A year after promising viewers a “red tsunami” in the 2022 midterms, only to be left with egg on their faces after the GOP drastically underperformed, Fox News was once again wondering what went wrong after Democrats romped to victory in statewide elections on Tuesday night.
Despite recent polls showing President Joe Biden deeply underwater with voters and even losing to Donald Trump in several battleground states, the Democratic incumbent governor easily won victory over his MAGA-endorsed opponent in deep-red Kentucky. And over in Ohio, a state Trump won by eight points in 2020, voters overwhelmingly passed an amendment ensuring access to abortion care in the state’s constitution.
The continued drag that undoing Roe v. Wade has had on the GOP was especially apparent in Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin had promised to implement a 15-week abortion ban if the GOP was able to gain unified control over the state’s General Assembly. Instead, not only were Youngkin’s hopes of a Republican sweep dashed, but the Democrats now control both chambers.
I will say that the trend, year over year, for xtians has been they have been going down at roughly 1% per year, every year, for many years now. I think it is things like this that explain why the cons are getting increasingly radicalized in their positions and in their tactics. They have been denigrating the notion of democratic norms (the well-actually “this is not a democratic country” stuff that they love to pull, for instance). Their more wonky members starting laying the groundwork way, way back, according to McLean’s Democracy In Chains.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/
I mean, the fact that about 1 in 3 is unaffiliated is quite staggering. I can remember a time where even admitting this was seen as rather “edgy”, now it’s going to earn a shrug.