How’d the GOP Win? By Running Left
The big Republican gains on Tuesday didn’t happen because their agenda is more attractive. And if anything, it shows that they’ll have to moderate to stay alive.
Voters be crazy.
That’s at least the conclusion one might reasonably draw from Tuesday’s election results. After all, while voters largely chose to send Republicans to Congress and governor’s houses in a sweeping landslide nationwide, they simultaneously sided with Democrats on issue after issue in ballot measures. But the results make sense—when you look at how Republican candidates acted like Democrats on popular, populist issues.
For instance, in Arkansas,
a projected 57 percent of voters backed Republican Tom Cotton for the Senate. Yet by
an even wider margin—69 percent—Arkansas voters passed a measure that will increase the state’s minimum wage—a measure that Arkansas’ newly elected Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson opposed.
Similarly,
51 percent of South Dakota voters chose Republican Mike Rounds in that state’s Senate race. Voters there also passed a hike in the state minimum wage,
with 53 percent of the vote. South Dakota and Arkansas both voted Republican in the last two presidential elections, as did Nebraska, where voters also passed a minimum-wage measure Tuesday night—with
59 percent of the vote.
People in these states arguably took matters into their own hands and voted to increase state minimum wages because their elected leaders—specifically, the Republican ones—were refusing to do so legislatively at the state or federal level. And yet the same states help increase Republican obstructionism power in Washington.
In Colorado, voters struck down yet another attempt by conservative extremists to amend the state constitution to recognize “fetal personhood” and severely restrict the reproductive rights of women in the state. By a margin of
63 percent to 37 percent, Colorado voters rejected the “personhood” measure. Meanwhile, voters in Colorado also elected Republican Cory Gardner to the Senate, even though Gardner had backed similar personhood measures.
If you’re confused, you’re not the only one.
Then again, that may have been the GOP strategy in this election. For instance, although Democrat Mark Udall tried to make the campaign a referendum on Gardner’s anti-choice positions, Gardner effectively
disavowed his previous stance on “personhood” and embraced access to over-the-counter birth control to try and look reasonable on women’s issues. It appears to have worked:
According to exit polls, 16 percent of Colorado voters who feel abortion should be “always legal” and 42 percent of those who think it should be “mostly legal” backed Gardner.
