Some thoughts on yesterday’s election
After a hotly contested election full of all the hostility we’ve come to expect from the American people these days, I wanted to express some quick scattered thoughts.
The “blue wave”
The blue wave was pretty underwhelming. Democrats won the races they had to to change the status quo, but not much more than that. At best, they met expectations and had a fairly average performance in terms of how these midterms have gone in the past. However, considering what they were running against, they really should have done better.
Against the party of Donald Trump, the Democrats really should have run away with this thing. While the result is still positive for Democrats, if I were a Democrat, I would be somewhat disappointed. I think progressives need to be asking why they could barely take over half a branch of government.
Why are progressives having such a hard time winning the kinds of victories they probably should be?
The answer seems clear: Most vocal progressives make no attempt to appeal to the other side. The interaction of progressives with conservatives largely consists of trying to shame conservatives, whether that be by calling them racists, bigots, homophobes, xenophobes, Islamophobes, and other names (often making up completely new definitions of those words at will), or by being condescending or condemning in some other way. It seems to me that they think that because have the support of the majority of the country, they can now afford to ignore and condescend to those who disagree. Yet that was proven wrong in 2016 and again in 2018. It is not a stretch to say that they are lucky that they barely met expectations, which they should have won handily, in spite of this.
It turns out that people who aren’t racists don’t like being called racists. Not only that, but when you insist on calling someone a racist when they are not one, they stop caring about anything you have to say. Same goes with all the other names I mentioned above. Why should you listen to someone who doesn’t make the slightest attempt to understand your point of view and insists on interpreting the worst motives possible to everything you say? I am sympathetic to many Democratic positions, but I want nothing to do with the hostile rhetoric coming from even the mainstream left. I know I’m not alone in this.
At the same time, the Republicans are also lucky. They are lucky that Democrats don’t truly attempt to reach across the aisle. If they ever make a sincere attempt to do so, a 2020 loss for Trump is virtually assured.
Could abortion be the deciding factor in recent elections?
This is just an anecdotal observation, but it seems like abortion is one of the big issues that keeps a lot of Christians from switching from red to blue. A lot of Christians are very sympathetic to welcoming immigrants, feeding the poor, and stopping racism and homophobia. But many of those same Christians also believe abortion is murder, and can’t bring themselves to vote for a candidate that endorses legally sanctioning it. Over 600,000 abortions occur per year. That’s about 40 times the number of people who die via gun violence per year (about 15,000, not counting suicides). It’s comparable to the number of people who die each year from stroke and heart disease combined (about 727,000, “83 per hour” according to the CDC). Even if you’re pro-choice, you should see how, for someone who does believe abortion is the actual taking of a human life, it would be one of the most important issues in the country.
No, that doesn’t explain the 80% of evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016, but could it have been the deciding factor for 2, 3, even 5 or 10 percent of them? I think it’s very plausible. About 125 million people voted in 2016, and 26% of those were evangelical Christians. That’s a very large demographic. Evangelical Christians are one of the most pro-life demographics in the United States, with two-thirds saying abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. We all know there are plenty of people who are “single-issue voters,” and for many evangelicals, that single issue is abortion. If that describes just 0.5 percent of evangelical voters, that’s over 150,000 votes. What made the difference in the 2016 election was about 100,000 total votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Democrat Christians routinely underestimate how important this is. There are tons of Democrat Christians who say they are pro-life (presumably on the basis that they believe abortion is the killing of a baby) and yet they never say anything about it, downplay it as unimportant, or mention it only when calling conservatives hypocrites for opposing both abortion and gun control. Yet, you can speculate plenty on the possible effects of national policy on healthcare and gun control, but abortion is definitely happening right here in front of us in much greater numbers. For someone to truly believe 600,000 babies are being legally murdered each year in this country, and think that’s not very important, or not say anything about it, doesn’t make sense at all. At best, it’s no better than Republican Christians downplaying racism or the plight of the poor.
I know there are tons of issues you could say this about — certainly abortion is not the only thing that acts as the deciding factor for a tiny percentage of the population — but this one seems among the more possible to address. If Democrat Christians who deride Republican Christians for not speaking out against xenophobia, warmongering, greed, sexism, and racism supported by some in the Republican Party were to speak out against the abortion policy supported so widely in the Democratic Party, as well as its numerous other problems, that might go a long way.
And finally
All in all, Jesus is still King, and every politician and voter is accountable to him, both for how they vote and what they say to people on all sides. We are Christians first, Americans somewhere down the list, and Republicans/Democrats/conservatives/liberals even farther down the list than that.
