Texas made it so that someone that presents male, whom all of their classroom mates referred to as he, can't participate in a high school play as a male character.
“Republicans need to look at all of these numbers, and really think about what’s more important. Yes, most people that are Republicans are probably pro-life,” she stated. “And we love our babies. And I love being a mother. But what’s most important? Republicans taking over. And Republicans being able to keep our country!”
Remember this when any future conservative (I don't care what party flag they're flying) tries to claim they are about any policy. If they ever attempt to come up with a policy again.
They've been getting vauger for decades intentionally.
Anti-abortion is going to become "childs rights" and they'll swear they'd never dream of outlawing abortion until they think they can get away with it.
Their problem is that they've been making abortion a wedge issue for so long, that it's now impossible for them to back down. They've been catering to the religious right, pushing a message that life begins at conception and any form of abortion (and some birth control) is literally the same as murdering babies. And their base ate that shit up.
Now they're trying to backtrack, which leads to their hilarious message of basically "look, we're going to have to kill a few babies to get into power, because power is more important." Good luck trying to sell that.
They're being really blatant about it all of a sudden. Is this sort of statement effective on Republicans voters? Do they not have any sort of cognitive dissonance when hearing one of their beloved Fox and Friends anchors saying this?
We need to be vigilant as we enter the presidential elections next year. Keep a close eye on secretaries of state or whomever certifies election results.
2020 was a test run for the Alt-right and they have learned where the weaknesses are in the democratic process. They will most certainly attempt to steal the 2024 election by any means necessary, up to and including violence.
Four county elections offices in Washington state were evacuated Wednesday after they received envelopes containing suspicious powders — including two that field-tested positive for fentanyl — while workers were processing ballots from Tuesday’s election. The elections offices were located in King County — home of Seattle — as well as Skagit, Spokane and Pierce counties, the Secretary of State’s Office said in emailed news release. Source
And because of the day Election day falls on next year:
"Remember, remember, the 5th of November, The facist's treason and plot; for there is a reason why facists and treason should never be forgot"
(Someone better with words can probably improve this)
Plan to take election day off next year. Take a vacation day, if you're able, and if not, just plan not to show up to work. Stand in line. Get a camelbak or a big water bottle. But vote, because I'd rather start steering the right direction than crash into a wall.
And don't forget the "life of the mother" exceptions in places like Texas that can only be triggered if the woman is actively dying. If she's not close enough to death, it is still "carry it to term or else."
Hey, but the doctor and all the medical staff could bet their medical licenses that the legal gray area would favor them in a particular case.
Of course it might be harder to practice medicine after the hospital execs consult with legal and fire your ass.
But hey, there's an off chance that legally you could get away with saving the life of the mother before death was imminent. Well, depending on the judge in Texas that day.
I mean I could post the quotes of him supporting a no-exception national abortion ban and the quote of him saying that if he really paid for an abortion that there's no shame in that. But that's low hanging fruit. Instead, I'm just going for the fruit that already fell on the ground:
I’m this country boy. I’m not that smart.
Herschel Walker
And people say, ‘Herschel, you played football.’ But I said, ‘Guys, I also was valedictorian of my class. I also was in the top 1% of my graduating class in college.
Also Herschel Walker
So what we do is we’re going to put, from the ‘Green New Deal,’ millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. So all of a sudden China and India ain’t putting nothing in there – cleaning that situation up. So all with that bad air, it’s still there. But since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China, bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. And now we’ve got to clean that back up.
So, I went to Faux News and looked at their front page. The very top headline is GOP Flips New York Seat Democrats Held for Decades, Causing 'Political Earthquake'.
This is followed by 29 more stories, including important stories like Couple's Viral 'Taylor Swift Jar' Has Wife Paying Whenever She Mentions the Star and Global Study Names the World's Booziest Nations - The Top Three Will Surprise You.
Finally, a full 30 stories down the front page, you eventually reach After Dismal Election Night, Republican Candidates Hammer Trump.
As an aside, it's cute how, when they want to celebrate and promote the feeling that their party is all one big happy family, they refer to themselves as "the GOP", but when they're trying to distance themselves from the party, suddenly it's "Republicans".
They're just trying to make America great again: the good old days where if you wanted a woman you could just rape her and she'd have to marry you to avoid the social shame!
That's the thing. Republican politicians have a corporate mentality. They pretend to care about the customers, but their true allegiance is to the shareholders. And that mentality has worked surprisingly well for them for decades. Pretend to care just enough about social issues, but don't do anything too controversial, all the while enacting legislation that disproportionately assists the 1%. They had a good thing going.
But they kept wanting more. They kept going back to the social policy well to get more voters because they weren't getting enough buy-in on their fiscal policies. Now you've got more elected politicians willing to push unpopular social policy when just ten to fifteen years ago they knew better for the most part. This new batch of Republicans actually intend to enact their regressive policies when previously they were content with merely stymieing progress and loudly complaining.
Now that they've reached a critical mass of people who don't know better or don't care, they have started enacting deeply unpopular policies. They don't know our care how unpopular they are because they can't imagine anything outside of their echo chambers. They're listening to the loudest 10 people in the room while ignoring the quiet 200 who will only speak at the voting booth. And voters have finally had enough. They may not love what the democrats are doing, they may even think that the democrats are doing a terrible job, but they absolutely hate what the republicans are doing even more. I'm betting that a large number of apathetic voters are starting to show up.
So republicans resort to every trick in the book to silence the majority who disagrees with them. Gerrymandering, purging voter rolls right before an election, closing poling places and limiting hours, restricting absentee voting, holding special elections during times when voter turnout has historically been very low, enacting voter ID laws... Every single trick they can think of so that only their voices count. And that still isn't enough.
They're doing what the people who voted put them there to do. The only problem is that those people apparently don't actually represent the majority, and republicans absolutely refuse to accept that.
Pretend to care just enough about social issues, but don’t do anything too controversial, all the while enacting legislation that disproportionately assists the 1%. They had a good thing going.
Yeah, overturning Roe was the dog that caught the car. Now that they don't have their main boogeyman drum (women everywhere aborting all the babies all of the time won't someone think of the children!) to bang on they've got nothing. Savvy grifters like Turtle Interrupted never wanted to actually succeed in passing that kind of extremist legislation, but now the GOP balance has shifted too far down the scale of "pretending to be crazy in order to steal money vs being actually crazy".
The problem is they are doing what their constituents want, they just don't have enough of them to get them the power they want because they are evil bastards.
It's worth noting that their constituents are an amalgam of fringe theocratic radicals and check-writing plutocrats. The whole reason Fox exists is that they realized long ago that their policy programs aren't popular, they instead needed to add circuses to the bread and circuses to be relevant in any way
Hannity: "Democrats are trying to scare women into thinking Republicans don't want abortion legal under any circumstances."
Nah, you guys are doing just fine on that without any help at all.
While the other cable news networks stuck with live special coverage for the rest of the evening, Fox News decided that its audience needed a break from the deflating electoral results for conservatives. After Hannity signed off at 10 p.m., Fox aired its regularly scheduled broadcast of “comedy” show Gutfeld!, which was pre-taped and didn’t make any mention of the elections.
Gotta protect their snowflakes from any hint of reality until they can figure out how to spin it properly.
It's so hilarious to see these people still acting like the dog that caught the car.
The forced birthers, oops, I mean, "pro lifers" need to shut up for a little while and repeat this mantra in their heads, over and over until it fucking sinks in: "Roe [*] WAS the compromise. Roe WAS the compromise".
Nah, I'm fine with them continuing to announce their anti-abortion views. Politically it costs then elections, and in real life it helps identify the idiots.
You rightoid fuckers HAVE NO POLICIES outside of schadenfreude and bogeyman flavor of the month fearmongering. Conservatives are incapable of governance, and a lot more people are finally catching on.
In my opinion PotatoTown Tuberville and the rest of the GOP who don't override the filibuster want to leave these positions open so they can stuff them with Christian Nationalists if they take the Senate next year.
I still don't think that the full impact of COVID is being accounted for in polling and voter outcomes. Yes the first wave hit blue areas hard and fast due to population density but with the vaccine and the ever growing amount of time it has been available I have to imagine it is almost exclusively hitting red areas now. COVID has not gone away but vaccinated people aren't dying at nearly the rate of the unvaccinated of which that group is pretty exclusively GOP or at least Maga. When some of these elections were coming down to the thousands of voters 3 years ago what happens when thousands of dedicated GOP voters are now dead?
I did the math a few years ago because I couldn't find anyone else who had published it. This is rough and IANAM (mathmagicman).
Every single day 8,000 boomers and above die, and 12,000 people turn 18 and those numbers are actually accelerating. If you use existing data to estimate conservative/liberal and likely voters within those groups it works out to a delta of 10,000 per day on a national scale. That's 5,000 votes switching every single day. That might not seem like alot. Because it really isn't. Out of 155 million votes cast, 10,000 is .006 percent. But here's the thing. It's cumulative. And it just doesn't stop. It is relentless. it's 300k a month, 3.6 million per year. And that pace is accelerating. Between 2020 and 2024 it's a 15 million vote difference. By 2028 it's 30 million. It used to be that people age into conservatism. But that is not happening with millennials. The demographics are changing, and changing quickly. The most conservative group in the country is dying. While the most liberal group is rising.
We just have to hold on to democracy for a few more years. This will all be behind us. Another 10k today.
I have a feeling you "aged in to conservatism" because that's when you finally had money and humans are generally shit when it comes to "fuck you I got mine" but speaking as a millennial, that's just not happening. My generation's retirement plan is to die at our desks hopefully in a way that creates a lot of work for our bosses. Although on the less cynical side of things, I also tend to think that generally people are becoming more tolerant over time.
Regarding the steadfast belief that "conservatism is dying": no it isn't. Christian schools, home schools, Christian colleges, and even regular schools, communities and colleges are pumping out kids that have the beliefs of their parents. I live in a rural area, and work (hypocritically) for a Christian based organization. I'm surrounded by young minds that are perfectly comfortable with the ideals of the religious right, and vote.
Society has been saying it for years... We said it when I was back in college. "Bubba in the white house is going to be the best! We'll undo all the hell Reagan and Bush did!" then Newt Gingrich (sounds like a disease...) made his "Promise to America(tm)" and everything got fucked.
It used to be that being conservative did not require you being batshit insane.
Yes batshit insane conservatives existed, but so did reasonable people supporting reasonable sounding policies by conservative politicians who behaved in a respectable manner.
While I believe it's still possible for reasonable people to be Conservative, it's not possible for reasonable people to support Republicans with their mouth pieces like Magorie "Jewish Space Lasers" Green being treated like someone with opinions worth listening to.
You need to keep in mind that 2023 COVID is a different beast than 2020 COVID. The currently most common strains tend to be less hard on the body as the virus has started to adapt to human hosts.
I still wouldn't recommend people to go unvaccinated but it's not quite as suicidally irresponsible as it used to be. Still irresponsible, though.
Everyone I know who was vaxxed and boosted told me it felt between a cold and the flu. Which granted not fun, but considering the alternative much better.
I think there are also a couple more factors. In a time when early detection and treatment gets the best outcomes, the right-wingers are more likely to believe that it isn't serious, so they're less likely to test and less likely to try to get paxlovid (or be outside the 5-day grace period).
And even if they know they're sick early and want to get paxlovid, people who live in rural areas have less access to healthcare in general - and some of their doctors may not believe in paxlovid. Which really sucks for those people.
All that said, the are definitely health care discrepancies for minorities, and those disproportionately affect Democrats (mostly).
Polling is on the current population of people who are willing to answer polls. If the poll is done by blind calling people what are the odds you would even answer the phone?
The GOP has happily made themselves into the Trumpism party even in elections where Trump isn't even running.
Those hard core Trump supporters are only interested in Trump himself (just like Trump is only interested in himself), and aren't as likely to bother if he isn't personally involved. To all but the Trump die hards, Trump is odious and that stink has rubbed off to make his detractors very active to fight the GOP at large.
I fear that next year Trump will bolster GOP votes with his fanatics.
Anyone voting republican, especially after Jan 6th, directly opposes democracy. If large scale organized violence aginst elections isn't a breaking point for you, then I don't/won't/can't trust you.
While the other cable news networks stuck with live special coverage for the rest of the evening, Fox News decided that its audience needed a break from the deflating electoral results for conservatives. After Hannity signed off at 10 p.m., Fox aired its regularly scheduled broadcast of “comedy” show Gutfeld!, which was pre-taped and didn’t make any mention of the elections.
Gutfeld acting as a conservative american "swan lake" might be the saddest thing I've heard all day.
Kayleigh McEnany actually seemed to correctly diagnose the problem. I was shocked. And then she started in on her solution:
Tomorrow, I want the House of Representatives passing legislation for men to pay women child support from the moment of conception, legislation to make the child tax credit apply to the unborn
Her solution to the vast majority of Americans rejecting GOP 'fetal personhood' extremism is to... go right back to trying to shove fetal personhood in through a back door. They really do think everyone else is even dumber than they are.
Her idea to increase SNAP funds for young mothers and add child support for pregnant women isn't that bad. The funny thing is, Republicans will never go for it. They're not a party of policies, they're a party that proposes "gotcha" bills that mock government and tax cuts.
There's no way Republicans will support any of her ideas. It's funny that someone on Fox News doesn't understand that.
The idea of creating pregnancy support and a tax credit for pregnant women is fine. The idea of expanding child support and the child tax credit to pregnant women is all about expanding the legal definition of "child" to include fetuses.
Nobody is forcing any Republicans to have abortions, so maybe them and their small government asses can mind their own fucking business in regards to everyone else.
As soon as one Republican does this, ten more screech about having a federal ban. They are irreversibly fucked and I am here to see every moment of it.
Maybd an american can explain the abortion bans:
Does 15 week ban mean no abortion after 15 weeks? That sounds reasonable. I thought the bans mean no abortions at all. In germany its no abortion after 12 weeks unless there is serious risk for the mother or the fetus is not viable.
Also, medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds and doctors forced to read scripted lies to scared patients. (just thought I'd fill in some of the etc.)
Also, pregnancy is declared to have begun basically four weeks before the last missed period. So a 15 week ban is really an 11 week ban. And you only get 11 weeks if you are regular and are keeping track.
Now keeping track, in some states, is becoming a legal liability. So these antiabortion measures are just going to cause more oopies. It's just evil for the sake of being controlling.
Part of the issue in the US is that the exceptions in these laws are made purposely vague to make it too risky for doctors to be able to help pregnant women unless they are literally about to die. Not familiar enough with the reasonableness of different week limits for abortion but the main way it's framed here is that it's mostly an issue between a woman and her doctor and not the business of politicians
The reason it's not reasonable is based on how we age pregnancy. The counter starts at the last day of your last menstrual cycle. That means the gestational age of the egg might be two days but you're already 4 weeks pregnant. On top of that a lot of diagnostic tests cannot be performed that early. My wife needed an amniocentesis due to possible congenital birth defects but by the time we had the initial screening, then the diagnostic test, we were at 16 weeks. Add onto that after a test like that the decision has to be made wether to terminate a pregnancy then the procedure has to be scheduled and performed. All in all you're looking at 20 weeks or so.
The vast majority, ~96%, of abortions take place at 15 weeks or earlier. That said, conservatives in America have spent the last 50 years arguing that each individual state should decide how to handle the abortion issue themselves. Now that Roe has been overturned, they've immediately pivoted to pushing a federal ban, proving once again that there are no core principles in modern American conservatism.