Like many authoritarian cults, the MAGA crowd does not believe their reign will ever end or that their opponents will ever gather their wits to respond to assaults on their rights, liberties, and physical safety. The fascists act with impunity because they cannot imagine the political pendulum will ever swing back; they cannot conceive that their abuse will ever trigger a backlash of sufficient strength to overpower their repressive rule. But some savvier Republicans (including White House staffers who are already lawyering up) are getting a wake-up call. In the run-up to the midterms, it seems to be slowly dawning on some of them that their abusive conduct has lit a fire under the Resistance, and that a reckoning is coming.
We see the backlash in voter turnout and enthusiasm in precisely the places where MAGA tried to strip millions of voting power. Trump’s voting suppressors never anticipated the counter-redistricting effort Democrats mounted in places like California. Moreover, they seemed unprepared to see a dramatic swing in both red statewide races (where gerrymandering is irrelevant) and in the districts they thought would be safe after they carried out Donald Trump’s orders to deprive non-white voters of their representatives of choice.
The Callais decision further inflamed the pro-democracy coalition. Southern Senate seats that never would have been competitive are now in play; re-redistricted congressional seats are at risk. Nationally, Hispanics have swung back hard for Democrats.
Early voting has been surging coast to coast. In Georgia, for example, over 1 million ballots have already been cast, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The early numbers offer more encouraging signs for Democrats than Republicans, particularly in metro Atlanta and other left-leaning parts of the state.” A similar surge in early voting is underway in Florida. Nearly 100,000 people cast ballots on the first day of early voting in South Carolina.
Organizing around early voting has been productive. No Kings Coalition organizers report:
According to a new analysis by TargetSmart, early voting surged by 51% in ZIP codes that hosted a No Kings event compared to the same relative Saturday in the 2022 midterm elections (October 22, 2022). Across the 13 states analyzed — Georgia (46 Events), Indiana (46 Events), Maine (32 Events), Minnesota (88 Events), North Carolina (71 Events), Nebraska (15 Events), New Mexico (29 Events), Nevada (22 Events), Ohio (79 Events), South Dakota (8 Events), Tennessee (24 Events), Virginia (85 Events), and Wyoming (14 Events) — overall early voting was up 32%, meaning communities with a No Kings event outperformed the general statewide increase by 19 percentage points. ….
The data also highlights a surge in historically underrepresented voters: in ZIP codes with a No Kings event, early voting among voters of color increased by 90% compared to 2022, versus a 29% increase among white voters.
The more desperately the Republicans try to cling to power, the more the Resistance builds. The Justice Department’s pathetic efforts to harass states and take over the voting process not only failed spectacularly in court (e.g., in the Missouri and U.S. Post Office cases, in over 2 dozen cases in which the feds tried to grab state voter rolls, or in the botched raid to grab Fulton County ballot materials) and petered out in a series of spasmodic, widely ridiculed efforts to hunt down noncitizen voters. It also seems to have played into the hands of early vote organizers who exhort voters not to allow the regime to rob them of their precious right to vote.
The baseless DOJ lawsuit suing California for refusing to eject a random list of 20,000 voters from the rolls triggered a furious response from a coalition of groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which intervened in the suit and vowed that voters would not be intimidated. As California Attorney General Rob Bonta declared in a Sunday interview, “Here you have the federal government, with bluster and intimidation and bullying, trying to scare them into disenfranchising voters, and it’s wrong….They’re desperate.” He continued, “It’s embarrassing for them. They’re in the death throes of this election cycle, staring down a blue wave where they’re going to get thrashed, and they are planning for what they do after they get thrashed.”
In a similar vein, Big Tech’s ham-handed interference with mass organizing has itself fueled a backlash. Meta’s interruption of the No Kings Coalition Instagram feed for over 4 hours — reminiscent of efforts for which Meta was sued in Brazil — triggered a demand for information from Meta, calls from Congress to investigate, and a seething response from the independent Meta Oversight Board, which called out “recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts.”
As the Oversight Board explained: “From the removal of political activist accounts during protests in the U.S. ahead of the midterm elections to technical restrictions that hit the accounts of a presidential candidate in Brazil leading to allegations of electoral interference, it’s clear that Meta must do more to ensure that its enforcement practices during elections are transparent and consistent and that political speech is protected rather than stifled.” Its co-chairs continued, “We have repeatedly warned that during elections and periods of heightened political tension, Meta’s content moderation failures often manifest themselves in two ways: overenforcement that suppresses political speech and underenforcement that undermines electoral integrity.”
The ferocious response from a variety of civil society groups and elected leaders nicely tees up a full-throttle effort to investigate and begin real regulatory reform of Big Tech, which has — with Trump cheerleading — made itself the target of voters’ ire on everything from AI to data centers to election interference and child endangerment.
Finally, the anti-MAGA backlash is getting a further boost from growing disgust over Trump’s overt corruption — about which VP JD Vance ludicrously claims ignorance and Republicans refuse to address. From the outrage engendered by taxpayer-funded self-promotional ads to the outcry over Kimberly Guilfoyle’s penny ante graft to the massive self-aggrandizing building projects and crypto-scams, Trump has fed the very narrative that helped dislodge Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Even Fox News polling reflects the degree to which these issues have broken through. Six in ten people said they “were extremely concerned” about corruption, with almost 90 percent saying they were either extremely or very concerned about government corruption.
In sum, the arrogance of autocrats can prove their undoing. In trying to block out independent media, they have ensconced themselves in an echo chamber, missing signs that their message is badly misfiring and that their actions are boomeranging. Be it on voting, Big Tech abuse, or corruption, the Trump regime’s overreach has inured to the benefit of Democrats and their allied pro-democracy forces, evidenced in the substantial enthusiasm advantage for Democrats, the spiking early voting numbers, and the expanding electoral maps. If the blue wave manifests itself, a good deal of the credit will go to MAGA hubris.
That's all well and good but no complacency - GET OUT AND VOTE. Even if all the polls and all the early voting show a Japanese woodcut level blue wave, VOTE and make sure your family and friends vote, too.
Trump & Co: Turning Fed agencies into Trumpian propaganda platforms while running a RICO enterprise that enthusiastically coordinates with war criminals & dictators while transferring wealth to the wealthiest & cutting funds for science research & the neediest among us.
Trump &. Co projection of & gaslighting with their grift fraud & serial criminality is endless.
#VoteBlue!