Clear as Mud
Red wave? Nope. Blue wall? Nope. Some thoughts on the midterm elections.
It is hard to read the tea leaves on the 2022 election. Certainly, we are a divided country, and there were plenty of issues to motivate voters from liberal to conservative. The last two years have not lacked concerns, even flash points. From November 2020 to last Tuesday, we saw a presidential election, January 6th, COVID and jab fallout, parents getting involved in k-12 education, Roe vs. Wade overturned, gender madness, what is a woman?
Voters should have been itching to get to the ballot box, but many, too many, stayed home.
The long lines at some Fargo area voting locations were blamed on higher-than-expected turnout. Except that was not the case, not even close. According to the North Dakota Secretary of State website there were 54,151 votes cast in Cass County on Tuesday. In the last midterm election in 2018 there were 78,225 voters. There might be something else causing the long lines.
For the entire state 241,971 votes were cast, over 88,000 fewer votes than in 2018, and the voter participation rate was 42%. That is not healthy, at all.
I am not questioning the election or threatening our democracy here. But it seems to me that we should try to figure out why people no longer vote, no longer participate. Complacency? To me that means comfort, but with all that is going on in the world, who feels comfortable? It could be that voters were at their second (or third) jobs to be able to fill their gas tanks and buy groceries and simply did not have the time to vote. What is it?
In other developments, it was another tough election for Democrats in North Dakota. Already at a significant disadvantage in the legislature, Democrats lost two more Senate and two additional House seats. In January there will be four Democratic senators and 43 Republicans. Four. I don’t even know how the committee structure will work with those numbers. There are 11 committees in the Senate, that is a lot of ground to cover for four people, they’ll get their steps in!
In the House there will be 12 Democrats and 84 Republicans. Believe me, I know that there are Republican legislators who align closely with Democrats on many issues, but those hard numbers are shocking, and not healthy in my opinion.
There has always been an east/west divide in North Dakota, but that dividing line moved sharply east. Three of the four Democratic senators live east of I-29 with a 58102-zip code and the fourth is just a few blocks west of the interstate in the southwest metro. And, with 10 of the 12 Democrats in the House from the Red River Valley so the east/west dividing line is now around West Acres.
The was no real resolution from last Tuesday’s election. But we will get a break from the political ads, at least until February when the 2024 cycle kicks off.
Originally published in Fargo Forum
