Vice President Kamala Harris pushing the 2024 Democratic theme

By now, most people have processed the results of the November 7 off-year elections, and they agree that the Democratic Party did very well. This includes, for example, the largely red state of Kentucky, where Democratic Governor Andy Beshear won reelection in a strong performance. Moreover, in Virginia, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin lost big time when Democrats not only held onto their state Senate majority, they also flipped the state House of Delegates to Democratic control.

Not coincidentally, abortion was on the minds of Virginia voters, as Gov. Youngkin had proposed to ban most abortions after 15 weeks. Democrats ran and won on protecting abortion rights in opposition to the Governor. Likewise, the abortion rights issue was even more directly on the ballot in Ohio, where voters approved a state constitutional amendment protecting access to abortion and other forms of reproductive healthcare.

These results follow previous special elections, such as in Kansas in August 2022, where voters rejected a proposed Republican amendment that said there was no right to abortion in the state. Thus, it’s apparent that, after the Republican-majority U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of last year, thereby taking away the constitutional right to abortion and leaving the issue to the states, the Democratic Party pro-choice position keeps prevailing in special elections, and promises to be a strong issue for the Democrats in the 2024 elections.

At the same time, as we have noted, the Democrats — from President Joe Biden to members of Congress and others — have turned the Republicans’ anti-abortion positions and rulings into a broader theme of “freedom.” And now, Vice President Kamala Harris has joined this “freedom” caucus. As this C-SPAN video shows, on Wednesday morning after the November 7 elections, VP Harris stepped out of the White House, walked up to the microphones, and had this to say:

Last night, I think the American people made clear that they are prepared to stand for freedom, and for the individual freedoms and the promise of freedom in America …. I think that if you look at from the midterms to last night, from California to Kansas, Ohio to Virginia, the voters said, “look, the government should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”

Democrats using the “freedom” theme is music to our ears, as we have been advocating this since 2013. The added benefit is that Democrats are taking “freedom” back from the Republicans, who have tried for so long to own the idea. It’s a great theme for Democrats to run on for 2024.

Photo by The Democratic Party, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/FjJ9mL

Younger activists, a major Republican fear

Republicans have a predictable pattern: even with government nearly evenly divided, they get drunk with power, use their votes to overreach with extreme policies, and wind up alienating voters in the next election. In June 2022, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court, with three new right wing Republican justices courtesy of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, voted along party lines to take away the right to abortion that had been established in the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision nearly 50 years earlier. This decision set off a firestorm among voters, especially younger voters, who showed up to the voting booths in droves five months later and gave the Democrats considerably better results (retaining control and actually winning a one-seat majority in the U.S, Senate, barely losing control of the House, and gaining state governorships and state legislature majorities) in an off-year election where the party in power usually does much worse.

Republicans, however, did not learn the lesson from the 2022 elections, i.e., that their extremism scared away voters. Instead, the GOP has charged ahead with even more extremist actions that could hurt them in 2024. These include: