From TPM Reader AB …
Been reading these and thought I would throw in mine, even though in an ideal world we would mandate a cooldown period where everyone had to hold off a week for any takes. So many of them seem to be either people lashing out because they’re upset and terrified or score settling for their particular hobbyhorse that they would be advocating for regardless of what the outcome had been. It’s going to take another beat before we can find any constructive path forward.
As someone who has worked on abortion for a long time, I don’t think it’s fair to say that it doesn’t have electoral salience for Democrats. While abortion was on the ballot in a lot of states, it wasn’t actually a large part of many federal campaign’s messaging. There seems to have been an assumption that it would be self-evident, but that’s just not true, particularly because of the confusing way it happened through the courts and technically under Biden. And a lot of Republican candidates flat out lied or fundamentally misrepresented their position on abortion in ways the media didn’t pick up. I’m sure a lot of the people who voted for both abortion referenda and Trump genuinely thought they were picking a pro-choice candidate.
