2022 midterms: These really are the most important
WASHINGTON >> In four short weeks, the nation faces the most important midterm elections of my lifetime. This year, the choice is between our democracy as we know it — messy, incremental, often frustrating — and a hard-edged performative populism fueled by resentment, misogyny and racism. To have any hope of building a better future, we must make a stand here.
One of the first things I was taught as a young journalist was to be wary of superlatives. But the truth is plain — and painful: Democrats must keep control of at least one chamber of Congress, and preferably both, because the Republican Party has become a danger to the American experiment.
This is not the traditional contest between one set of politicians favoring progressive policies and another offering a more conservative vision. It is between a Democratic Party that believes voters ought to be able to make those ideological choices and a GOP that no longer believes the will of many of the American people must be respected.
A terrifying survey in The Post last week found that of 569 Republican candidates nationwide for House or Senate seats or major statewide offices, an astounding 299 — more than half — “have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election.”
This is not acceptable. Many
Republicans were unhappy after the close 1960 election, alleging irregularities in the vote count in Illinois and Texas, but they accepted Richard M. Nixon's loss and John F. Kennedy's victory. Many Democrats were irate following the 2000 election, which was decided by a handful of votes in Florida and an intervention by the Supreme Court. But they plastered “Not My President” slogans on their bumpers and T-shirts, rather than attempting an actual insurrection.
A party that believes only in elections it wins cannot be trusted with power.
The increasingly far-right Heritage Foundation has compiled a database going back to 1982, and in all the local, state and national elections over those 40 years can document only 1,384 “proven instances of voter fraud,” many of them individual acts. This supposed threat is the excuse for disenfranchising millions of Americans, whether by keeping them from the polls or delegitimizing the votes they do manage to cast.
The rhetoric of election denial is pure demagoguery, but with real-world menace. In at least two swing states — Arizona and Nevada — true-believer Republican candidates who deny Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump have a good chance of being elected secretary of state, putting them in charge of elections. If the 2024 results are not to their liking, they may simply not accept them.
At least when it comes to elections, Republicans still feel the need for some sort of fig leaf. In other areas, the party has abandoned all sense of decency.
The GOP has decayed to the point at which its leaders cannot bestir themselves even to condemn openly racist remarks made Saturday by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who said Democrats were “pro-crime” and portrayed African Americans as “the people that do the crime.”
It is too facile to blame all of this on Trump. True, many Republicans are paying lip service to the “stolen election” lie because they fear Trump will turn the GOP base against them and end their political careers.
Trump's acolytes do have a choice, if not courage or decency. Shame on them for undermining the nation's faith in the democratic process for personal gain.