No one can predict the future, but the Supreme Court — this very conservative Supreme Court — may have given Democrats a gift for 2024.
The moment the court rendered the final three decisions of its term — on affirmative action, student debt relief and religious rights over gay rights — my first thought was that it not only helps Democrats, but it also hurts Republicans, at least in the near term.
First, it gave Democrats the opportunity to campaign on three issues in next year’s election to galvanize voters much the way the Dobbs decision overturning a national right to abortion rallied voters in the 2022 midterms.
All three issues are central to the interests of three key democratic voting blocs: minorities, the LGBTQ community and young people (who have consistently been less enthusiastic about President Joe Biden). The question is whether these issues will rally voters in the same way the Dobbs decision did last year.
If you think back to a year ago, public reaction to the Dobbs decision was unprecedented. Everyone seemed to know about it, talk about it, have an opinion on it, and they acted on it at the polls.
That is rare. Typically voters pay attention to the Supreme Court for a couple of weeks after its session ends and move on. This past term, rulings may have had heightened interest because of the attention drawn to ethical questions surrounding certain justices.
The Dobbs decision also happened in an election year. November 2024 still seems like a long way off. Next year’s primaries, debates and court decisions have the potential to bring new narratives to light and sway the electorate in different directions.
But as the court giveth, it also taketh away. Just as its decisions gave potential shelf life to issues Democrats could prioritize, it conversely deprived Republicans and their presidential hopefuls of talking points they’ve made central in campaigning for the nomination and that they may have used in the coming presidential race.
The Dobbs made it harder for the GOP to motivate Republican voters, especially social conservatives, to head to the polls in the midterms. This year’s granting of religious exemptions to people who oppose gay marriage, as well as undoing affirmative action and revoking student debt relief, may produce a similar result.
The only issue Republicans seem to have now is their latest in a long line of bogeymen: anti-“woke” culture wars.
Politico has reported — to the shock of no one — that GOP hopefuls continue to drum up cash by flooding supporters’ inboxes with all sorts of terrifying predictions. Three times in a single week Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent emails with the subject line: “Do not tell my children that men can get pregnant.”
Well, I wasn’t gonna say anything, but now I kind of want to.
Sometimes the reach for talking points borders on desperation so absurd that you wonder about the level of intellectual horsepower of the people incensed by them.
Today’s chapter of “Right-Wingers Without a Clue About How Anything Works”: pizza ovens.
“Woke bureaucrats want to destroy the last of New York City’s beloved coal- and wood-fired pizzerias in a crazed climate crusade,” claimed pearl-clutching conservative snowflakes, or, as The Guardian of London put it, the “rightwing outrage cycle.”
A predictably inaccurate story here, a Twitter rant there and suddenly “New York City is banning all wood and coal pizza ovens.” Gadzooks!
In reality, the city required restaurants to install air filters in their chimneys to keep specific cancer-causing particulates from entering the atmosphere. For the faux-outrage inebriated, that would be chimneys where the smoke escapes, not the ovens where the pizzas are cooked. Got it?
But that didn’t stop some idiot from throwing pizza slices over the gate at City Hall. Yeah, you really showed ’em, pal.
Listen, I’ve eaten at pizza places in flyover states. Conservatives are clearly not concerned with pizza quality. (In fairness, exceptions are to be noted in Chicago and a particular restaurant in Phoenix.)
One other reality: The city passed this air quality rule in 2016. It applied to all restaurants, not just pizzerias. Nearly all the eateries, including pizza places, had installed the proper filtering systems long ago. Nobody noticed a difference in the taste of a good old-fashioned slice of New York pizza.
Please forgive my digression. As a native New Yorker, I take pizza seriously.
But I take facts more seriously, unlike the manipulable, intellectually incurious conservatives that people like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis like to exploit.
There are so many ways in which the GOP has become a national embarrassment that there isn’t enough time in the day to list them all, let alone time enough to convince its calcified followers that it’s even more embarrassing to buy into the embarrassment.
Ironically, Republicans actually have a political ace up their sleeve but have so far refused to acknowledge it. As Politico notes, the Republican presidential field is the most diverse in its history, yet they’ve not said a word about it on the campaign trail or in any of their campaign literature.
How do ya like that? The GOP is going woke! Can’t admit that. Quick: Send out another press release and campaign email about pregnant fathers!
No less than a dozen candidates are running to be the standard-bearer for a party seen as the party of white supremacy are yet doing nothing to undo that notion. Every minority candidate ignores the party’s history of racism and misogyny while every candidate ignores the unconstitutional actions of a Florida governor and the criminal behavior of a former president, all while parroting lies about “stolen elections” and a “weaponized” Department of Justice.
Maybe such diversity (as dirty a word to conservatives these days as “compromise”) can be dismissed. The fact the field includes an Indian American woman, three Black men, an Asian man and a Latino, all of whom barely anyone can name, nearly all of whom will fade into anonymity or oblivion after the election, tells you two things:
1. The GOP presidential field consists of two people: one old white man from Florida and one slightly younger white man from Florida (and just barely, at that).
2. The also-rans are just hoping for some table scraps, like a vice presidential nod before the election or a Cabinet post after it
Call me when a trans-Muslim Republican is running for president. The ensuing chaos ought to be a hoot.
Not to be lost in all this are two court rulings that far more tangibly favor Democratic political prospects: Allen v. Milligan, in which the court found that Alabama’s redistricting efforts violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and Moore v. Harper, in which the court ruled that a state legislature does not have exclusive, independent and unchecked authority to set the rules regarding federal elections. (The so-called independent state legislature theory.)
As a result, Republicans could lose two or three congressional seats in Alabama (which could similarly affect other states, including Louisiana, Georgia and Texas). The North Carolina ruling means partisan state lawmakers will no longer have unchecked power to manipulate federal elections, potentially undermining or even negating their constituency’s vote.
I hate to think these two rulings give Democrats a better chance in next year’s election than the other three. With Democrats, you never know.
The challenge for Democrats isn’t about the issues the court has served them on a silver platter or even the rulings affecting voting in an advantageous — translation: equitable — way. It’s whether Democrats can effectively deliver the message.
“Two electoral landslide victories for Obama, a huge popular vote win for President Biden, and four years of resistance to Trump — and the Democrats still have a brand problem,” writes Barack Obama’s former communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, for Vanity Fair. “This is more than a failure by party leaders and activists to settle on a narrative.”
Diversity is one of the Democratic Party’s strengths, but crafting a powerful social-media-friendly slogan to describe a coalition ranging from Joe Manchin to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “poses a central and seemingly insurmountable challenge,” Pfeiffer writes.
This is in the face of one constituency that responds to things viscerally as opposed to intellectually, or, as Pfeiffer puts it, “the message-versus-megaphone problem. Democrats spend 99% of their time worrying about what they should say and only 1% figuring out how to get people to hear what they are saying.”
I get it: It’s a lot easier to be the party of temper tantrums that wants to break government, frighten you and anger you than it is to be the party applying reason and reasonableness to use government to improve the lives of its citizens.
After all, what does it say about a man, a former president, whose Independence Day message is to post a meme that reads: “81 million votes …. and I’ve never seen a pro-Biden hat, shirt or flag in my life,” followed by a flag with the inscription “Fuck Biden.”
What’s the answer to such a petty, hideous creature who is yet a god to 70 million people? I know: Even though Biden won, I’ll keep wearing a hat with his name on it and drive around in my pickup with a Biden flag flapping behind it. ’Murica!
Seriously, Democrats, you ought to be able to do better than Republicans shouting about pregnant men, woke pizza and childish resentments over losing an election. The whole idea of conservatives being riled up over pizza in New York or gas stoves, Mr. Potato Head, M&Ms, Nike, Bud Light, Ben & Jerry’s, books, Carhartt, Target, Kohl’s, Disney, Starbucks, Amazon, NASCAR, the NFL, the NBA — man, I need to take a breath!
Here’s a message for ya: Hey, deplorable-type person: Normal people don’t feel the need to show their preferred candidate on their hat, flag or T-shirt. That’s for weaklings who buy into a cult. Besides, I already have a Biden flag: It’s red, white and blue and has stars and stripes.
The whole thing is so ludicrous that any reasoned disputation of such gibberish is practically an insult to the concept of reason itself, a wasteful exercise in appealing to the intelligence of folks who ain’t got none or, worse, who ain’t willing to use what they got.
We are on the cutting edge of a broad culture clash, a generational divide not unlike what we saw in the 1960s but fueled now by bad actors with far more tools at their disposal.
On one side are older, primarily white Americans attached to more traditional formal and religious values of a slower-paced world. On the other side is a younger, more diverse generation of Americans whose values are not only different but are also shaped by a world changing at a near exponential rate.
The Supreme Court, ruling on issues driven more by cultural mores than policy has spoken for one side of that clash, the side hyper-resistant to the changing trends they see in American life. Recently, Trump and DeSantis pitched their candidacies to the latest “it” group in politics: Moms for Liberty, or, if you prefer, the tea party reincarnate. Both men made a commitment to values in consonance with one generation and completely incongruent with the other.
Their core belief is that they’re doing the right thing, and the court is upholding them because, in their view, the court did the right thing.
They should be careful what they have wished for because the silver lining here is that the Supreme Court rulings are entirely out of step with public sentiment. Polling data finds that:
- Nearly 6 in 10 Americans support affirmative action in higher education and in the workplace.
- Most Americans say companies should support the nation’s LGBTQ+ community.
- Biden’s student debt relief proposal is popular with the Democratic base.
True, the Supreme Court doesn’t answer to public opinion, but lawmakers do, and if Democrats can galvanize those voters the way the Dobbs decision did last year, they can send all six conservative justices a nice thank-you card.