Patrick — you write that you aren’t on board with the suddenly popular idea that ”Americans basically like liberal policies but just happened to elect conservative politicians.” Specifically, you push back against the claim that the minimum wage “won” last night. I agree. But I’d also take issue with the rest of the suggestion. This tweet, which encapsulates the line of thought, has had over 15,000 retweets:
So voters want a higher minimum wage, legal pot, abortion access and GOP representation. Ok then.
— Ben Casselman (@bencasselman) November 5, 2014
The “abortion access” declaration there rests heavily upon the fact that more states rejected “personhood” amendments last night than accepted them. But “abortion access” and personhood amendments are by no means the same thing. For a start, many pro-lifers oppose such initiatives, on the grounds that the laws are inevitably poorly written and practically unworkable. As Think Progress notes today, such measures have been defeated “even in deep red states” — states, that is, in which abortion is highly unpopular. Second, whether fairly or not, the issue is mixed up in the minds of more moderate voters with other hot-button social questions — among them the legality of contraception and the laws regarding miscarriages and accidental death. Unraveling the mess to get at voters’ actual views would be fascinating, I think. Third, we should always be careful when we throw around vague terms such as “abortion access.” Americans’ views on abortion lie somewhere in the middle of the two parties’ stated positions, a majority of citizens wanting abortion to remain legal within the first trimester but believing that the practice should be verboten in the second and third terms. In most states, of course, the laws are significantly looser than this. Are we honestly to believe that because a few states declined to extend protections to human beings at the point of conception America is to be considered generally “pro-choice”? Nah.
As for “legal pot,” I would hope that voters were warming up to it. From what I can tell, the polls suggest that they are. How this sentiment is represented within the two parties and within the boundaries of the fifty states, however, is much more complex than Casselman implies.