Below is our 2022 edition.
1. The rising importance of ballot initiatives — and the fight against them
The 2022 election involved a repudiation of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the fight is in many ways just beginning.
And perhaps the biggest battleground moving forward will be ballot initiatives.
Kansas’s primary was the first post-Roe election in which the pro-abortion rights position won when the question of reproductive rights was put to voters. But it wasn’t the last. Five states featured ballot initiatives on abortion in November, and all five broke the same way as Kansas did, including a swing state (Michigan) and two other red states (Montana and Kentucky).
For Republicans who would very much like to regulate abortion more strictly, this is a problem. Not every state makes it easy to allow voters to decide such issues, but abortion rights advocates are keying in on the states where it’s feasible. Already, initiatives are being lined up in Missouri, New Jersey and Ohio.
Meanwhile, Republicans in some states like Ohio have doubled down on making it harder for voters to pass such measures — including, in Ohio’s case, moving to raise the threshold from a majority to 60 percent. (Republicans had hailed the Supreme Court’s decision as merely allowing states to decide the issue; they seem to have meant a state’s elected representatives should decide, and not the voters themselves.)
This isn’t just about abortion; Republicans have also grown weary of progressive ballot-measure victories on issues like marijuana, the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid and reforming redistricting. The big question moving forward is what they do about it — and what they can do about it.
2. The subtler shifts in the GOP
The Republican Party is a very different entity than it was early in the 21st century. Heck, it’s a pretty different entity even than it was as recently as 2015. Such is the Trump effect.
But two major changes haven’t gotten enough attention: the party’s turn against big business and against a hawkish foreign policy on issues like Ukraine.
The most telling moment on the latter came when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) recently warned that a GOP-controlled House might not sign off on extensive continued funding for Ukraine. This statement came despite Ukraine’s demonstrated success in beating back an invasion from a top U.S. adversary, Russia.
And while McCarthy’s comments surprised many, the writing has been on the wall: While Americans of all stripes rallied to Ukraine’s cause initially, we’ve seen a steady erosion in Republican support for funding its defense. Fewer than 1 in 10 Republican-leaning voters said in March that we were doing “too much” to help Ukraine, but that number had risen to nearly half in an early November poll from the Wall Street Journal.
The GOP’s break from Wall Street has been building over a longer period of time. But it really hit its stride in 2022 as prominent conservatives like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) made comments attacking “woke” corporations — and even targeting them through legislation — a calling card. The GOP’s takeover of the House is now threatening to create an even bigger rift between the party and its erstwhile allies in the Chamber of Commerce.
Throw in the GOP’s growing criticism of vaccines, which has moved from focusing on covid mandates to more directly attacking vaccines themselves and mandates for other vaccines, and the GOP is redefining itself in major ways in real time.
3. Our elections are getting tighter
As someone who began covering politics and campaigns in 2006, I was spoiled early on by a series of mostly decisive “wave” elections, in which one party clearly won an unmistakable mandate from the American people.
What’s transpired in more recent elections has been decidedly more nuanced. As I wrote this week, our elections are getting closer. Swings of less than 1 percent would have changed the results of the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests, as well as the battle for the Senate in 2020 and the House in 2022.
It’s worth asking whether our increased polarization — and fewer truly undecided, persuadable voters — has simply made larger swings more difficult for either party to achieve. It’s too early to say with any certainty; perhaps the swings will return once the polarizing Trump era recedes into the distance. But it wasn’t that long ago that Democrats could win a filibuster-proof, 60-seat majority in the Senate (2009) and Republicans could win more control of American government than they had at any point since the Great Depression (2014).
Both the 2020 and 2022 elections were surprisingly tight, especially at the congressional level, leaving us with some of the thinnest majorities in modern history. Both the major political parties might have to ask themselves how that changes the rules of political engagement — i.e. how to appeal to a dwindling but increasingly decisive political middle, rather than mostly focusing on base service and banking on a favorable political environment.
4. Growing accountability for Trump’s frivolous election claims
A bunch of people spent the end of 2020 and the early days of 2021 lying to the American people in ways that ultimately resulted in an attack on the seat of American government. And their lawsuits were routinely and repeatedly rejected because of how baseless they were.
The question was soon: What could even be done about that, legally speaking?
Even before Jan. 6, 2021, we raised this possibility. Ben Smith suggested in the New York Times that those launching bogus claims about voting machines in particular could face real — and reverberating — consequences.
The legal process has been characteristically slow, but it has resulted in some accountability. To wit:
- In 2021, nine pro-Trump lawyers including Sidney Powell were ordered to pay a combined $175,000 in legal fees for filing a frivolous lawsuit in Michigan.
- A federal judge in Colorado disciplined two pro-Trump lawyers, calling their false claims “the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.” The $187,000 in fines in that case were upheld by an appeals court this week.
- In May, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell was ordered to pay court costs over a lawsuit against voting-machine companies that a judge labeled “frivolous” and based on some “groundless claims.”
- A federal judge last month sanctioned several members of Trump’s legal team for misrepresenting facts in their “frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others.
- Rudy Giuliani, who was suspended from practicing law in Washington, D.C., last year, is now facing potential disbarment.
- The Texas bar has also pushed to disbar Powell in ongoing legal proceedings.
- The “red slime” lawsuit that Smith wrote about, concerning a digital security company which kept getting referenced in conservative outlets’ speculation about voting machines, has continued to move along. Most recently, Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch was ordered to be deposed this month — the highest profile figure yet.
The last one is obviously the big one and will be worth keeping a close eye on in the coming months. Were Fox News to suffer a major judgment for broadcasting these false claims, it would be a seminal moment for a conservative media industry that has increasingly descended into poorly constructed conspiracy theories.
But even aside from that, lawyers who would push these obviously bogus claims in court have seen that doing so comes with a cost. And that has implications for who might venture down these paths in the future.
