We need to try harder

It was close: just a 3,000 vote margin, but in a congressional race that featured just two issues, abortion and inflation, the pro-abortion Democrat beat the Republican stressing Biden inflation. Here’s how one pundit described the race last night, before the final result had been announced:

NY-19 is a true swing district, having gone for Trump by two points in 2016 before tilting to Biden by two points in 2020. As such, political junkies have been touting today’s special election as a key bellwether for weeks. To further sweeten the pot, each candidate is running hard on his party’s core midterm message. For Ryan, that means championing abortion rights; for Molinaro, it means decrying inflation. The irresistible political force of pro-choicers angry at the end of Roe will meet the immovable object of working-class voters angry that everything now costs 10 percent more than it used to, and that collision will take place in a true 50/50 district.

High drama. If either party beats expectations considerably, there’ll be a broad freakout in political media tomorrow. Should Ryan win comfortably, bold predictions will be made that the red wave is canceled. Should Molinaro win comfortably, bold predictions will be made that the “Roe effect” is mostly hype. In all likelihood we’ll see a narrow victory for one or the other that allows partisans on both sides to put an optimistic spin on the outcome. NBC says it’s seen an internal Democratic poll that has the Republican Molinaro ahead by three, but that’s within the margin of error. The race is a true toss-up.

Due, no doubt, to my own solipsism, I’m dismayed by this result: I don’t consider abortion the greatest challenge facing the country right now, so how could anyone else go out and vote for a candidate solely because of that issue? But, just as I don’t watch television, and am then astonished to read that some woke piece-of-trash superhero series premier notches up 10 million viewers, I have to recognize that there are people who care desperately about the “right” to abort fetuses, and will push all other concerns to keep a pro-abortionist in power.

There’s no reaching such people, probably, so the answer lies in getting more of us to the polls than them. I would guess that the turnout for this late August, special election to choose a candidate for a four-month term was light, so there’s hope that the outcome will be different this November. But still, the Democrats managed to get out more of their voters than the Republicans did, and that should be a wakeup call.