2024 Democrats: the walking dead

A presidential-year national political campaign centered on the loss of abortion rights probably never had much of a chance.

It’s hard to beat a guy like Donald Trump, who has convinced millions he has a red “S” on his chest, by promising to fix a problem he gloried in creating.

Any other Republican might have won big in 2024, too.

In 2019, I wrote, like many others, that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer had warned Roe v. Wade was vulnerable.

But I didn’t share the accepted wisdom that a reversal would empower Democrats.

“If Roe does go down, it’s a huge win for Republicans,” I maintained, in a voice lost in the wilderness.

“It’s the Super Bowl, the Nobel Prize and The Bachelorette all in one. Independents and formerly Republican Catholics might turn red by the millions.”

The many Republican Catholics who had previously switched to Democratic could be flipping back. And taking along some friends.

That seems to have been the result. Biden and Trump had split the Catholic vote in 2020. Four years later, after Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization killed Roe and sent abortion back to the states, Trump got 58% and Harris, 40%. That’s a big difference. One in five Americans is Catholic.

A similar dynamic was at play with pro-life independents.

Analysts agreed for decades that those Catholics who were pro-life wanted to vote their anti-abortion convictions, but it wasn’t practical as long as Roe seemed protected by its status as clear precedent. So many of them voted in support of the rest of their political intentions, turning Republicans into former Republicans.

After all, another part of the Catholic pro-life stance is opposition to the death penalty.

Some Catholics may love Biden’s recent rescuing of most of the inmates on federal Death Row. But that may not win their future votes for Democrats. They may want to try to make sure nationwide abortion doesn’t come back.

My purpose in dredging up my old opinions isn’t to pat myself on the back, fun as that may be. I’m building a case that the red flags were flying a long time ago, and the path to liberal victory pointed in a different direction — then and now.

It might have been different if the Democrats had won the 2022 midterms and were in position to pass a national abortion-rights law. That almost happened, but didn’t. It probably couldn’t have without divine intervention.

I’m not getting into what I think should have been done to win in 2024. That would make this too long for anybody to read, nowadays. I’ll write about that no later than a week from now. Today, it’s just about losing.

Losing Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

Blaming the 2024 disaster on Hispanic voters awakening only to ignore the abortion issue is somewhat accurate, but missing the point. Statistics demonstrate that what was really going on was that Hispanics, especially Catholics, were voting against disorganized immigration and for their wallets and values.

Those values, for Hispanic Catholics, include support of abortion by a 3-2 margin. They don’t include vaccine mandates in the public schools or propping up drag queens as moral examples.

And misogyny on the part of Hispanics or anybody else wasn’t as big of a factor as it was made out to be.

Spanish is spoken in Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Panama, Guyana, Brazil and Costa Rica, and yet those countries have all elected women presidents.

Claudia Sheinbaum, left, elected President of Mexico in October, visiting Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in 2023

And U.S. voters gave Hillary Clinton many more votes than Trump in 2016. They just weren’t in all the right places.

The loss of 2024 was not about Kamala Harris’ weakness as opposed to Joe Biden or any other male standard-bearer. Biden would have lost similarly, even if he hadn’t appeared doddering.

It didn’t even matter that Biden had an immensely successful presidency. Few outside the Democratic echo chamber were listening.

They were convinced he wasn’t doing much of anything they liked long before he had a chance to do them.

Voters of all stripes are so used to ineffectiveness that they assume it’s everywhere.

And Biden did miss two curveballs — immigration and Afghanistan — so a strikeout was assumed by many. Grab some bench!

There were reasons all over for conservative confidence. When the Supreme Court became a tool of the Republican Party, right-wing justices were like kids in a candy store. They ran off with the sweetest precedents and ate them up.

Loper Bright v. Raimondo! Let’s cripple federal agencies and give the upper hand to corporations! Jones v. Mississippi! We can throw away the key on child criminals! Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt! Let’s hamstring the ability of people to sue states they don’t live in, even if their laws abuse them! Dobbs! Our dream comes true!

We know how it happened. The Dobbs decision was possible because three Supreme Court justices were nominated during Trump’s term instead of one in Barack Obama’s final year and two in Hillary Clinton’s first term.

Conservatives were over the moon when Mitch McConnell refused to let Merrick Garland’s 2016 Supreme Court nomination be considered. Garland would have been very unlikely to be confirmed by a GOP-controlled Senate, anyway, since that would give liberals a court majority.

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett got in because Clinton got beat. If she’d won, Garland would have, too.

So underwhelming showings by Democrats in Senate elections, and a loss to a longshot presidential candidate in 2016, lost the Supreme Court and Roe.

“If the GOP is successful in overturning Roe, a result might be that the Democratic Party will have lost … the credibility it enjoys from protecting one of its core issues,” I wrote in 2019.

“It would lose some of its constituency’s interest in getting out to vote.”

That was the opposite of what was generally expected, but that’s what happened.

The 2024 defeat is now widely ascribed to a failure to inspire enough Democrats to vote. People wanted the abortion situation remedied, but weren’t necessarily enthusiastic about supporting the party they saw as having let Roe slip away.

Democratic voters supported state laws to protect rights to abortion and fertility procedures, mostly after Dobbs became law in the summer of 2022.

But when I wrote in 2019, Republicans in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky and Ohio had already passed strict new state abortion bans that would mesh nicely with a Roe reversal, though that was still three years away, and unsure. At least 14 other states had similar bills in the pipeline.

The local activity primed conservative voters for 2022 and 2024 national elections.

Most Democratic state legislators played catch-up.

Getting there “the fustest with the mostest” doesn’t always win in the long run, but it saves a lot of time sorting things out.