Puzzling Trends and Minority Rule

Support for Democrats and Republicans fluctuates wildly from president to president. I am always surprised at the number of people going back and forth between elections and midterm results. Both Clinton and Obama lost a lot of votes and the house at the midterm of their first four years. I am led to think that voting is mostly a gut feel thing. Short slogans and TV ads are a big influence. "But her emails." Voters have to like a candidate in some manner, policy never wins an election.

The Republicans have been the minority party for a while, though they occasionally get more votes than Democrats in a mid term election. That may be more to do with who shows up to vote. That is part of their strategy, to control access to voting. And also in general, they have a good number of states under control. The governors may decide future elections, if vote counts are close, and we continue using the Electoral College.

Ballot initiatives even in Republican states like Kansas and Kentucky have provided protection for abortion rights. Of course the state legislatures in red states have moved to block ballot initiatives. You can do this by demanding so many signatures in every county, for example. And other legal tricks.

The general trend over decades, with voters in urban areas, is toward the liberal end. The tolerance view, as opposed to white Christian nationalists. People are influenced by family and may tend to drift toward the views of the parents when they get past forty.

But there is now evidence that the millennials do not change to conservatives as they age. They may even have fewer children and continue to be the same liberals they were when they were 20.

So the trend may be toward the Democrats here. However, since Trump packed the court with conservatives, that may be a major factor holding back the millennials for another 20 years. A disturbing trend came up with Title 42 which is essentially a presidential tool to control health hazards and the movement of people in a pandemic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Service_Act

Gorsuch dissented, explaining how it is not even their job.

In a dissenting opinion, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the "current border crisis is not a COVID crisis. And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort."